The far right uses child sexual exploitation to its own agenda

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Half a million children are sexually abused in England and Wales each year — but public conversation remains dangerously skewed. Since 2011, a narrow focus on 'grooming gangs' has allowed the far right to push anti-migrant narratives, while broader child protection reforms go ignored.

In this powerful interview, historian and survivor Louise Raw unpacks how child abuse is being weaponised for political ends, and what needs to change to put survivors back at the centre.

Read the full interview below.

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FEATURED STORY

Are grooming gangs the far right's golden goose?

Louise Raw

Child sexual abuse happens on an epidemic scale and across all sectors of society, with an estimated 500,000 children abused in a year in England and Wales alone. Yet, there can be a real reluctance to face up to just how devastatingly common these crimes are.

Since 2011 the conversation in the UK have been heavily dominated by a narrow and racialised focus on 'grooming gangs'. As horrific as the crimes in question are, we at BTS believe that all victims and survivors of child sexual abuse deserve support, justice, and for their voices and needs to be at the heart of policy and practice. This should not be a contentious statement. Yet, attempts to challenge inaccurate stereotyping and recentre the conversation to be more inclusive, survivor-centred and evidence-based are routinely met by accusations of obfuscation and denial.

There have certainly been abysmal failings in responding to 'grooming gangs'. This is sadly true for so much child sexual abuse, regardless of whether it happens in schools, churches, families, sports clubs or other institutions. Indeed, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA, 2015-22), which heard from over 6,000 survivors, identified a litany of failings in child protection across the board. Yet, despite investing over £186 million in public funds into the Inquiry, the former Conservative administration had yet to implement a single recommendation by the time they left office in 2024.

In this interview, BTS caught up with Louise Raw, a historian, child sexual abuse survivor, and founder of Survivors against Fascism to discuss the devastating ways in which the topic of child sexual abuse is weaponised for political ends and what opportunities for pushback are being missed.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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BTS: Child abuse is, unfortunately, a very broad topic. Let's start by narrowing down our discussion. How do you define your area of work?

Louise Raw: We're going to focus on child sexual exploitation (CSE). It's a subset under the horrible umbrella of child abuse, and a bit different to other types of child sexual abuse (CSA). In some ways it's less obvious.

With most CSA, the abuser is usually someone known to the child. A family member, friend of the family, or someone in a position of authority will force the child into a sexual relationship. CSE, on the other hand, often involves someone not known or related to the child.

BTS: What does CSE entail?

Louise: There are many ways this could play out, but I'll give you a typical scenario. At the beginning, the exploiter will love-bomb their target with compliments and affection. They'll give them gifts, take them out to dinner, tell them they're in love. The child may genuinely believe this is a relationship. For them, their 'boyfriend' is perhaps a few years older, but he's great.

From the outside it can also seem unremarkable, especially to people who are blinded by misogyny or class bias. They might look at these girls, how they dress, who their 'boyfriends' are, and ask, "what's the problem? It seems consensual to me." And since the victim, if confronted, will often say the relationship is consensual, seeing the trap they're falling into can be really difficult.

But if their new 'boyfriend' is a CSE predator, that's exactly what's happening. And if that person is acting as part of a group – CSE by multiple perpetrators – the young girl is falling prey to what the press and politicians like to term a 'grooming gang'.

At some point the coercion will start through threats, blackmail, or another form of pressure. It could involve drugs and alcohol. Perhaps the 'boyfriend' will break form at a party, saying "here's my friend, here's my cousin, have sex with them as well." Once that bridge gets crossed the abuse tends to deepen. The child goes from 'girlfriend' to someone controlled for sex.

BTS: Why did you qualify the term 'grooming gang' as something the press and politicians like to say?

Louise: Because the term is massively racialised. It first entered the public consciousness in 2011, when The Times ran an exposé on what it called "on-street grooming", involving Asian men. It has since morphed into "Muslim grooming gangs". There is this racist, Islamophobic idea floating around that there is something inherent to these communities and their beliefs that leads people to abuse in this way.

This – and virtually only this – gets labelled as 'grooming gangs'. We rarely if ever see it applied to white perpetrators. For them, 'paedophile network' might be used, perhaps 'child sex ring'. And while those are also considered bad, nobody asks whether something specific in their culture or religion made them do it. Nobody demands that all white people condemn the actions of those white perpetrators, or re-affirm their allegiance to British values. Such questions and demands are only reserved for people who aren't white or Christian.

For all those reasons, 'grooming gangs' isn't a term that I love. CSE by multiple perpetrators describes the situation perfectly well, without the dog whistle racism.

BTS: CSE is one of those topics that nobody in public office can risk being tarred as being 'for'. That makes it incredibly risky to stand up to misinformation on this topic, something political figures on the far-right seem to have fully understood. 'Grooming gangs', the state's failure to counter them, and the state's refusal to acknowledge their supposed root cause (i.e., Asian and/or Muslim identity), are all mainstays of far-right messaging today. How has the far-right turned CSE to their advantage?

Louise: It's just about the only thing that all of society can agree on: nobody likes nonces (paedophiles), apart from other nonces. As you said, that gives it incredible power as a weapon. Not a terribly hard one to use either, as it doesn't take a genius to appeal to that sort of base instinct. Hence the difficulty in fighting back. If you say anything in dissent, or even just try to add some nuance, they can shoot back: "what are you, pro-paedophilia?"

Far-right campaigning around this goes back even further than the original exposé in The Times. It's such an important issue to them that groups are actually fighting over the mantle of who was first. Look on the BNP website. Next to slogans like "our children are NOT halal meat", you'll see it:

There is absolutely no doubt that Marlene Guest and the BNP exposed the Islamist Rape Gang scandal 20 years ago … You can forget about those who are trying to take credit for the exposure. People such as Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and even Maggie Oliver. None of these people exposed the grooming of our girls in Britain all those years ago.

The BNP were indeed early on this. More people started jumping on this bandwagon after The Times story broke, but it was around 2014 that groups really started claiming that Islam was the root cause of the issue. You had the BNP marching on it, organising on it. Yes, they had focused on Islam before. But it had been in a more general, Great Replacement-type way: Islam is evil, barbarians at the gates, they want to take us over, etc. But from about 2014 onwards, the far right increasingly started to specifically connect Islam with paedophilia.

If you think about it, it was a new take on the barbarians at the gates message, but this time they're already inside! They're here, they're in your city, they want to replace you, they're a threat to your kids. This line of scaremongering around alien cultures and sexual threat is old – much older than the current debate. We saw it in Victorian England with the 'Yellow Peril' (a racist term designed to spread fear about Chinese workers). Then it was something said about Jewish people, then Black men. Now it's Islam's turn.

Add children into the mix, and you've got yourself the perfect weapon. No matter what you say, you can always preface it by saying you're not being racist, you're just defending women and kids. Who can argue with that?

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BTS: You said the far-right really started to focus on this post-2014. How has that activity evolved over the past decade?

Louise: In 2013-15, the Rochdale child sexual exploitation scandal had just played out in the courts and the Telford and Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandals were all over the headlines.

At this point a new line of messaging was emerging, namely that they knew and did nothing. 'They' was the councils, the police, other officials, and the left in general. The problem was perceived to be far, far greater than the perpetrators sitting in jail. They were just the visible tip of a supposedly vast cover up undertaken by people who feared inflaming community tensions.

The BNP started adding politicians to their visual messaging. One image I saw was of children in a box wrapped up like a Christmas present, with a little tag reading, "to grooming gangs". The English Defence League staged a huge march in Rotherham in 2014. In 2017, a report from the Quilliam Foundation claimed that 84% of group-based CSE was committed by men with Asian heritage. This figure was quickly challenged by experts in the field, but it didn't really matter. This really powerful idea was already out there and there was no pulling it back. Soon after, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance started unveiling massive banners about the apparent threat to women and girls from Islam.

And then there is Tommy Robinson. He used to lead the English Defence League, but by the mid-2010s he was pretty washed up. Then, in 2016, he joined the right-wing Canadian website Rebel Media as a journalist of sorts. He got himself arrested for filming outside sexual exploitation trials in Canterbury and Leeds, where, according to Guardian, he made "what a judge later described as 'generically derogative' remarks about the defendants' ethnicity and religion while claiming that child sexual abuse had been covered up".

These stunts brought Robinson back to stardom in far-right circles as a 'truth teller' and political prisoner valiantly standing up against the conspiracy. He did it brilliantly, manipulating a lot of people while making himself a good deal of money in the process. I've been told by so many people on the far-right that Robinson exposed the 'grooming gangs', and I've been asked how I can criticise a man who exposes grooming gangs? He didn't actually expose anything – if anything he endangered the trials. But that reputation remains solid in certain circles, and shows again how CSE narratives can be effectively used to attack anyone who questions them.

It has continued to snowball, most recently with Elon Musk's interventions earlier this year. As Andrew Gillingham presciently noted in a Telegraph column way back in 2011, "There could…hardly be a more emotive story than this. Sexual abuse! White girls! Pakistani men! Politically-correct establishment letting it all happen!"

BTS: What parts of the story do the far-right have to omit in order to keep the weapon sharp?

Louise: Brown girls, male victims, white perpetrators.

We know that paedophiles target those close to them – people who are accessible. Official reports acknowledge that there is likely massive underreporting from Muslim girls, but where is the outcry and promise of support for them?

Male victims also never seem to get mentioned, yet there's every reason to think boys are victimised as well. Indeed, if we treated paedophilia rather than racialised paedophilia as the problem, Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, and the Catholic church would all be mentioned in the same sentence and receive the same kind of attention.

Finally, the far-right never talks about its own problem with paedophilia and child abuse. Not all white perpetrators are on the far-right, of course. But there are enough documented examples that it should really be part of the conversation.

Robert Ewing, a self-described neo-Nazi, was found guilty in 2015 of murdering 15-year-old Paige Chivers. Elliot Jones, who was once incarcerated for attacking a mosque, and his brother tried to entrap and extort a paedophile online. They had dubbed themselves the "The Paedophile Squad". Yet two years earlier, Jones himself had been convicted of trying to incite a child into sexual activity. Or Jack Denny, a former police sergeant and one-time candidate for Reform UK. He was dropped from the ballot when it was revealed that he had been convicted of possessing indecent images of children. The list goes on and on.

I think this is important to stress, as being 'protectors of women and children' is so core to their rhetoric. There are a lot of convicted child sex offenders in the ranks of the far-right. If they were truly so anti-paedophile, wouldn't they be the first to expose and condemn their own? That's the real cover up. They will not speak to it, at all. And if you speak to it, boy, do they come down on you.

BTS: What has been the response to this from both the state and civil society?

Louise: The response has been poor by just about everybody. In general, it's been to not push back against the narrative.

Let's state clearly that paedophilia exists in a fairly stable percentage – I think it's about 2% across every diverse group – so let's look at this as a non-racialised issue of male violence and misogyny. This is something governments could do. They could say, "we care about all victims, so we're going to put more money into this. We're going to put more into helping victims, into helping people report, into educating the police, into educating local councils and local authorities."

But what have they done instead? They've given into the far-right narrative at every turn. It makes it look like they're guilty of what the far-right has always accused them of – covering it up. Now they're throwing yet more money at it, rather than standing up and saying, "do you know how many enquiries there have been? Do you know how much work has been done on this? Yes, we want to do more, but let's look at paedophilia as the problem rather than any racialised version of it, and go after all sorts in equal measure."

The establishment is on the back foot and the far-right is on the front foot. That's been the problem all the way through. It looks like no one cares. And what does the far-right do? What it always does – it comes in and hoovers up. Hoovers up those who are concerned and who want support.

BTS: I get how the far-right attracts people who feel really concerned about this issue. But how are they attracting those who want support as well?

Louise: Just by saying they care. If you feel like nobody cares and nobody's listening to you, and then someone comes along and says they do, you will pay attention to them. If you're someone who still has to see your abusers on a daily basis, or you've felt judged by the authorities, and then suddenly a few people who seem very strong want to support you – that's massively appealing, isn't it? You may not be very political or right-wing yourself. But if they're the only ones offering physical, financial and medical support, and a friendly ear, you will likely appreciate that. That's how they open the door.

BTS: What about the left? What has their response been to CSE by multiple perpetrators?

Louise: The left in this country has never dealt with misogyny very well. Historically it grew up in opposition to the women's movement, and that remains a problem now.

Far too many people on the left don't see misogyny as a systemic or political issue. It's easy – though wrong – to see how men treat women as a private matter that politics can't possibly address.

You see this again and again. Groups will say they're against racism, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, ableism, and you will sit there and whisper: "say misogyny, say misogyny". It gets left out, left to the feminists, left to women mostly. We all know where that leads. Women and 'their' issues get treated as an irritant, as divisive, #notallmen. The left's inability to openly say it opposes misogyny is one of its failings. We are still far better on it, and on supporting CSE victims, than the right. But we need to make that much clearer.

BTS: Last month, the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse was released by Louise Casey, a peer in the House of Lords. The prime minister has responded by saying he accepts the report's recommendation to open a full national enquiry into "grooming gangs". How do you assess this development? Does the report give us reasons for optimism, or do you think it steers the government in an unproductive direction?

The decision to commission a review that focused exclusively on group-based CSE was deeply problematic from the start. It suggests a hierarchy of abuse – that this is the most 'important', most serious, perhaps most common form of CSE.

Those starting limitations will create a severely blinkered result. Its analysis will ignore tragedies like the murder of 15-year-old Paige Chivers by a white EDL and BNP supporter. It will also ignore the millions of children abused in the most common way – by individual people they know. They won't count, and the society and services that failed them will get away without so much as a sideways glance.

Instead, the parameters of the report will ensure that attention stays only on group-based CSE, and most likely only on group-based CSE committed by people who aren't white. In this way, Casey's recommendations actually make it more likely that future victims will be failed. The report is a showy, media-friendly, far right-appeasing sticking plaster on just one of many gaping wounds. It does not offer a pathway to a solution.

Addressing systemic misogyny and male violence, and properly funding struggling children's services, might go some way to actually changing things and helping victims.

But we know that placing a disproportionate focus on perpetrator ethnicity only fuels dangerous stereotypes and stands in the way of justice. We know this from many experts, including the most important voices – those of survivors. They have told us they suffer more and struggle more to be believed when their own suffering doesn't 'fit' a popular narrative of abuse that is being pushed.

Experts, including those with lived experience, academics, charities and organisations in the field, have already warned the home secretary that racialised, reductive depictions of CSE undermine and frustrate the response to it. Casey herself has made subsequent pleas for the issue not to be racialised, but it's too late. This is exactly what the review has done.

BTS: Is CSE the far-right's golden ticket?

Louise: I think they're increasingly settling on it, because it really is the golden bloody goose. We're seeing them focusing on it more. It's not just the nationalistic far-right anymore either – the evangelical far-right and what we might call the alt-right are also jumping on this train.

They're doing it for all the reasons we've suggested. It's eminently usable, applicable, adaptable – it just ticks all those boxes. Who's going to stand up and say, "I don't approve of you supporting victims?" Who's going to stand up and say, "I don't approve of your attacking paedophiles?" Anybody who does that will instantly get called a nonce apologist and a rape apologist. It's bulletproof.

BTS: It does seem phenomenally hard to push back on. It seems like only victims and survivors could really make that message land. Some have tried, but that's ended up pretty nasty, hasn't it?

Louise: It's gotten very, very nasty. Asking those people to speak up is also ethically very dubious, so you have to hope that they will approach you. It makes you feel like crap even asking, but that's still why I have my little lobby group Survivors Against Fascism. I try to get those voices out because absolutely no one else is going to be listened to. It's the only way.

We can only fight fire with fire, and we can only take it to the battlefield they've set up. It's no good tinkering around the edges, obfuscating, arguing something like, "migrants contribute a lot to the economy". It's true but no one will hear it unless you also tackle this issue head on. You have to keep repeating, even though it should be obvious, "We abhor child sexual abuse; we support ALL victims!" The Left is already doing this, but it needs to be louder to be heard over far right lies.

We have plenty of victims on side with us, and it's our job to absolutely protect them. They get attacked very quickly on social media when they start speaking out, and from there it can escalate. People say social media isn't real life, but it bloody well is when they've got your address. We do our best, but society in general should be much better at protecting victims from the counterattacks. There's a lot to be done.

BTS: Anything to add?

Louise: The effect of all this on both victims of paedophilia and the Muslim community has been disastrous. We need to help both, while at the same time showing that we care about stopping paedophilia – all of it.

Being abused can lead to lifelong issues, physical and mental. We need proper funding for programmes to support victims. And we need proper funding to fight misogyny and empower girls. We can't help keep them safe without it.

And we need to show that the far-right are predators, not protectors. We need to evidence and talk about all the vile things they have said and done. Expose them, show the world what they're really about. We also need to shine a light on how much money key figures in the far-right are making off of this. Show that they don't actually care.

Above all we need to not abandon the field of victim care to the far-right. We should be ones holding victims' hands and throwing our arms around them, protecting them. We have done great work in this area and we are the ones that genuinely care, and who don't seek to make money from it! But we need to make this clearer. We can't be shy about showing that we – the opposition to the far-right – are, and always have been, the people standing up to protect the vulnerable in society. We can't afford to let that be their thing. We have to make it clear that it is ours.