Question received on January 4, 2025.
Elon Musk is on loop. For more than a week, the American businessman has been posting provocative publications on his social network X about cases of gang rape that have shaken the United Kingdom over the last decade. The world’s leading fortune, whom Donald Trump has committed to appointing to his future government, is using it as a springboard to interfere in politics across the Channel. Even if it means multiplying false approximations and omissions.
What are the “grooming gangs” that Elon Musk talks about?
In the 2010s, a vast scandal hit the British authorities: police and social services were blamed for having ignored alerts targeting gangs mainly of Pakistani origin, having committed gang rapes in different English municipalities for sometimes several decades. Nicknamed the grooming gangs, They allegedly approached their victims by offering them alcohol or taxi rides, before blackmailing them and threatening them with death if they spoke. CheckNews had, in 2018, devoted an article to one of the cases.
Tuesday, December 31, the “Elon clips” account publishes a piece of interview where Elon Musk discusses “migrant rapist gangs in England”. The billionaire shares the video and comments: “I vote Reform.” Understanding Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party. Since then, every day has brought its share of tweets, and their tens of millions of views. “Mass rapes in Britain continue,” Musk proclaims on January 3. “Justice must be done for the hundreds of thousands of British girls [ciblées]», he wrote the next day. So many references to grooming gangs and the inaction which is criticized by the public authorities.
Have the media covered up rape cases?
Reacting to recent left-wing media articles, such as GuardianElon Musk castigates: “These are the same media that hid the fact that a quarter of a million little girls were – and still are – systematically raped by immigrant gangs in Britain.” Musk relays, conversely, an analysis published on January 4 in The Telegrapha daily openly supporting the conservative party, which states: “Abuses may still take place because the state did not act properly before.”
In the French right-wing press, in recent days, people are decrying the «silence» of the British media, and we welcome the intervention of Elon Musk having contributed to “breaking media silence”. “Britain’s biggest scandal almost went unmentioned. But [Musk] brought back into the spotlight one of the greatest crimes in modern English history.praises the JDD. In le Figaro Vox, lawyer Gilles-William Goldnadel rents the “information role of social networks”since “the delayed media fever which seizes the scandal of rapes immensely minimized if not concealed, was favored by […] Elon Musk».
Misleading innuendoes. The Guardian reported in 2011 the work of“a new public protection unit within the police [du Grand Manchester]created to investigate the sexual exploitation of children”. A procedure was already emerging: “Men allegedly met girls in front of stores and at train stations […] and offered them food. The conditioning continued by making them consume alcohol and drugs before taking them to parties […] and encourage them to have sex with older men.” The newspaper notes that“many of the investigations in Greater Manchester involve Pakistani men.”
On the French side, the World published a report in Rochdale in 2012. Nine residents, including eight of Pakistani origin, have just been convicted of serial rapes. The daily newspaper echoes research work showing that“between 46% and 83% of the men involved in this specific type of case – gang rapes committed by men who coax their young victims in an “open environment” – are of Pakistani origin […] for a population of Pakistani origin estimated at 7%”.
Another illustration to refute the “invisibility” of these cases by the media: British public television produced, and broadcast on its BBC One channel in 2017, a “true crime” series inspired by the failings of the Rochdale authorities.
Did the authorities ignore the alerts?
“Some of the criticisms made by Elon Musk are certainly misinformed,” lamented Wes Streeting, British Secretary of State for Health, reminding the BBC that these cases have already given rise to several investigations. In 2002, Labor MP for Keighley Ann Cryer was the first British figure to complain about “Asian men” approaching teenage girls after school. And the elected official obtained that five individuals were sentenced to prison in 2005. But Keighley is an exception. Elsewhere, it took several more years for the authorities to pick up on the warning signs and for the perpetrators of rape to be brought to justice.
The Rotherham case is symptomatic of the authorities’ reluctance to act, for fear of accusations of racism and community divisions. In her report delivered in 2014, former social services inspector Alexis Jay lists: “children were doused with gasoline and threatened to be set on fire” or “threatened with firearms”and so “forced into silence”. In 2015, an inspection report on Rotherham Metropolitan Council revealed that police officers “regarded many of these victims with contempt”, and that many municipal officials have “expressed their nervousness in identifying the suspects’ Asian ethnic origins, for fear of being seen as racist.”
-These cases are now closely monitored. In April 2023, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a specialist unit to combat the sexual exploitation of children, the “Grooming Gangs Taskforce”. Which, during its first year of existence, prides itself on having contributed to the arrest of “more than 550 suspects” and the protection of “more than 4,000 victims”.
Have grooming gangs caused “hundreds of thousands of victims”?
The figure cited by Elon Musk was undoubtedly inspired by an intervention in the House of Lords by Malcolm Pearson, a Ukip senator (the former party of Nigel Farage). In 2019, Lord Pearson indeed spoke of “250,000 victims of gangs of Muslim sexual predators”and added that this figure “is in itself probably underestimated”. However, it is not corroborated by any of the figures established to date.
In Rotherham, 1,510 children may have been sexually abused between 1997 and 2013, the British National Crime Agency estimated in a 2018 report. In Telford, the figure of a thousand victims was put forward, the same year, by journalists from Sunday Mirror. In Oxford, gangs are believed to have abused at least 373 children. Elsewhere, the victims are numbered in the dozens. In Rochdale, the latest police report identified 74 children sexually exploited from 2004 to 2013. While in Huddersfield, an investigation ordered by the town council mentioned the number of 22 victims.
Why attack the British government?
“Who was at the head [du Crown Prosecution Service] when gangs of rapists were able to exploit young girls without having to answer for their actions before the courts? Keir Starmer, explains Elon Musk. Pointing the finger at the current British Prime Minister “for his complicity in the worst mass crime in UK history”.
In fact, between 2008 and 2013, Keir Starmer held the position of head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the third most senior prosecutor in the country. What Elon Musk fails to specify is that Keir Starmer was at the origin of the first criminal prosecutions against the gang which operated in Rochdale. After an investigation called “Operation Chalice”, carried out in 2012 by the police in Telford, the CPS took action against all the men arrested in this context. Starmer also carried out an internal reform aimed at further punishing perpetrators of rape. “When I left office, we had opened the largest number of files for cases of sexual abuse of minors,” the head of government defended himself to the press on Monday.
Elon Musk also accused the minister responsible for the protection of women and girls, Jess Phillips, of “advocating genocide through rape”. The minister’s mistake was to have refused to order a national inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in Oldham. In 2022, a report revealed “serious failings” local authorities, but only covered cases that occurred between 2011 and 2014. Jess Phillips explained that she left it up to the city council to launch a city-wide investigation.
Why heroize the influencer Tommi Robinson?
Elon Musk demands the release of Tommi Robinson. The British far-right influencer was sentenced in October to eighteen months in prison, for violating a court decision prohibiting him from repeating defamatory remarks against a Syrian refugee. Founder of the English Defense League, which intends to fight against the Islamist threat, Robinson is considered by his supporters as a whistleblower on grooming gangs.
While Elon Musk and Nigel Farage entered into negotiations, the former having to invest in the latter’s party, the two men displayed their disagreement about the political fate of Tommy Robinson. “The Reform UK party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes. blames Musk in yet another tweet. Farage retorted: “I still think Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform UK.”
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