Today’s feminists often prioritize cultural sensitivity over girls’ safety. Their activism helped steer Britain away from addressing a yearslong rape crisis.
A movement that began as a universalist moral revolt has, in its dominant institutional forms, drifted into managed difference and coalition etiquette..
The horrifying stories covered in the report have been discussed throughout Britain for more than a decade, and one government after another has passed around blame, unable to explain why the state failed to stop the ruination of thousands of young women and girls. Yet an unlikely intervention helped bring the scandal back to the surface. Elon Musk began to discuss the story on X in January 2025 and demanded a fuller accounting from British authorities. His request spurred a new round of debate and launched the inquiry that culminated this week.
The Rape Gang Inquiry describes “the systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly White British, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs across towns and cities throughout the United Kingdom,” and concludes that “this scandal constitutes one of the most horrendous failures in the history of the country.” It documents “organised networks of perpetrators” who transported victims between locations, supplied them with alcohol and drugs, recorded their abuse for distribution and blackmail, and “passed girls between multiple adult men.” These crimes “have been committed for decades, since the 1950s by Pakistanis in particular, and have affected every region of our nation.”
The scale is almost beyond comprehension. Drawing on parliamentary extrapolations and subsequent data, the report notes that “at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma,” according to Lord Malcolm Pearson of Rannoch. “The true number is probably higher.” It finds that “the same unspeakable crimes occurred in at least 149 local authority districts, close to 40 percent of all such districts across the United Kingdom.” (The report later acknowledges that 250,000 is not a precise count of the number of victims, “because the British state has failed to record it.” But it asserts that the figure is a conservative estimate.)
The victims’ experiences, in the report’s words, strip away any possibility of abstraction. Girls “as young as 11 were initially befriended by a young Muslim man” and then plied with “alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes,” collected “from school gates, care homes, and streets in taxis,” taken to “houses, flats, restaurants, and hotels,” and “raped repeatedly by groups of men, tortured, filmed for blackmail,” and insulted as “white trash” and “kuffar” who deserved punishment. Many became pregnant; “some miscarried under trauma,” some “endured coerced abortions,” and “some gave birth to children who were later removed by the state.”
One survivor, “Chloe,” describes being raped at 12, drugged, groomed in taxis and hotels, and even admitted to Accident & Emergency after a whiskey bottle was forced into her vagina and shattered. Yet “no questions were asked about how she had sustained such an injury” and she “was examined, the glass was removed, and she was discharged” back to the same world of abuse. When she told police she had been having sex with adult men in cars, they “dismissed Chloe as a prostitute.” The police also determined that Chloe had consented to the sexual encounters, despite her claim not to know the definition of the word consent.
The report is explicit that “political failure lies at the heart of the scandal. Successive governments lacked the will to confront the ethnic and religious patterns,” with Labour “initially refus[ing] a public inquiry altogether,” watering down processes, suppressing ethnicity data, and casting legitimate concerns as “ ‘far-right’ agitation,” while Conservative governments, once in power, “continued with Labour’s approach and failed to impose mandatory ethnicity recording or launch a full statutory inquiry.” Across the political class, “political correctness, fear of accusations of racism, and fear of losing electoral support from certain demographics have taken precedence over the protection of British children.”
This is what the report calls Britain’s “institutional denial” and “paralysing fear of ‘racism’ accusations,” a fear so deep that “the state enabled” perpetrators “to operate with impunity.”
The initial reaction to these crimes exposes the moral fraud of so-called feminist solidarity. There has been, in recent decades, plenty of public language about women, an abundance of institutional “equality” talk, and a steady production of statements, panels, reports, and campaigns to crack open a phantom “glass ceiling.” Yet, when faced with “repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma” inflicted on hundreds of thousands of poor girls, feminism largely failed to treat this as the central feminist catastrophe of our time.
Instead, the same “cultural sensitivity” and “community relations” language that paralyzed the police and councils seeped into feminist institutions. Rape Crisis England & Wales, a feminist organization that advocates for abuse victims, acknowledges that police investigations for years were focused on victims rather than suspects, and would too often “deem 11-year-olds capable of consent,” as their CEO put it in a response to a previous rape gang inquiry last year. The report notes that ethnicity and religion were often left unrecorded “to protect ‘community cohesion’ ” and that national reviews found it “simply not possible to know the scale” because “ethnicity, group offending, and historical cases were routinely unrecorded or shelved.”
The abuses were no mere indiscretion on the part of the perpetrators. Rather, they stemmed directly from their culture. The gangs were “predominantly Muslim Pakistani,” operating under “an honour- and shame-based clan code that treated non-Muslim girls, especially white working class girls, as property available for sexual use,” and this pattern was “reinforced by eight theological and legal aspects of Islam,” including the doctrine of Muslim superiority, forms of loyalty and disavowal (al‑walā’ wa‑l‑barā’), “the superiority of men over women, … the absence of any fixed minimum age of consent,” and “a system of sex slavery authorizing sexual relations with non‑Muslim captives.” Filtered through “clannish immigrant sub-cultures,” these elements “provided religious justification that enabled the systematic rape and even slaughter of White British girls.”
British Islamic organizations dispute the notion that religion played a role in the abuses. “Sex with people they are not married to, all these things that they have done are prohibited in Islam,” said Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, then–assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said of the perpetrators in 2014. Yet, like the feminist groups, a principal concern of many Islamic organizations has been to accuse conservatives of overreacting to or exaggerating the abuses.
The feminist movement, which once refused to let male power define women’s lives, now routinely refuses to name the “new men” who operate within cultural and religious systems hostile to feminist demands. It is anxious about mentioning their culture, edgy about identifying their religion, panicky about pointing out the cruel and unusual abuse when that abuse did not fit the preferred script dictated by the intersectional logic of the day. The inquiry’s insistence that “misguided political correctness and cultural sensitivities” be banished from its proceedings was, explicitly, a rebuke to precisely this sensibility.
Multicultural etiquette, in other words,
created an expanding category of unnameables. Where earlier
British feminism could say, plainly, that husbands, fathers,
employers, priests, or legislators had exploited women and
must be opposed, the contemporary movement often refuses to
say that certain patterns of male violence are concentrated
within particular ethno-religious subcultures, and that these
patterns matter for the safety of girls. Modern feminism
shouts when the target is culturally safe and falls quiet when
the perpetrators are wrapped in the prohibitions of diversity
talk.
One of the report’s most unsettling implications for feminists is that the loudest voices forcing this scandal into the open were not the major women’s organizations or state-backed feminist commissions but insurgent figures: male, and outside the consensus classes.
Nothing in the report suggests that every feminist or every woman in public life is cowardly or complicit. Some individual women, such as social workers, activists, and survivors themselves, showed exemplary courage.
But the absence of a coordinated, unembarrassed, angered feminist response on the scale this scandal demands is impossible to ignore. The inquiry is explicit: “The country now knows the full truth. The country has been given the basis for justice. The country has the roadmap to ensure these crimes never happen again.” Yet the response of the major women’s movements has been silence.
The older British feminism that began with figures like Mary Wollstonecraft treated women’s subordination as a civilizational wrong, not a boutique grievance. Wollstonecraft insisted that women were rational, and entitled both to education and legal equality; the Langham Place circle translated those claims into public agitation; the suffrage movement turned them into a mass political demand. That tradition understood that women had been treated as property, as children, as moral auxiliaries to men, and as bodies for male use—and refused to accept any compromise in naming and resisting such treatment.
It was precisely this refusal to trim moral principle to fashionable alliances that gave British feminism its stature. The vote, access to education, and legal recognition of women as adults equal to men were framed as a civilizational correction, not a narrow lobby interest, and they inspired women across the West to make similar claims and secure similar rights.
If one asks, “what happened to feminism?” in Britain, and in the wider West, the report and the surrounding silence together suggest a brutal answer. A movement that began as a universalist moral revolt, insisting that women’s vulnerability was not “a cultural preference to be balanced against competing sensitivities, but a public wrong that had to be named plainly and confronted without apology”, has, in its dominant institutional forms, drifted into managed difference and coalition etiquette. It has become a movement that worries first about “community cohesion,” about not “inflaming ‘community tensions,’ ” about not disturbing the moral arrangements of the professional class, and only second—if at all—about the girls at the school gate.
The Rape Gang Inquiry could be the beginning of a movement for true accountability. It declares that “the country now knows the full truth” and calls for “considerable changes to our criminal justice system,” “legislation aimed at targeting specifically gang-based [child sexual exploitation],” “institutional accountability measures,” and “enhanced safeguarding through greater family involvement.” It promises, after publication, to “release the full witness testimonies, gather additional survivor accounts, identify those responsible in Parliament, and begin civil and private legal actions to ensure maximal accountability.”
In the older feminist tradition, such a report would have been treated as a manifesto for action, the factual backbone of a new, uncompromising campaign.
But when a movement born to protect women cannot bring itself to cry out on behalf of children because the perpetrators are too politically inconvenient, it is difficult to avoid the verdict that it is dead.