Is Islamic theology a key factor behind grooming gangs? My report lists 8 factors

The full extent of grooming gang activity is only now coming to light.

This is a crime epidemic in which thousands of perpetrators have raped tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of young girls. There have been convictions in around 20 locations across the UK, but the Independent Rape Gang Inquiry has announced that there are 85 local authorities in which grooming gangs have been active.  

In future generations, historians may wonder why the nation permitted these crimes for so long, shielding abusers and abandoning victims. Why have the authorities been more ready to show empathy to abusers than to their victims? 

This has been going on for decades and the scale of the abuse is staggering. Also staggering is the failure of the authorities. Sara Rowbotham, a whistleblower on the Rochdale rapes, commented, “It’s disgusting that we were disbelieved, scrutinised, misrepresented, scapegoated, and then publicly and nationally discredited by both the police and local authority.”

The evidence shows that the strongest correlation of grooming gang crimes is with Islam and a Muslim religious identity, not with any particular ethnic labels such as ‘Asian’ or ‘Pakistani’. We can know this because in the many cases where convicted gang members’ names have been published, so many of them bear distinctively names. An Islamic name such as Ali or Muhammad is a very strong indicator that a person was born into a Muslim family and raised with some kind of Muslim identity. While it is true that in some Muslim cultures families may occasionally give religiously neutral names to a child, for example in Iran, in any part of the world it is very rare for a non-Muslim family to give their child a distinctively Muslim name. A crucial point is that it is culture shaped by Islam that can drive grooming gang crimes, not just an individuals’ personal faith.

There have also been no non-Muslim ‘Asian’ grooming gangs. While it is true that a majority of gangs have been made up of men of Pakistani heritage, all their published names have been Islamic. In addition, there have been multiple convictions of grooming gangs made up of Muslim men who were not from Pakistani backgrounds. To be sure, there have been a handful of non-Islamic grooming gangs, with small numbers of members and relatively few victims, but none of these non-Islamic gangs have been ethnically ‘Asian’.

One factor contributing to the official denial and silence is religious illiteracy. Western secular people are ill-equipped to understand how religions work. Rafael L. Bardají, former national security advisor to the Spanish prime minister, put his finger on the issue: “A population that has fundamentally turned its back on its faith cannot understand the religious motivations of others…”    

At the same time, some Western people may be blind to certain features of Islam because they project their impressions of a benign Christianity onto it. There is also a dominant strand of Western thought which dismisses the influence of religions altogether, relegating faith to the domain of personal spirituality: Karl Marx described religion as a symptom of oppression, not a cause of anything. He said, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”

Haunting the official responses to these crimes is the twin spectre of Islamophobia and a dread that the multicultural experiment is failing. Such pressures have undoubtedly intimidated many officials from speaking out.  

In my report I identified eight aspects of Islamic theology and law which could motivate grooming gang criminality. These are: 

1. The doctrine of the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims. 
2. The doctrine of loyalty and disavowal, also known as ‘love and hate for the sake of God’. This doctrine teaches that Muslims should love and associate themselves with Muslims and all things Islamic, but reject and dissociate themselves from non-Muslims and non-Islam.
3. The superiority and dominance of men over women. 
4. The mandated seclusion of women by men. 
5. The religious practice of forced marriage, and the lack of a concept of an age of consent. 
6. The perceived threat of dangerous female sexuality. 
7. The practice of sex slavery as an aspect of the laws of jihad. 
8. Dhimmitude and the treatment of conquered non-Muslim peoples in Islamic law. 

Evidence for these points can be found in the testimonies of grooming gang survivors, the public statements of Muslim leaders, and the canonical texts of Islam. 

I also make eleven recommendations: 

1. It must be publicly acknowledged that there are Muslims who reject key elements of the grooming gangs’ religious cultures. 
2. Fears of stoking Islamophobia should not interfere with exploration of religious motivations. 
3. The religious identities of both perpetrators and victims should be recorded. 
4. Police should be trained to record and investigate the religious beliefs of suspects.  
5. Police should be trained to investigate religious aspects of the testimony of victims. 
6. The state should enforce a legal prohibition of unregistered sharia marriages. 
7. The role of abusers’ family members in enabling abuse must be considered. 
8. Islamic religious leaders should be called upon to disavow the activities of grooming gangs as well as key doctrines which have formed them. 
9. Politicians should refrain from making dismissive but ignorant claims concerning what Islam does and doesn’t teach about human sexual relations. 
10. The UK Forced Marriage Unit should remove statements on its website that there is no religious basis to forced marriages in Islam. 
11. Awareness training should be provided to vulnerable white working-class communities who are being targeted by grooming gangs.

The full report, UK grooming gangs and Islam is available to download from the Christian Concern website