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By 
Mark Durie2025-11-28T11:01:00+00:00
A new report by Anglican priest and scholar Dr Mark Durie argues that grooming-gang activity across the UK isn’t connected to ethnicity but to Islamic theology.
Source: Reuters
An anonymous Rochdale grooming gang victim at her home in England. She was 14 when she was sexually abused.
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 Arabic 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:
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:
The full report, UK grooming gangs and Islam is available to download from the Christian Concern website
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