Thread by @kafkaswife

Grooming gang deniers have become increasingly emboldened in recent years, with many hiding behind academic credentials to legitimise their conspiracies. Let’s take a look at one example from 2020: “Challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative”

The report was authored by Dr Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail. Read this thread for an insight into Cockbain’s activist “scholarship”.

Waqas Tufail is an even stranger character, with sinecures on the board of the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity journal and the Research Committee on Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnicity. Tufail founded the Northern Police Monitoring Project, which promotes an abolitionist ideology. NPMP partner frequently with Kids of Colour, an organisation that has defended co-conspirators of a child murderer and suggested that criminal convictions under joint enterprise law prop up a “‘racist’ gang narrative”.

The report clearly sets out its intention to de-racialise the common perception that “grooming gangs” were a Asian-male-on-white-child phenomenon.

Unsurprisingly, it focuses particularly on the threat from the far-Right both domestically and internationally, “disinformation” and the supposed co-opting of women’s rights. Indeed, thousands of words are dedicated solely to the right-wing response to the mass rape atrocities.

The authors seem especially paranoid of “transatlantic neoconservative actors and institutions, often funded by wealthy elites, which work to ‘manufacture’ fear of Islam and Muslims in order to influence political discourse and policy”. To what end, we can only wonder.

The authors also take issue with the successful prosecution of Asian pedophiles, fretting that they may “exacerbate the perceived threat of ‘grooming gangs’”

Policing failures are addressed - but only to perform a pledge of fealty to oppressed “immigrant” groups. The non-british background of many perpetrators is not acknowledged.

Downplaying the ethnic violence component of grooming gangs isn’t a new phenomenon. Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley, received death threats for being one of the first public figures to speak out about gangs of Pakistani men sexually abusing white children in Yorkshire all the way back in 2003.

But in recent years more sophisticated networks have acted to promote their own narratives about the perpetrators of child gang rapes. Let’s look into the history of the report and the Institute for Race Relations (IRR).

The IRR was founded in 1958, then known as the Race Relations Unit. The idea for the unit came from the editor of the Sunday Times, and so initially had deep establishment connections (see the chairmanship of Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders).

By 1972 it had morphed into a more explicitly ideological organisation focused on researching “contemporary British racism”. Three contributors to their “Race and Class” journal were “killed in the front line of struggle”, including the notorious pro-Khmer Rouge academic Malcolm Gladwell. The IRR’s funding streams switched to heavily-infiltrated KGB front groups.

The IRR holds charity status under the clause of promoting racial harmony. It might seem strange, then, that they have associated with genocide-denying communists and wrote fawningly of the SPLC-proscribed Nation of Islam. But this is par for the course in the modern British charity sector.

In 2024 the IRR worked with BBC Documentaries, the APPG on Trafficked Britons in Syria, the BFI, CNN, Kings College London, the University of Oxford and… the Northern Police Monitoring Group!

Who funds the IRR? For those familiar with the Charity Industrial Complex, you’ll recognise the names: the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the Open Society Foundation. Three-quarters of their annual funding comes from these trusts alone!

Why is this paper significant? In 2020, the Home Office published a report citing Cockbain and Tufail’s joint research supposedly “confirming” there is no evidence that one ethnic group is disproportionately engaged in crimes of child exploitation. The Centre for Expertise on child sexual abuse echoed these claims.

The Home Office report’s supposedly conclusive rejection of the racialised element of the abuse was anything but:

Yes, a think tank that once praised Pol Pot was utilised by the Home Office, obfuscating facts directly relating to the greatest British scandal in living memory.

This is why tackling the ongoing scourge of child rape gangs will require much greater action than another toothless government inquiry. Networks of self-described “activist” academics can brazenly promote agendas that contradict real data. Ignore the “radical” framing: Cockbain and Tufail are little more than lackeys for the same state that turns a blind eye to the racial abuse of white British children across the country.

To break up these toxic networks, it’s time to re-write the 2011 Charities Act, remove charity status from organisations that receive more than 50 per cent of funds from billionaire trusts, and - most importantly of all - make denialism of the atrocities a criminal offence, with a statutory duty placed upon organisations to uphold the law.