"Grooming gangs" are Asian but "paedophile rings" are white, apparently
A modern curiosity of British English
I’m writing a postletter about the dragging of England’s grooming-gang scandal back into the headlines by reactionaries who’re fine with children being sexually exploited, so long as it’s not by Pakistani or Muslim men. While writing, I noticed an asymmetry in how Britons (and now Americans mimicking them) describe different groups of pedophiles, and thought I’d write a separate note about that asymmetry.
The asymmetry is that Britons tend to call a white (or female) group of pedophiles a “paedophile ring”, but are much more likely to call a group of pedophiles a “grooming gang” when it’s mostly South Asian men.
Evidence from BBC News
Take, for example, what Wikipedia calls the “2009 Plymouth child abuse case”, in which 5 adults shared and made photographs of themselves sexually assaulting children as young as 5 months (yes, months, not years). Contemporary BBC News articles include photographs showing all 5 of the perpetrators to be white, and report that 4 of the 5 were women(!) — and none of the reports I just linked uses the words “grooming” or “gang”, but they all call the perpetrators a “ring”.
On the other hand, when I search the BBC News website for “Rotherham abuse” (without the quotation marks), the first hit is to “Bradford abuse could 'dwarf' Rotherham, says MP”, a January 6 article about pedophile groups in and around Bradford, where most of the relevant pedophiles convicted to date have been South Asian; the article uses the phrase “grooming gang” but not the word “ring”. I search for “Rochdale abuse” and get a similar result; the top article discusses a “grooming gang” and uses the word “ring” only indirectly (“ringleaders of the Rochdale grooming gang”).
Evidence from X/Twitter
That’s one mainstream news source. Does this racialized, gendered difference in phrasing show up in an informal social-media setting? To check, I use Google to search X/Twitter for the words “paedophile ring” and then “grooming gang”.
For “paedophile ring” the first 5 results are
Paris Gourtsoyannis mentioning a “Glasgow paedophile ring awaiting sentencing” where the pedophiles “are not of Asian backgrounds”, and linking an STV News article showing 5 white men, two white women, and no Asians;
Chris Wild posting that “Operation Screen in Halifax exposed a paedophile ring made up of professionals working in children's social care”, Operation Screen having begun in 1997 before producing (according to a response to an FOIA request) 9 arrests, and charges against Terence O’Hagan, Malcolm Phillips, and Andrew Shalders (I would guess that none of those 3 men were Asian or Muslim);
Lizzie Dearden commenting that the phrase “paedophile ring” was in use around 2012, in a thread about how new the phrase “grooming gang” is;
LBC correspondent Alan Zycinski mentioning “The sentencing of seven members of a paedophile ring in Glasgow” (the same one as discussed in the STV News article above) and linking an LBC article; and
the profile of Spotlight_CFC66, an account alleging a “Celtic Paedophile Ring” responsible for “child abuse at a Celtic Football Club”.
These mostly refer to (alleged) pedophile rings where the pedophiles were likely white (and sometimes female). The phrase “grooming gang” comes up only as a contrast.
On the other hand, for “grooming gang” the first 5 results are
Conservative MP Claire Coutinho linking to the previous Conservative Government’s press release about a “Grooming Gangs Taskforce” arresting “hundreds” in a year, and crediting then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with introducing “ethnicity data collection” to circumvent “cultural sensitivities”;
BBC radio presenter Nuala McGovern wondering, “We see the term 'grooming gangs' in the headlines but is that an appropriate term to use?”, next to an embedded clip of her interviewing ex-Detective Maggie Oliver about the question;
Bob Seely asserting that BBC News’s “coverage of the grooming gangs issue over the years is one of the reasons why Britons are losing faith in it”, and complaining of the “deafening” “silence over the differing racial and religious identities”, since if “grooming gang perpetrators had been white and the victims non-white, the coverage would have been very, very different”;
Spectator assistant editor Isabel Hardman paraphrasing a linked Spectator article with “The only thing that changed this week is that grooming gangs became a salient issue”; and
OSint613’s long “RUNDOWN” of “UK GROOMING GANGS”, which repeatedly refers to the rapists’ “Pakistani” ethnicity.
In xeets, the phrase “grooming gang” tends to allude, or explicitly refer, to gangs of “ethnic”/non-white/Pakistani abusers.
So the tendency of “paedophile ring” to refer to white (sometimes female) pedophiles and “grooming gang” to refer to non-white and especially Pakistani pedophiles is present on X/Twitter too.
Evidence from Google Image Search
Websites’ images also reflect this racialized and gendered language. Putting “grooming gang” into Google Image Search returns wall after wall of South Asian men. And a smiling Keir Starmer.
On the other hand, “paedophile ring” returns overwhelmingly white people, including several women in mugshots, and a sad child on the cover of book My Granddad and the Paedophile Ring.
Out of curiosity, I finally put in the phrase “pedophile ring” (no “a”) to see what would happen. The number of results shrank, but diversified into a mixture of TV/movie screenshots and posters, a photograph of pedophile victims’ kin outside a police HQ, a photograph of cops holding a press conference, and Wikipedia’s biographical images of Margaret Oliver, John David Norman, Phillip Paske, Jim Caviezel, and Marc Dutroux. Plus that photo of Elon Musk standing next to a smiling Ghislaine Maxwell at a party, I wonder whether that’s gonna come up again later.
Perhaps notably, everyone in these latter results was also white (and sometimes female).
Paedophile rings versus grooming gangs
Why bother documenting this arbitrary linguistic distinction between (white, multi-gender) “paedophile rings” and (brown, Muslim, male) “grooming gangs”? The general answer is that it’s good to reflect now and then on the language one uses, and to be aware of arbitrary distinctions. Awareness of them can ward off fallacies, like defining white grooming gangs out of existence (because if they’re white, that somehow makes them “rings” instead of grooming gangs) and then making shocked faces about how the remaining grooming gangs mostly comprise Asian men (when that’s simply because non-Asian grooming gangs aren’t being counted as such).
I have a more specific, practical reason too. This postletter started as a footnote to another postletter I’m drafting, a draft where I use(d) the term “grooming gangs”. Using the phrase “grooming gangs” led me to notice its connotations of Asianness and maleness, and I began, in a footnote, interrogating the phrase and my use of it. As my footnote grew to article size, I split it off into this piece.
Ultimately, I’m suspicious of the phrase “grooming gangs” given its verifiable connotations, and given that the perfectly serviceable phrase “p[a]edophile rings” already exists. However, the phrase “grooming gangs” has nothing about race or religion or gender explicitly baked into it, is not literally incorrect, and has clearly taken root in fringe and mainstream discourses alike. So, on balance, I find it reasonable and clearer to use the phrase when discussing the gangs alongside the discourses about them. But it’s fair to be uncomfortable with a racially loaded catchphrase being foisted on such a fraught topic.
