'Believe All Women — but Only the Right Women?': Viral Post Slams Feminists Over Silence on UK Grooming Gangs

Thousands of working‑class girls were raped, trafficked and terrorised in grooming scandals across Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, as police, councils and social services looked the other way. Now, as a new inquiry reopens those failures, a viral post is asking an awkward question of some of Britain's best‑known feminists: why weren't you louder for these girls?

The post, circulating widely on social media in the wake of a new crowdfunded inquiry into grooming gang abuse, asks why a movement that campaigns loudly on rape culture, Page Three and lads' mags has been largely quiet on one of the worst child protection failures in British history. It is a hook, not a verdict. But the question itself has real weight, and the victims at the centre of this story deserve it to be examined honestly.

What Happened To These Girls

From the late 1980s until 2013, group-based child sexual exploitation affected an estimated 1,400 girls, generally from care home backgrounds, in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Similar networks were later identified in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Oldham and elsewhere.

The 2014 Jay Report, which first brought the scale of Rotherham's abuse to national attention, described children being 'raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.' Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of perpetrators. Some were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight.

The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors, including fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism, sexist and classist attitudes toward the mostly working‑class victims and a desire to protect the town's reputation. The girls were not believed. In some cases, they were arrested.

The Feminists Who Did Speak Out

The narrative that feminism as a whole stayed silent does not hold up to scrutiny. Julie Bindel published her first investigation into grooming gangs in 2007 and was subsequently added to an Islamophobia Watch website for doing so. She has been writing and broadcasting on the subject ever since, including a 2026 podcast series in which a survivor, Fiona, spoke about her exploitation in Bradford and the institutions that failed to intervene.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author and activist, also highlighted the grooming gangs scandal as early as 2021 in her book Prey, and has spoken about how the abuse of working‑class girls was dismissed in language that mirrored the dismissal of Muslim women's abuse in the Netherlands, 'they're slags,' 'white trash.'

Both women faced professional reputational risk for raising their voices. Both raised them anyway.

The Silence That Is Harder to Explain

The Silence That Is Harder To Explain

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing in The Free Press this week following the publication of the new Rape Gang Inquiry Report by Rupert Lowe MP, said the scandal 'should have summoned the full ferocity of the UK's feminist tradition,' but instead the dominant institutions of gender equality 'mostly responded with caution, euphemism, and procedural language where plain moral speech was required.'

Rape Crisis England & Wales did respond to the new inquiry report, commending the courage of survivors but adding it was 'unhelpful and irresponsible to attribute sexual violence and abuse perpetration uniquely to specific races, ethnicities or religions.' Critics argue that framing institutional concern around ethnicity data, rather than leading with condemnation of the abuse itself, is the kind of deflection the viral post is pointing at.

The inquiry that prompted this renewed debate is a statutory independent inquiry, established under the Inquiries Act 2005 and set up following Baroness Louise Casey's 2025 national audit, which found serious and repeated failures to protect children from organised sexual abuse. It is now under way, with national accountability hearings due before the end of this year.

The girls at the centre of this story are not a culture war. They are the reason this conversation must continue, clearly and honestly.