British feminism, once a universalist moral insurgency, now stands indicted by its own silence in the face of industrial-scale sexual abuse of vulnerable girls. The Rape Gang Inquiry, published Tuesday by Rupert Lowe of the right-wing Restore Britain party, documents a scandal that should have summoned the full ferocity of the UK’s feminist tradition. Yet the dominant institutions of “gender equality” mostly responded with caution, euphemism, and procedural language where plain moral speech was required. I was interviewed as part of the inquiry, and I have studied firsthand many of the failures it documents.
The horrifying stories covered in the report have been discussed throughout Britain for more than a decade, and one government after another has passed around blame, unable to explain why the state failed to stop the ruination of thousands of young women and girls. Yet an unlikely intervention helped bring the scandal back to the surface. Elon Musk began to discuss the story on X in January 2025 and demanded a fuller accounting from British authorities. His request spurred a new round of debate and launched the inquiry that culminated this week.
The Rape Gang Inquiry describes “the systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly White British, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs across towns and cities throughout the United Kingdom,” and concludes that “this scandal constitutes one of the most horrendous failures in the history of the country.” It documents “organised networks of perpetrators” who transported victims between locations, supplied them with alcohol and drugs, recorded their abuse for distribution and blackmail, and “passed girls between multiple adult men.” These crimes “have been committed for decades, since the 1950s by Pakistanis in particular, and have affected every region of our nation.”
