Canary writer Ed Sykes outlines our position on child sexual abuse and its current weaponisation by the far-right. Some readers may find this content distressing.
Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a stain on humanity. And experts have already told Conservative and Labour governments what to do to deal with it. But the political will hasn’t been there. This has allowed the far right to weaponise the issue, spreading lies to further their racist, corporate agenda while diverting people’s justifiable anger away from the true causes of the crisis. To push for a meaningful solution to the problem, here’s the context we all need to be aware of, in seven key points.
1) Child sexual abuse must not become a political football
CSA is a complex issue, but it’s nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. Statistics consistently show this. Nonetheless, billionaire Elon Musk and other far-right figures have been acting like this is somehow Labour’s fault. And former Blairite MP Ivor Caplin facing a paedophilia scandal certainly doesn’t paint the party in a good light.
Caplin was a prominent supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, before going on to work with the arms trade lobby and other companies that stood to benefit from the aftermath. He also chaired a pro-Israel lobby group, the Jewish Labour Movement, at a time when it was playing a leading role in smearing Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. As late as November 2024, he was defending Keir Starmer’s Labour despite the party suspending him earlier in the year.
However, the CSA scandal is not about one political group. Because the far right – including Musk himself – has long faced its own allegations of sexual offences. So before anything else, it’s important to remember that sexual violence is everywhere. It’s not about a particular social group or institution. It’s about abuse of power, misogyny, and chronic institutional failures.
And the facts are tragic. Around half a million children face sexual abuse every year in Britain. Yet studies suggest only 15% report it, while only a tiny fraction of these cases lead to convictions. One report said “at least one in 10 children in England and Wales are sexually abused before the age of 16”. Abusers, meanwhile, come from all communities in the UK, in proportion to the population. The overwhelming majority, however, are men.
2) Stop misinformation. Implement the recommendations.
On 6 January, the Survivors Trust insisted that the “troubling trend of misinformation” we have seen in recent days “undermines the true scale of the crisis and the pressing need for reform”. And it highlighted that:
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which heard from over 7,500 victims and survivors, provided a clear roadmap for action. Yet, two years later, none of its recommendations have been fully implemented.
It called “for the establishment of a Child Protection Authority (CPA)”, which “would ensure the implementation of IICSA’s key recommendations”.
The Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre (RASASC), meanwhile, has stressed that:
Abusers come from every stratum of society, every ethnicity, every socio-economic group. There are no exceptions. Wherever there are children, abusers will be sure to work, play or live nearby.
Hierarchical institutions where a power dynamic is at play (like in religion, care homes, politics, or showbusiness) are often a perfect environment for abusers to work. But as RASASC stressed, CSA can happen in any environment or profession.
Far-right attempts to convince us that a certain section of the population is responsible for CSA or that the establishment has covered such a situation up is demonstrably false. In reality, the only clear statistical conclusion is that we have a problem with misogyny and patriarchy. Because males are overwhelmingly the abusers and females are the ones they usually abuse. And giving attention to people trying to racialise CSA only serves, as academics Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail wrote in 2020, to:
obscure from view institutional failures, contemptible attitudes towards victims, many of them working-class girls and young women, and a reluctance to acknowledge that austerity-related cuts have decimated services dedicated to tackling sexual abuse and violence.
3) We all need to talk about child sexual abuse more clearly
CSA is not a new phenomenon. And unfortunately, the way people have discussed the issue has long been inappropriate.
Back in 2001, for example, the BBC was talking about the “child prostitution crisis”. And it wasn’t alone. Rather than clearly talking about abuse and exploitation, commentators made it sound like children were consciously choosing to submit themselves to CSA. But even then, the BBC was clear that the care system had failed countless children, partly because it was “too difficult and too expensive” to help them.
The way the media and others often frame CSA from different social groups is also dangerous. By talking about white abusers as a “paedophile ring”, for example, and Asian or Muslim abusers as a “grooming gang”, they’re creating an artificial distinction. As a former prosecutor in such cases, Nazir Afzal said:
One day I was prosecuting a ‘grooming gang’, the next a ‘paedophile ring’. … For me they were all child sex abusers
But by using the highly emotive word “gang” in one case, and the much less menacing “ring” in another, commentators create a subconscious emotional hierarchy that generates different levels of outrage.
This is organised child exploitation. It is child rape. It is child sexual assault. It’s child sexual abuse.
We mustn’t pick and choose which cases to talk about. All CSA is terrible. All of it must end.
4) The longstanding tradition of institutional inaction against abusers
Around the UK, children’s homes have long been a key site of CSA:
- In Rochdale, institutional complacency, complicity, inaction, and victim blaming allowed former Rochdale MP Cyril Smith and others to continue abusing children for years. Smith even got a knighthood, despite political leaders (including Margaret Thatcher) being aware of allegations against him.
- In Lambeth, there was a “culture of cover-up” at the council that allowed the abuse of children in care homes in south London for decades. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said the children had become “pawns in a toxic power game within Lambeth Council and between the council and central government”.
- In Belfast, police admitted failing to look into allegations of sexual abuse at Kincora Boys’ Home, amid “systemic failings”. British governments, meanwhile, allegedly tried to stop a full inquiry for intelligence reasons. MI5 was apparently aware of abuse but because of Kincora’s links to far-right informer William McGrath, it sought to cover matters up in part by destroying files.
- Regarding Jimmy Savile’s infamous abuse, the BBC reportedly ‘missed opportunities’, while official reports on him “marginalised the proactive, enabling role of the BBC, the NHS and the British establishment”. As academics Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin insist, this “multi-institutional masking… co-produced his ‘untouchable’ status and enabled him for decades to deflect and discredit rumour, gossip and allegations about his sexually predatory behaviour.” These core institutions played a “pivotal role”, becoming ‘interdependent’ on Savile for financial reasons, but have not really faced justice “for enabling, covering up or failing properly to investigate what he did”. This pattern has repeated itself in the cases of numerous powerful celebrities who, thanks to their money and influence, have been able “to manipulate the media, neutralise allegations, silence victims and abuse with impunity”.
5) Institutions shamefully blamed victims for their abuse
Partly because of the risk of far-right figures jumping on minority abusers guilty of CSA – which has helped to fuel racist attacks on innocent people – there have been cases (like in Telford) where institutions have expressed concern over “race relations”, and where it may have contributed to inaction. But as Ella Cockbain has insisted:
‘political correctness’ has never been the sole or even the main explanatory factor for inaction
As she highlighted:
Focusing on that detracts from major issues, such as derisory attitudes to victims and survivors of child sexual abuse – who were all too often ignored, blamed and even criminalised.
Campaigner Julie Bindel has backed this up, stressing in 2024 that:
In many cases, girls subjected to such abuse, no matter the racial and religious background of their abusers, are not believed by the police, and at times they are even blamed for what happened to them.
When Rochdale emerged as one of the CSA scandals involving ethnic minority abusers, the council and police invested insufficient resources in helping the victims. As the BBC reported:
Girls as young as 13 who were horrifically abused were branded “child prostitutes” – judged, blamed and disbelieved. Sometimes they were even arrested themselves.
There were similar failures in places like Oldham and Oxford. And amid the care system’s “blatant” failures in Rotherham, “police failed to act… because working-class girls were treated with utter contempt by those in power”. As journalist Taj Ali pointed out:
This is a pattern of neglect, with numerous instances of victim-blaming.
6) Dealing with toxic masculinity is key
Men are overwhelmingly responsible for CSA, and for violent crime in general. It’s not men from specific ethnic or religious groups we need to worry about. It’s men who have certain ways of viewing their own power and how that relates to people they perceive to be less powerful than them. In some cases, there may be personality disorders at play. In others, it’s more about the circumstances they’ve grown up in.
As the Guardian‘s Sonia Sodha has written, stereotypes and expectations abound when kids are growing up. This includes “the idea that girls are sweet and boys are tough”, that they watch different programmes, behave differently, and play with different toys (think dolls and guns). And studies have shown that some boys who’ve had “adverse childhood experiences” may have a “greater propensity to violence”. The fact that we’ve had years of cuts to children’s support services, meanwhile, just adds to an already massive problem.
Australia’s Our Watch, which aims to prevent violence against women, says:
While there isn’t one way of being a man, there are more dominant forms of masculinity that many men feel pressure to conform to and uphold. And rigid adherence to dominant forms of masculinity is a driver of violence against women.
The Pathfinders organisation, seeking to advance “peace, justice, inclusion, and equality”, highlights the impact of negative masculinities. For example:
The idea that being tough, violent, or physically dominant is a male trait has its roots in specific concepts of masculinity that have spread from some military to state institutions and then to society at large—and can be exploited to drive boys and men to use violence to assert their social status.
It adds that:
Media, advertising, video games, and movies reinforce the connection between gun ownership and masculinity, promoting and misconstruing violence as an accepted aspect of male identity.
The dominance of misogynistic pornography is undoubtedly another key factor. In particular, studies have suggested that the younger boys first see porn, the more sexist their attitudes tend to be as adults.
There has been some interesting research proposing the promotion of positive masculinities in order to reduce violence. And Pathfinders provides some examples of where this may be working.
7) Increasing investment in preventing child sexual abuse is essential
Leading politicians have long failed to treat CSA as the appalling scandal it is. Indeed, one inquiry said Westminster institutions have “regularly put their own reputations or political interests before child protection”, with behaviour ranging “from turning a blind eye to actively shielding abusers” in the political system.
Far-right agitators who focus on CSA only tend to do so when they think they can exploit people’s justifiable anger to further their racist, divisive agenda. They don’t care that it’s the “availability and vulnerability” of victims that often pushes abusers into action rather than religion or ethnicity. Men of all communities opportunistically seize chances when they arise, which is often when politicians, institutions, and police officers don’t have the will or resources to tackle what is a complex issue to resolve.
The government must implement the IICSA’s recommendations. It must also invest sufficient resources in systems to prevent CSA and to ensure that abusers face justice. And it must take steps to ensure that cynical racists are unable spread dangerous disinformation that diverts attention and anger away from the true drivers of the ongoing CSA crisis.
Featured image via the Canary
