Grooming gangs report: How Rupert Lowe turned child abuse into anti-Muslim propaganda
Submitted by
Faisal Hanif
on
Wed, 07/01/2026 - 17:06
Far from protecting children, the report exploits the suffering of abuse survivors to portray British Muslims as an existential threat and legitimise their exclusion from national life
Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain campaigns during the Makerfield by-election in Wigan on 18 June 2026 (Reuters/Temilade Adelaja)
On
Rupert Lowe's "rape gangs inquiry" report is anti-Muslim propaganda.
It is not commentary that went too far or an inquiry that lost its way. It is propaganda produced with a predetermined conclusion, designed to fix in the public mind the image of Muslims as so morally deviant, so irredeemably alien and so dangerous to the social fabric that their removal becomes not merely justifiable but necessary.
It is a crowdfunded, privately assembled document with no statutory powers, no independent oversight, no peer review and no legal authority, launched last month by a sitting MP whose party advocates mass deportation and has called for a death penalty referendum.
It cites as authoritative sources a self-published book, a lobbying organisation whose founder reportedly believes Islam is "the work of the devil", and a figure it describes as a whistleblower, Tommy Robinson.
It opens by tracing the root cause of child sexual exploitation to the British Nationality Act 1948 and the observation that "oil and water do not mix." It is not a child protection document.
It is an expulsion document that uses child protection as its cover.
The late Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist whose award-winning investigation first exposed the discernible pattern of predominantly Pakistani men being tried for the grooming and rape of predominantly young white girls, understood this trajectory a decade ago.
When I worked as a reporter at the Times, I had the opportunity to sit with him. Norfolk was candid about something important: that his legitimate reporting was now being used by the far right for their anti-Muslim agenda. He worried about it.
The journalism that exposed a real pattern of real crimes was being torn from its context, stripped of its caveats and fed into a machine that had no interest in child protection and every interest in constructing Muslims as a collective threat. What Norfolk hinted at as a corruption of his work has become the work itself.
A term without law
The instrument through which this has proceeded is a term that does not exist in law. The term of "grooming gangs" has no legal standing, no consistent definition and no place in criminal statute. It has been coopted to attach a specific crime to a specific group and their religion and make that attachment feel like fact.
This non-category is the central mechanism through which a moral panic has been constructed, sustained and parliamentarised. Moral panics of this kind, in western history, do not end with prosecutions.
They end with mass expulsions.
White suspects account for 63 percent of group-based cases where ethnicity was recorded, compared with 13.7 percent for Pakistani suspects
The language of the movement confirms the destination. In May, Lowe described the grooming gang scandal as "something the equivalent of the Holocaust" - a comparison the Jewish Leadership Council condemned as "not only inaccurate but deeply offensive".
He was not the first. In 2018, Ukip's children and families spokesman told his party conference that grooming gangs constituted "a holocaust of our children", traced the abuse "right back to Mohammed himself", and received a standing ovation.
Holocaust language serves the logic of existential threat: what is being described is not crime but war, and war demands not prosecution but removal.
The statistical architecture has been fabricated layer by layer. The 250,000 victim figure originates with Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who claimed in the House of Lords there were "upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men", extrapolating from victim estimates in Rotherham, Telford and Oxford.
All three source reports examined all child sexual exploitation, not grooming gangs specifically, and none broke down estimates by the race of perpetrators.
Lowe's own arithmetic destroys his argument. White suspects account for 63 percent of group-based cases where ethnicity was recorded, compared with 13.7 percent for Pakistani suspects. On his own numbers, that implies over a million victims of white gang perpetrators. His report says virtually nothing about them.
The survivors who complicate the narrative are exploited and discarded. Holly Archer, a prominent Telford sex ring survivor, described how Britain First twisted quotes from her book "to make me say the most racist things... They'd made it about immigration. About all these migrants 'coming over here to rape our girls'."
The Rochdale charity Shatter Boys was approached by Lord Pearson with promises of millionaire donors. Its founder refused, saying: "I think their fight is about Islam."
Femi Mohammed - a named Muslim woman who survived child sexual exploitation, grooming and trafficking - participated in Lowe's inquiry, submitted evidence, had her travel to the February 2026 hearings arranged and was removed without explanation.
She has since stated that the inquiry "contributed to the silencing of my voice" and had "the effect of shielding from public scrutiny the very institutions they publicly claim should be held accountable."
A Hope Not Hate investigation found at least 20 cases of English Defence League members convicted of child sexual exploitation offences. The movement that appointed itself guardian of Britain's girls has members convicted of abusing them.
I have reached out to Lowe's office for a comment but there was no response by time of publication.
Conditional tolerance
Many British Muslims have always known that the tolerance extended to them was conditional - not the tolerance of equals, but of guests, revocable upon sufficient provocation.
What Lowe has done is not introduce a new argument into British politics. He has simply been honest about where the existing argument always led. The removal of a religious minority from national life, justified by the claim that their presence constitutes an existential moral threat, is not a novelty. It is a pattern.
Central to this escalation is the reinvigoration of one of the oldest tropes in the European demonisation of Islam in parliamentary dress.
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The consequences of this rhetoric did not wait long to materialise. A 36-year-old white Scottish man attacked five Muslims across Edinburgh, two of them as they left a mosque after prayers.
As officers held him, he was heard shouting: "I'm protecting the country from these fucking Muslim bastards raping our young daughters."
Lowe's report was published three days earlier. The line between them is not a coincidence - it is a transmission.
Yet notice the hierarchy of outrage. MP Zarah Sultana asked why no emergency Cobra meeting was convened, pointing out that Starmer had called one following attacks on Jewish men in Golders Green in March. Five Muslim men were attacked in a single evening by a man screaming about rape gangs. No Cobra. The conditional tolerance, made visible in real time.
Andrew Norfolk worried that his journalism was being stolen and perverted. Lowe has given that perversion its fullest institutional expression.
The children of Rotherham and Rochdale deserved to see the institutions that failed them held to account. Instead, they received this - their suffering converted into propaganda, their pain the instrument of a project whose conclusion was written before the inquiry began. For some, it was never about justice.
It was always about getting rid of Muslims.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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Rupert Lowe's inquiry turns child abuse into anti-Muslim propaganda
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