by Mary Harrington, UnHerd
The grooming gangs are just the tip of the iceberg: Britain has a mafia problem. This is the clear inference from The Network Map, a report due to be published this week.
The report details the level of interconnection between key individuals in purportedly localised grooming gangs, collating over 1,000 convicted perpetrators, regional gangs, extended families, establishments, and “notable individuals” including councillors and police officers. What is likely to emerge is a network of affiliation both across gangs and with other forms of crime in Britain and beyond.
This issue is so grave that the researchers who compiled the report have chosen to remain anonymous, because they fear retaliation from the gangs. Their report should be welcomed across the political spectrum, for the opportunity it offers to move on from a polarising and paralysing culture war focus in media discussions of these gangs.
The well-documented details of the gangs’ atrocities and ethnocultural makeup are incendiary, and the suffering of their child victims rightly continues to elicit horror. But within the terms incentivised by short-form social media discussion, this has tended to mean public discussion focuses on these highly emotive aspects, while the question of networked criminality is sidelined.
The grooming gangs are, as is now widely acknowledged, predominantly of Pakistani heritage. Their crimes are horrific and enraging. And yet: what if organised, systematic, racialised child rape is less the problem than an epiphenomenon of the real problem, namely a nationally and internationally networked criminal mafia? There have been many other such criminal gangs with an ethnocultural component: for example, Triads (Chinese), Yardies (Jamaican), or, of course, the mafia of Francis Coppola’s movies (Italian) in the USA and Italy.