Who will speak for the Huddersfield girls?

Britain is a country where a politician putting his hand on a middle-class woman’s knee causes more outrage than the sexual abuse of scores of working-class girls by men from Pakistani backgrounds.

This is the conclusion we must draw from the #MeToo scandals of the past year. Or rather from the striking disparity between what becomes a #MeToo scandal and what doesn’t. A posh journalist having her knee brushed by a politician causes media meltdown, Twitterstorms about ‘the patriarchy’, and soul-searching in parliament about men’s wicked behaviour, while the exploitation and rape of working-class girls in towns like Huddersfield provokes little more than an awkward tut of disapproval.

The guilty verdict delivered in the trial of 20 men at Leeds Crown Court on Friday confirms the British political class’s ongoing reluctance, or outright inability, to confront the problem of Muslim grooming gangs.

In response to the verdict, which found that 20 men from mostly Pakistani backgrounds had committed 120 offences against 15 girls in the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield over a period of seven years, there have been a few perfunctory condemnations. But there haven’t been any hashtags, or gatherings outside parliament, or pained newspaper columns, as there were following far less serious cases of sexual misdemeanour in recent months.

The Kate Maltby incident – she’s the journalist who had her knee touched by then first secretary of state Damian Green – became a cause célèbre among feminists, columnists and the Twitterati. But the Huddersfield outrage has not. On the contrary, it is more likely to induce an embarrassed grimace, an awkward silence, than Twitterfury or letter-writing to MPs. Even though it involves far graver acts of depravity than the botched come-on ‘suffered’ by Maltby, such as men driving teenage girls to remote moorlands late at night and threatening to abandon them there if they did not acquiesce to certain sexual demands.

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