How Academia has enabled the industrial-scale rape of British children

First, a guilty confession: the depth, breadth and ongoing nature of this heinous, nation-wide crime only came to my attention when Elon Musk forwarded that now infamous tweet on x – i.e. incredibly belatedly. 

Like many others, I had assumed that, given past reviews and inquiries, the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal had been dealt with by the professionals and the paedophile-rapists locked away. In other words, I had had faith in the criminal justice system still functioning.

I was sickened to discover that, not only is this not at all the case, but that my own profession – the ‘ivory asylum’ of academe (Professor James Orr) – has done so much to cover up and wilfully misinterpret data, to attack anyone who dares speak out as ‘racist’, and to twist the category of the ‘oppressed’ so badly that those guilty of these grotesque crimes are framed as perpetual victims. Criminalization itself is, in some cases, seen as the real problem.

As Professor Matt Goodwin points out in his excellent book, Bad Education (Penguin, 2025), and, before and alongside him, a host of many other academics and former academics, western academia has been destroying itself for many decades. Methods of honest, open inquiry such as following data to its logical conclusions, unbiased analysis and rigorous, objective research have been sidelined and defunded, if not demonised as ‘White supremacist thinking’, and their practitioners sometimes forced to leave the academy altogether. In a linguistic sleight-of-hand, critical thinking has been replaced in almost every university, school and cultural institution, by Critical Theory, as defined by the Frankfurt School, neo-Marxist ideologue, Max Horkheimer; that is ‘social critique meant to effect sociologic change’ (Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, 1937).

In most British universities, the ‘traditional’ scholars attacked by Horkheimer, those who made western universities the envy of the world not so long ago, have today all but been replaced by ‘activist scholars’ – a glaring oxymoron – of the New Left. Over the past century, such activists have changed the intellectual and political culture of the west almost totally from the inside, as was their explicit intent: the "long march through the institutions", coined by Rudi Dutschke (with reference to the physical Long March of the Chinese communist army under Mao Zedong). Many lecturers are ignorant of the origins of this civilizational sea-change, though they are only too eager to play today’s academic game – a game in which feelings replace facts and political beliefs and ‘lived experience’ trump scientific rigour; in other words a game in which standards are lowered to meaninglessness – and they are rewarded for doing so with real power in the real world. What I will term these ‘New Academics’ (New Left activists) advise at some of the highest levels, nationally and internationally, and their ‘work’ has led to actual policy outcomes and has been used as evidence by some of the highest institutions: the supreme court in the US, the United Nations, the UN General Assembly, the British Ministry of Justice, and so on. 

For example, Dr Ella Cockbain, an Associate Professor in Security and Crime Science at University College London, whose work was heavily cited by a now infamous Home Office report on grooming gangs in 2020, downplayed the massive overrepresentation of Pakistani perpetrators in the abuse. In 2012, she co-authored a Guardian article with Helen Brayley-Morris, who is now in a deputy-director role in the Home Office, writing: ‘Despite the conviction of nine Asian men for child exploitation in Rochdale and worrying signs in the statistics, racial profiling won’t help potential victims.’ And in 2013 Cockbain published the academic article, ‘Grooming and the “Asian sex-gang predator”: the construction of a racial crime threat’. Meanwhile, academics who instead followed the evidence were dismissed and attacked. A 2020 study by professors Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe, which concluded that men of Pakistani Muslim origin dominate prosecutions for ‘group-localised child sexual exploitation’, faced all kinds of ideologically-driven reprisals. 

Yet Dame Louise Casey’s recent report has finally confirmed that Pakistani Muslim men are hugely overrepresented in these crimes and that there has never been enough data gathered to conclude otherwise – as Cockbain was so eager to do.

At last, some momentum is gathering for light to be shone on this darkest area of British history and, quite rightly, the focus should be on the children who have been raped, tortured, and either killed or left for dead, psychologically and emotionally, without justice or any social support. But as to why this has been allowed to happen, unchecked and barely discussed, for so many decades: the fish rots from the head. 

How we perceive, speak and even think about certain topics in the public square has been ‘taught’ and gatekept by the New Academics in so many ways, explicit and implicit, and for so long, that it is no wonder that a generation of politicians, counsellors, police, social workers, lawyers, judges, teachers and other state and private sector workers alike became deniers, apologists, and in some cases even facilitators of this crime against humanity. 

Much could be written about the success of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School ideology that got its hooks into Columbia, Harvard and Yale universities in America in the 1940s and from there wreaked havoc globally, as well as the inheritance of several other schools of neo-Marxist, Continental Philosophy, including but not limited to: poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, decolonialism, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related standpoint theory, Whiteness studies, radical feminism, queer theory and every other manifestation of the academic New Left. James Lindsay’s Race Marxism provides an excellent overview, which is beyond the scope of this article. However, we could specifically hone in on Edward Said, a so-called Palestinian-American promulgator of postcolonial theory, along with his mentor, Michel Foucault, the so-called father of postmodernism, and a queer political activist, for popularising, in ‘elite’ circles, a worldview that brought Britain to a place wherein:

1. It is ‘Orientalist’, i.e. racist, to call out any wrongdoing by minority brown or black people (always the oppressed) against white people (always oppressors). Racism thus becomes antiracism and vice versa;

and

2. Historical moral norms must be continually questioned and undermined, including sexual norms. So-called ‘cultural hegemony’, the dominant ideology of the ruling-class, is always, according to the New Left, just a means for the powerful in society to maintain their power. 

Point two is partly achieved via point one, of course, in that there are many cultures globally in which having sex with children is normal, legal and entirely unproblematic (much of the Islamic world, in fact), so it follows that it must be racist and / or White supremacist to criminalise this behaviour.

The New Left academic-activists have been pushing to legitimise paedophilia, or as they like to call it, ‘cross-generational sex’ (Gayle Rubin, 1984), for decades, and bringing any and all sexual deviancy, including being a Minor-Attracted Person (or MAP), into the mainstream, by championing ‘sex positivity’ and ‘queering’ every aspect of life: from ice cream https://medium.com/prismnpen/sensual-being-in-queer-life-and-ice-cream-c0f1e3cb6439 to Drag Queen Story Hour for toddlers. 

In an open letter published in Le Monde, France, in 1977, 69 famous intellectuals – representatives of every aforementioned school of neo-Marxist, Continental Philosophy – signed in defence of three men arrested for sex offences against children aged 12–13. The leading lights in sociology, psychology, criminology, literature and linguistics, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Jean Danet, Françoise Dolto, Bernard Besret and Gabriel Matzneff, argued that the children consented to being raped, but that the law denied minors their right to consent. (Foucault was himself probably a paedophile rapist who is alleged to have had sex with underaged Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.)

Yet these writers have transformed and continue to shape nearly every academic discipline in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in the west and, since at least the 1970s, their Critical (Marxist) Theories have leached into school curricula and public policy, perhaps most ironically (given this was Foucault’s main preoccupation) into crime and policing itself. 

A relatively recent criminology ‘textbook’, Sex and Crime (Sage, 2021) by Professor Stacy Banwell, Dr Alexandra Fanghanel, Dr Michael Fiddler, Dr Emma Milne and Dr Guilia Zampini, will serve to illustrate what I mean. 

This ‘comprehensive account of the myriad ways that sex and crime interact in contemporary social life’ has a whole section dedicated to ‘A Radical Case for Paedophilia’, which quotes extensively from Tom O'Carroll of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) – the organisation a young Harriet Harman supported. O’Carroll, who was a former chairman of the now disbanded PIE and at one time a prominent member of the International Paedophile and Child Emancipation (now known as Ipce) spent the 1970s lobbying for the legalization of sexual activities between adults and children, as well as against the criminalization of child pornography, in the UK. In 1981 he was imprisoned for conspiring to corrupt public morals (1981) and in 2006 for distribution of child pornography. Yet the ‘activist’ authors of this textbook – all contemporary lecturers at British universities – quote from his work in glowing terms:

O’Carroll’s book is engagingly written and is a tightly argued call for paedophiles’ rights to be recognised. It espouses sex-positive, sexually liberal positions which seem to follow the queer and feminist epistemology that we encountered in Chapter 2; that is, O’Carroll argues against patriarchy and heteronormative ways of relating. He argues for sexual agency and the rights of gay men and women to be recognised in law. He demands that there be more discussion of sex and sexual practice in school, for instance, to take away the taboos around frank sexual discussions, active in the 1970s and 1980s […]  He argues that we should strive politically and socially to eradicate the shame and stigma associated with sex, desire and what we do with our bodies. He argues that children should not be taught sexual shame. Much of this commentary is laudable. We may even agree with it. So, if we want to object to his thesis [that paedophilia should be legalised], we need to give consideration to the basis of our arguments, without falling into the myopic hysteria that O’Carroll accuses his critics of […] we want to remind you that discomfort over a troubling idea cannot alone create a foundation for a strong rebuttal to an argument we may not like. (270)

The authors of Sex and Crime then appear to make O’Carroll’s case for him, arguing that ‘the contemporary construction of children as innocent, naïve and in need of protection’ contributes to ‘the criminalisation of children’s sexual practices’:

The dynamics of suspected sexual abuse against children are also not clear cut. Certainly, children are more vulnerable than adults to sexual, physical and emotional abuse because they are learning to live in the world and have an evolving sense of sexuality and desire. But children develop at different rates and can experience sexual arousal and pleasure, even at very young ages. Contemporary social and political approaches which attempt to address child sexual abuse do not, generally, take these elements into consideration. This can result in the criminalisation of children’s sexual practices. The contemporary construction of children as innocent, naïve and in need of protection contributes to this. Part of the reason why there is this anxiety about the expression of sexual desire in children is because of the need to control the population, and to police sexual expression in ways that manage who has sex, how they do it and whether they are deviant or not (remember Gayle Rubin’s 1984 hierarchy of sexual practice in Chapter 1). The construction of childhood as sexless (Aries, 1960), or the repression of sexual expression, is one of the ways in which this happens (Foucault ,1998[1976]). We need to continue the work of problematising the way in which we think about this in our study of what should be criminalised, and what should not be, when it comes to children and sex. (279)  

Any anxiety about paedophilia, the book suggests, comes from a place, à la Foucault, of wanting ‘to control the population, and to police sexual expression’. Sex and Crime is here to teach us about ‘the process whereby states use fear of sexual exploitation to justify the tightening of border control and the deportation of migrants’ (130). 

For instance, the book opens with this observation:

Why is sex such a big deal?

One of the reasons why sexuality, sexual practice, crime and law are so heavily intertwined is because controlling sexuality is a way of controlling the population and creating a nation; nation-building is something that preoccupies nations all over the world [a hilarious tautology…]. As Michel Foucault (1998[1976]) has argued, when everyone follows the rules – is an obedient citizen – society functions as desired by those with power and control. (4)

Alongside Foucault, another key theorist on whom this book hinges is the aforementioned ‘cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist’ Gayle Rubin: another ‘sex positive’, pro-prostitution apologist for paedophilia. If you look carefully at the ‘Sex hierarchy’ Rubin came up with in 1984, and which features in the introduction to Sex and Crime (8), you’ll see that ‘Cross-generational’ sex is one of the activities currently outlawed in the west (in the ‘bad’ outer circle) but which she has campaigned relentlessly to be incorporated into the ‘good’ inner circle:

Predictably, the authors of Sex and Crime also think the grooming gangs atrocities, that have affected approximately half a million children across England and Wales alone, according to the Casey Report, are a ‘racist’ trope. In other words, despite self-identifying as ‘activist’ ‘feminist’ lecturers in the introduction, they trivialise the systemic gang rape and torture of children and, by extension, demonise anyone who disagrees with them. They also claim to be ‘obsessed’ with hierarchies and marginalized people. But what they mean by this is excusing rapists who are black or brown and implying that any condemnation of them is ‘racist’, ‘ethnonationalist’ and / or ‘femonationalist’, which they define as ‘the political practise by nations of demonising other countries for being “backward” or barbaric by claiming their own feminist credentials – using feminism as an alibi for racism in foreign policy.’ (338) For instance, they quote Sara Farris (2012): 

[Femonationalism] brings together anti-Islam and anti-(male)-immigrant concerns or nationalist parties, some feminists, and neoliberal governments under the idea of gender equality’ (2012:187). That is, nations – especially in Europe, but also in North America and Australia – figure the Muslim ‘other’ as some sort of backward misogynist who oppresses women, hates sexual freedoms and stones gays to death. (41, italics mine)

Note that the well-documented lack of women’s and gay rights across the Islamic world – something individual Muslims and ex-Muslims fight tirelessly to change – are merely figured as such by westerners, rather existing empirically.

In an almost total inversion of the reality of the grooming gangs epidemic, Banwell, Fanghanel, Fiddler, Milne and Zampini write:

There have been several cases of localised grooming in the UK which have received significant media attention, particularly in the aftermath of the Rochdale, Bradford and Rotherham scandals in the north of the UK in the 2000s […] These male abusers have often been portrayed as belonging to an organised group or ‘gang’ in media coverage. Most of these men are British Asian, while many of the girls are white. These cases triggered a specific brand of moral outrage with racist undertones, evident in the political and media commentary at the time that awareness of the abuse ruptured into the public domain. (139-40, italics mine)

Elsewhere in this academic textbook, these Criminology lecturers explain how the word ‘gang’ in the term ‘grooming gang’ isn’t merely an accurate description of the fact that children were and are still trafficked and raped by multiple men at the same time, but is itself just another ‘racist’ term:

On the one hand, one thing that Jack Straw unquestionably got right was in identifying the vulnerability of victim targets. On the other hand, we could argue that Straw’s opinion is steeped in Orientalism, which shapes our representation and understanding of British Asian men’s ‘dangerous masculinities’ (Tufail, 2015). Ella Cockbain (2013) discusses the creation of the ‘Asian sex gang predator’ figure in the aftermath of the Bradford, Rochdale and Rotherham cases. The racialised nature of the label starts with the word gang, a word normally reserved for BAME deviant groups. The ensuing media portrait is that of Asian men as being both natural and organised predators of young white girls (Gill and Harrison, 2015). Interestingly, the media attention given to these men tends to be far greater than that given to their white groomer counterparts. In this way, the problem is identified as one of ‘race’, rather than one of gender, masculinity and power. White groomers, such as Jimmy Savile (see Chapters 5 and 12), statistically make up the majority of sexual predators, yet they are seldom, if ever, identified as being part of a gang… (140)

The so-called Criminology experts here entirely mistake the statistics on what amounts to organised child sexual slavery and enforced child prostitution (hyperlink to Jonathan’s ‘We need to talk about a glaring failure by the police and the criminal justice system’), claiming that ‘the majority of sexual predators’ are white and ignoring the very real data on ‘group-based child sexual exploitation’, which is its own category, and that 96.4% of gang rapists in Britain are of Pakistani and other East Asian origin.

As per the Casey Report:

child sexual abuse (CSA) is an umbrella term that includes different types of abuse, including intrafamilial CSA, online CSA and child sexual exploitation • child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a subset of child sexual abuse involving a power imbalance and the coercion or manipulation of a child into sexual activity in exchange for something the child needs or wants • group-based child sexual exploitation (group-based CSE) is a subset of child sexual exploitation where two or more perpetrators are involved.

And in sharp contradistinction to the conclusions of Sex and Crime, Baroness Casey refers to: “examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.”

The Sentencing Remarks of His Honour Judge Peter Rook QC in the recent grooming gang case in Oxford, provides us with some insight into what such organised, grooming gang rape looks like, from the perspective of one of its victims, ‘GH’:

There came at time before she was 13 that both of you Mohammed and Bassam Karrar started to bring strangers to have sex with her. You Bassam would organise the sessions. Mohammed was closely involved and would be at most of these sessions. These 11 occasions happened many times. You would make her act as a hostess at sex parties no doubt charging for her services. If she did not want to have sex with the men, you both would get angry. She had to endure depraved sexual demands including the acting out of weird sex fantasies, and the insertion of objects in her vagina. If she kicked out, she would be restrained. If she said that she did not [want to] have sex, she said “Mo and Bassam would get mad at me.” You, Mohammed, made videos of GH performing sex acts no doubt with a view to selling her sexual services. 

You, Mohammed Karrar, took her to various places to provide sex to others – a hotel in Bournemouth, a flat near a school in Oxford. She was taken to High Wycombe for sex on a regular basis. Both of you took her to High Wycombe for sex with others. Bassam took her two or three times without Mohammed. Sometimes there were three or four men at a session. Sometimes as many as nine or ten. GH thought that Bassam was taking lots of phone calls in relation to the Wycombe trips where there would be sex acts and sexual fantasies acted upon. 

GH would hear both Mohammed and Bassam speaking to customers over the phone before going to the Nanford for sex. She was taken to Nanford House over 50 times. The charge would vary according to the sex act you’d make her perform. Mainly Mohammed would take her, but Bassam took her more than a couple of times. Sometimes she would be to taken to the Nanford twice or three times a week. 

You, Mohammed Karrar, prepared her for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men (count 30). At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet. Not only were you both involved in the commercial sexual exploitation of GH, you also used her for your own self-gratification. You both raped her when she was under 13. When she was very young, although it is not clear whether she was under 13, you both raped her at the same time (oral and vaginal/anal). It happened on more than one occasion (Count 28). 

Mohammed Karrar, on one occasion when GH was 12, after raping her, she threatened you with your lock knife. Your reaction was to pick up a baseball bat with a silver metal handle, strike her on the head with it, and then insert the baseball bat inside her vagina. You treated her as if she was your commodity. You branded her (with your initial near her anal passage) using a hot hair pin. If GH did not comply with your wishes, if you were not with other people, you would lose your temper with her. As part of the grooming, you would provide her with crack cocaine and you injected GH with heroin on numerous occasions (Count 40). 55) When she was not prepared to participate any more, you would issue terrible threats. Your activities took a heavy toll upon her both physically and mentally. In late 2010/2011 she phoned you. You invited her to come and see you. You said “We’ll sort it and make it better.” Once there, you had an argument, and to exert your power and punish her, you pulled down her trousers and raped her. (https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf)

Yet, returning to Sex and Crime: on the topic of human trafficking, Banwell, Fanghanel, Fiddler, Milne and Zampini also have much to say, quoting positively from another of their favourite ‘feminist’ ‘intellectuals’, Professor Kamala Kempadoo, a British-Guyanese writer who has been promoting the study of sex work and Black radical thought at the University of York for some time. According to her Wikipedia page, Kempadoo is ‘one of the most important scholars and influential thinkers on the global sex trade, sex work [which she wants decriminalised], human trafficking, and sexual-economic relations.’ 

In Sex and Crime, Kempadoo is quoted as regarding any attempt made by white people to rescue sex trafficking victims as an example of ‘White supremacy’. She compares it to the ‘abolitionist movement’ managing, somehow, to make both the attempt to free human sex slaves and the fact that white British people were responsible for abolishing slavery, globally, as twin racist evils:

Kempadoo sees any attempt to intervene in aiding the trafficking victim as being embedded in a system of patriarchy, postcolonial convictions and White supremacy, where: 

the rescue fantasy is a means through which the endeavors are legitimized as altruistic and humanitarian, obscuring the reliance on and reproduction of the racial knowledge of the Other in the historical tropes of, on the one hand – the hopeless victim, impoverished and incapable of attending to one’s own needs – and, on the other, the benevolent civilizing white subject who must bear the burden of intervening in poor areas of the world. (Kempadoo, 2015: 14)

This resonates with Elizabeth Bernstein’s (2012) account of anti-trafficking organisations and benevolent White feminism. White supremacy is intertwined with the power of Western states and their colonial legacy. As such, this moral crusade:

locates its moral obligations and civic responsibility in great part in the rescue of ‘prostituted’ women and children (victims) from the clutches of male privilege, power and lust (sex trafficking) and celebrates its success in extending its international reach (especially in Asia), reproducing the colonial maternalist position in relation to the non-Western world while reconfirming white Western feminine subjectivity as benevolent. Contemporary anti-slavery advocates share a similar dimension of the modern ‘white man’s burden’ in that they see themselves as leading a moral crusade against an ‘unconscionable evil’ that proudly claims to be following in the footsteps of the British and American nineteenth-century evangelical-inspired movements to abolish the enslavement and trade of Africans. (Kempadoo, 2015: 14-5)

On this reading, abolitionism is the new anti-slavery movement that obsesses over trafficking for sexual exploitation over other forms of labour exploitation. When an abolitionist logic is uncritically applied to the context of sexual exploitation, it results in multiple erasure effects. It erases the distinction between sexual exploitation and sex work, rendering agency meaningless and championing instead the idea of a powerless victim in need of rescue. (146)

Banwell, Fanghanel, Fiddler, Milne and Zampini continue:

Another theme we recognise in this chapter is the widespread use of the victim narrative across trafficking, prostitution and grooming discourses and how this impacts our understanding of agency, specifically its denial. We also deal with another form of denial: that of states’ responsibility for colonialism and their supporting of postcolonial configurations. This is expressed through a renewed commitment to nationalism by states, a nationalism tied to ethnic groups, known as ethnonationalism. This is visible in nation-states’ increasing efforts to curb and control migration through criminalisation. This process is evident across all issues under scrutiny: in prostitution, primarily through its conflation with sex trafficking, we find persistent attempts by states and other agencies to shift our attention away from inequality as being the root cause of prostitution, towards blaming the immorality and criminality of the other, be it the sex buyer, the human trafficker, or in some cases still, the sex worker, who has now largely been relegated to the status of victim. In the case of grooming, ethnonationalism and femonationalism (see Chapter 3) are encapsulated by public discourses that point the finger towards British Asian men grooming white young girls, in the media and in the public domain. (131-2) 

Indeed, Guilia Zampini closes the book with her explicitly neo-Marxist ‘vision of the future’ (p.314) thus:

‘Rape and sexual violence will disappear’, presumably, because everything will be deemed ‘consensual’, and atrocities like rape and paedophilia will no longer be outlawed by the state because there will be no nation state. 

One final topic of note is Professor Stacy Banwell’s (neo-Marxist) discussion of the way in which some sexual violence is perpetrated in military contexts by westerners, before going on to devote a brief couple of pages to rape genocide as a tool of war in two non-western contexts: the DRC and Rwanda. Prof Banwell proposes that, in the case of ‘rape and sexual assault within the US military’ and ‘other (Western) examples of sexual harassment and assault within the military’, the culprit is undoubtedly ‘hegemonic’ ‘militarised masculinity’ (168). This is, according to Banwell, linked to ‘phallocentrism’ (a favoured term of the New Left that’s been knocking around for a century) and, again, of course, nationalism: ‘The military institution – where men learn to fight and kill on behalf of the nation / their women – is where aggressive hegemonic heterosexual masculinity is enacted.’ (168) However, Banwell goes on to write, hegemonic masculinity is not always ‘attained through physical and / or sexual violence; rather, as R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt (2005: 832) argue, it involves “ascendancy through culture, institutions and persuasion.” Referring to the gender world order in a capitalist and neoliberal global economy, Connell (1998) refers to this type of masculinity as transnational business masculinity.’ (318)

This stunning insight – that not all western men are violent rapists (but that western capitalism is of course always figuratively violent and rape-based) – allows Banwell to perform the tortured conclusion that, in the case of actual rape genocide in the wars in the DRC and Rwanda, we should think of the ‘vulnerability of the penis’ (Janine Clark, 2017), because of the political marginalisation of the perpetrator…

Yet if any of the contents of Sex and Crime causes you concern, it’s because, according to a patronising section titled ‘Practising loving perception and world travelling’ (9), you’re coming at it from a place of ‘arrogant perception’ rather than ‘loving perception’ – terms they borrow from Maria Lugones (1987):

Lugones (1987: 5) contrasts loving perception with arrogant perception. Arrogant perception is one that refuses to ‘travel’ to the perspective of another person or to try to see a situation or understand a concept from their perspective […] The tool of world travelling helps us to practise loving perception. A ‘world’, in this context, is someone’s flesh-and-blood reality. […] Thus, even if some of the material we talk about shocks you, or disgusts you, or you cannot understand why people would do it, try to adopt a loving perception – an openness to difference – towards this issue. Think about the fact that people in your [university or school] class may have been affected by the issue at hand, or may disagree with you that they are shocking or disgusting things. Adopting a loving perception recognises difference and allows a plurality of opinions about a topic to be held together. That is how we better understand the world, and ultimately make it more just: by better appreciating the opinions that other people hold, and understanding why they hold them (9-10)

If you’re wondering whether these author-lecturer-activists ever get round to discussing the flesh-and-blood reality of raped children – BAME or white – or their human rights, this book is here to remind you of the ‘sinister side’ of the ‘universalising discourse’ of human rights, which is merely a Western concept, coopted by ‘White feminist moral reformers’ to justify simplistic narratives of good and evil sexual practices:

A universalising discourse always hides a sinister side: namely that human rights is a Western philosophical and juridical conception that is criticised for having little applicability or resonance beyond the west (Pollis and Schwab, 2006). Even in a Western context, it has thus far proven impossible to build universal equality on the foundation of continued patriarchy, economic inequalities and lasting colonial relations. Susan Dewey and colleagues (2018) have noted that efforts to regulate sex stem from dominant (read Western) values and concerns that shape our understandings of and interventions in sexual behaviour, work, public health and even human rights. More concerning still, Elizabeth Bernstein (2012) argues that the human rights discourse is being exploited by apparently benevolent forces – principally made up of White feminist moral reformers – to justify simple narratives that reduce the problem of trafficking to sexual exploitation alone, rather than acknowledging its deeper political and economic drivers. These benevolent actors often advocate for the criminalisation of deviant individuals as the solution to the sexual exploitation problem, thus individualising blame (see Chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of this process). (133)

In other words, those of us who care about the gang rape, trafficking and torture of children in England and Wales – or for that matter children anywhere in the world – had best check our Orientalist thinking and, of course, our skin colour.