'White working class girls don't matter'

Class, race, and the personal autonomy fallacy in Britain's rape gang scandal

A tactical choice has been made as to who pays the price for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has a price, of course. ‘Immigration’ has appeared in the ‘major voting issues’ list of every UK General Election since 1992. Yet, most politicians in the United Kingdom continue to avoid broaching the topic of ‘mass immigration’ and its negative impacts. Those pilloried few who have broached the subject are often too bashful to make anything but an economic argument against mass immigration.

It is true, one-in-ten foreign nationals are claiming benefits in the UK. It is also true, as Nick Timothy MP revealed last November, that 72 per cent of Somalis in the UK live in social housing, compared to 16 per cent of the total UK population; and the housing of illegal migrants in ‘asylum hotels’ costs the tax payer 4 MILLION pounds per day. Whilst the economic impact of mass immigration cannot be ignored, its effects must —surely? — come second to that of the safety of the nation’s women and girls.

Rape of Proserpine (ca. 1760–1770), a 50.5 x 36.2 x 40 cm French soft-paste porcelain sculpture possibly made by Orléans Manufactory. Located in the Met Museum in New York.

And yet the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls refuses to launch a national inquiry in to the systematic cover-up of the UK’s rape gang scandal. The much-repeated statement that ‘The inquiry has been had’ is a lie. The ‘inquiry’ in question — Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, IICSA, 2022 — did not mention ‘grooming gangs’ or ‘rape gangs’ and named only one of the infamous towns plagued by this scourge. It has fallen to the initiative of Rupert Lowe MP to fundraise public money to launch a private inquiry with the cross-party support of a small number of individual MPs.

If the question, ‘Why did no-one do anything for these girls at the time?’ felt impossible to explain, the question, ‘Why is everyone still reluctant to put a stop to this?’ seems all the more untenable.

In the spring edition of The European Conservative, however, I attempted to explain to the general public ‘Why working class girls don’t matter’ to elites. Whilst, ‘Cultural cohesion’ and ‘Not wanting to lose seats in diverse parliamentary constituencies’ go some way to explaining the psychopathy on display, it does not satisfy the broader question of complicity in social worker and police officers, and the mainstream media’s ongoing campaign to brand victims and whistleblowers as overdramatic, liars, and racists.

The following is an extract from a longer essay — The Altar of Multiculturalism —which can be read in The European Conservative Magazine:

“It is sensed, if not discussed, that had the majority of the victims been middle or upper class girls, this horror would have been brought to an end a long time ago. Why is it, then, that white, working class girls are expendable? Or, to be more brutal, why do the British not value their white, working class girls?

It is not that Western nations are incapable of seeing that men raping adolescent girls is bad. Across the West, child marriage in other parts of the world is recognised as an abomination for a number of reasons: the girl cannot consent, the age difference is a perversion, the girl is not prepared to engage in the sex acts that will be demanded of her, her body is too small, her mind is not yet mature.

Yet, the same is not said of white, working class girls in Europe. To an extent, it is a question of perceived autonomy. Immigrants from the developing world are seen as adults in their motherlands but conceived of as child-like—a romanticized, ‘noble savage’—in the West. If a thirty-something year old man takes a child as a wife in Niger or Bangladesh, there is a palpable injustice in the act. But if a thirty-something year old man from Pakistan takes a 12-year-old ‘girlfriend’ in Bradford? ‘Well,’ the relativists say, ‘it’s a grey area, isn’t it? She’s mature for her age and he is like a child. It is much like a 16-year- old boy dating a 15-year-old girl. Of course the law recognises the need for some vigilance, but mostly it is fine. After all, these 12-year-old girls are almost women.’

But, as

Mary Harrington

has argued, it is our own fault. The deconstruction of the meaning of childhood has left young women more vulnerable than liberated. Progressives champion children being cast in the role of “rational, choosing autonomous subject” but their vision of liberation “leaves little space for partial, coerced, ill-informed or pseudo-‘consent.’” These adolescents—not quite ‘girls,’ not quite ‘women’—‘consent’ to painful and degrading sexual acts because they crave love and affection.

But does this perception of ‘consent’ account for the apathy seen in the police officers and social workers who should have been protecting these girls? What about the girls who went to the police station bruised, bloody, and crying for help? Greater steps are taken in the country to protect dogs from abuse than some children. Is this because a dog is considered to be more human than a working-class girl? I don’t think so—but somehow the dog is seen as more worthy of help or more able to feel suffering.

This order of sympathy also applies across classes. Much like the third-world migrant, there is an innocence ascribed to the middle-class child that the working-class child seemingly lacks. The middle-class child is considered to be autonomous in their successes and a victim in their failures and exploitation. In contrast, the working-class child may receive praise for their successes or their success may be attributed to general success of a ‘system.’ When something goes wrong in the rearing of a working-class child—he or she breaks the law, suffers abuse, or falls in with a gang—it is generally accepted that the child is (at least in part) responsible for what happened…

Explaining why the working class — even their children — are regarded as being of a different, a lower, order of sentience is the question that continues plagues me. To an extent, a failure to see the working class as sufficiently real — as something more than worker ants or ‘Non-player characters’ — is a failure of imagination.

One study in Nature indicated that the compassion felt by ‘conservative’ minded people tended to be expressed towards their family, friends, nation, and humans more broadly, whilst those of a more ‘liberal’ mindset tend to direct their compassion towards more abstract entities, like the global population, animals, plants, trees and inanimate things like rocks.

It could be that the perceived ‘stupidity’ of the working class — ‘mindless’ as Keir Starmer branded those who protested against mass immigration after the Southport Massacre — is correlated with perceived sentience. Animals are a prime example of where a perceived lack of ‘consciousness’ is synonymized with ‘diminished sentience.’ Consciousness, which might be understood as the ability, not only to observe, but, to reason and come to correct conclusions about what had been observed: to perceive. There is a volatility and uncontrollability which (correctly or incorrectly) has long been attributed to the working classes. This volatility tends to be interpreted by onlookers as ‘not thinking’ rather than a lack of concern for middle class social conventions, for example, and such people are condemned as ‘stupid’ rather than ‘different’.

This broad condemnation of the working classes as ‘stupid’ or ‘mindless’ has, at least by my reckoning, lead to the overall depreciation in the perceived ‘sentience’ of the working class. This enables the political class to ask themselves, if only within the privacy of their own heads, ‘Why, after all, would a girl go back to hanging out and living with her rapist unless she was ‘a bit thick? She cannot be suffering that much.’

Labour MP Jess Philips confronted with questions in the House of Commons over the government’s refusal to launch a national enquiry into the ‘grooming gang’ scandal

It is true: whilst some girls were threatened into compliance by their rapists, ‘elected’ to view these men as ‘boyfriends’. These girls often came from foster care or were already being abused at home. Whilst it may not make sense to outward observers — to move from one abusive home to another — for many of these girls, they will have had some of their essential needs met by their new abusers that were not being met by the people who were supposed to care for them. Emotional needs; like companionship, compliments, and a listening ear. Physical needs; like food, a hot shower, or freedom — even if it was freedom to leave the bedroom or go to the local shop. They will have struggled to differentiate between abuse and love because they have never known one without the other.

It is easy to judge when one is unable to imagine oneself in the mind of another, and the further that mind is from one’s own in age and nature and experience, the easier it is to dismiss that mind as a rational, tangible feeling thing of its own: the easier it is for their testimonies to be written-off as ‘inconsequential’ in the grand theatre of politics and the world…