Jemima Goldsmith says common thread in UK sexual abuse is ‘men abusing power’

British screenwriter Jemima Goldsmith highlighted that sexual abuse in the United Kingdom spanned all communities and the common thread was men abusing their power.

In a recent post on X, Goldsmith, the ex-wife of former prime minister Imran Khan, said sexual abuse was present in “all communities, socio-economic backgrounds, races and faiths.” Her post came a day after the Pakistani Foreign Office condemned what it called the “increasingly racist and Islamophobic” comments directed at Pakistanis in the UK.

The statement came after tech billionaire Elon Musk entered a contentious debate surrounding the term “Asian grooming gangs”, with remarks sparking concerns of perpetuating harmful anti-Pakistani stereotypes.

Goldsmith listed statistics of abuse by the Catholic Church in England and Wales, British boarding schools, and British Asian grooming gangs.

According to data provided by her, the Catholic Church, from 1970 to 2015, had 3,000 instances of child sexual abuse, 936 allegations of paedophilia, 133 convictions and 52 priests defrocked.

She wrote that boarding schools in the UK had thousands of alleged victims over decades, with 425 accused paedophiles and 160 charged from 2012 to 2018.

Goldsmith said UK Asian grooming gangs had at least 1,400 victims and 60 child rapist convictions from 1997 to 2013.

In a footnote, the screenwriter added, “The exact number of victims for all of the above is unclear, as cases so often go unreported for years. And there have been multiple failures to prosecute perpetrators and protect victims.”

She emphasised that the common denominator was men, “often from closed, hierarchical, gender-segregated communities”, abusing their power.

A decade-old report discussing how gangs of mostly Pakistani men had groomed, trafficked and raped young white girls returned to the political agenda in Britain following criticism from Musk, Reuters reported last week.

The issue was under the spotlight after the tech billionaire called for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to quit over what he said was Starmer’s failure to tackle the scandal when he was the country’s leading prosecutor, accusing him of being “complicit in the rape of Britain”.

According to The Guardian, British feminist writer Julie Bindel highlighted that many on the right have “suddenly become laser-focused on the sexual abuse of girls –– so long as they are white and their perpetrators are Pakistani Muslim”. Those “focused exclusively on the ethnic origin and religious affiliation of a particular set of abusers”, she added, are “not really interested in the girls at all”.

The publication stated that the problem in the matter was that the data on gang-based child sexual exploitation was “shockingly poor, especially with respect to ethnicity”.

A report from November by Hydrant, a British policing programme on child sexual exploitation, showed that in 2023, ethnicity was only recorded in a third of such cases.

Among these, 83 per cent of perpetrators were white and 7pc were Asian, which included 2.7pc with Pakistani heritage. The Guardian said that figures for the first nine months of 2024 were broadly similar, thereby countering the current narrative, however, it was “difficult to assess its reliability given that in most cases ethnicity is not recorded”.