After an independent British organization estimated that as many as 250,000 young women have been sexually exploited across the United Kingdom in the past several decades, a Free Press report concluded that the nation’s feminist movement’s response with silence instead of condemning the abuse equates to a failure to defend victims.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch-American activist who said she was interviewed in the recently released Rape Gang Inquiry, said in the Free Press article, published June 19, many major institutions promoting gender equality responded with “caution, euphemism, and procedural language where plain moral speech was required.”
“When faced with ‘repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma’ inflicted on hundreds of thousands of poor girls, feminism largely failed to treat this as the central feminist catastrophe of our time,” she wrote.
The 219-page inquiry, published June 16 by Rupert Lowe of the right-wing Restore Britain party, described a systematic targeting of vulnerable girls by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs in towns and cities across Britain.
>> UK inquiry: 250,000 girls raped by grooming gangs as police, politicians looked away <<
According to Hirsi Ali, the abuse was enabled by political leaders, public officials, and feminist organizations who were reluctant to confront ethnic and religious patterns in the crimes because they feared accusations of racism and political incorrectness.
The report said victims were groomed, transported between locations, plied with alcohol and drugs, and abused by multiple adult men. Hirsi Ali highlighted the case of a survivor identified as “Chloe,” who said she was raped beginning at age 12 and later treated by police as a prostitute, despite being a child.
Hirsi Ali argued that the abuses stemmed “directly from” the perpetrators’ culture, citing the report’s conclusion that the crimes were reinforced by ideas of male superiority over women and by religious justifications for sexual domination of non-Muslim girls.
While such accounts should have made the scandal a central feminist issue, Hirsi Ali said, institutional feminism held back out of concern for “community cohesion” and cultural sensitivity.
“Modern feminism shouts when the target is culturally safe and falls quiet when the perpetrators are wrapped in the prohibitions of diversity talk,” Hirsi Ali wrote.
She contrasted the modern feminist movement’s response with the older British feminist tradition, arguing that earlier feminists could speak plainly when women were exploited by “husbands, fathers, employers, priests, or legislators.” Hirsi Ali cited figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and women of the suffrage movement, whom she said shaped feminism by refusing “to trim moral principle to fashionable alliances.”
“A movement that began as a universalist moral revolt, insisting that women’s vulnerability was not ‘a cultural preference to be balanced against competing sensitivities, but a public wrong that had to be named plainly and confronted without apology,’ has, in its dominant institutional forms, drifted into managed difference and coalition etiquette,” she argued.
Hirsi Ali said the report could become the basis for a renewed push for accountability and warned that institutional feminism has abandoned its purpose if it cannot defend children.
“In the older feminist tradition, such a report would have been treated as a manifesto for action, the factual backbone of a new, uncompromising campaign,” Hirsi Ali concluded. “But when a movement born to protect women cannot bring itself to cry out on behalf of children because the perpetrators are too politically inconvenient, it is difficult to avoid the verdict that it is dead.”