When the Truth Is Uncomfortable – and We Want to Look Away
Both the UK grooming scandals and the medicalisation of ROGD teens highlight how the visceral reality of body horror drives us to turn away from deeply unsettling truths.
It’s striking how two seemingly unrelated issues can sometimes reveal the same deep-rooted problems in society. On the one hand there are the UK grooming gang scandals – horrifying crimes, ignored for decades, involving networks of Pakistani Muslim men who targeted vulnerable teenage girls. On the other, there’s the sudden explosion of teenagers, particularly girls, identifying as trans – many of whom are suffering irreversible harm as a consequence of inappropriate medical transition. At first glance you may not think these two crises have much in common, but scratch the surface and a disturbing pattern emerges.
In both cases, the adults in charge looked the other way. Institutions minimised. Social workers made the wrong calls. Mental health professionals rarely helped – and often caused harm. Journalists stayed silent. Officials deflected. Very few people in positions of authority had the courage to confront the shocking reality, and those who did were labelled as bigots.
Meanwhile parents’ pleas were ignored and dismissed as either “Islamophobic” or “transphobic” depending on the context. And because the parents found no societal support when they needed it, their children became out of control and their lives were ruined.
At a conference in the US earlier this year, I found myself facing blank stares when I mentioned the parallels between girls caught up in the grooming gang scandal and teenagers swept up in the world of rapid-onset gender dysphoria. One delegate pushed back, insisting that victims never feel glad to be targeted while plenty of ROGD kids say they are happy with their medical transition. But sadly, that’s not true. Many of the targets of grooming gangs believed their abusers were their boyfriends. Just like many ROGD teens, they felt flattered by the attention and even encouraged their friends to join in what they saw as fun. The gifts, the glamour, the sense of being wanted – it all had a powerful pull. Quite a number went as far as converting to Islam and marrying their abusers.
At a recent Let Women Speak event, a woman known as 'Belstaffie' recalled how in the 1980s when she worked as a student social worker on placement in local authority children’s homes, the girls in these homes were targeted by Pakistani grooming gangs. The girls would recruit others into abuse. They’d boast about the ‘fun’ they had, the bottles of vodka from their ‘boyfriends,’ the free weed and free cigarettes that seemed thrilling to these naïve and troubled girls. She remembered cars lining up outside the home to collect the girls for the weekend. They would return looking like “they’d been mauled by animals.” At the time, she spoke to her senior who said that nothing could be done about it and so it continued.
In my work, I’ve seen something similarly disturbing among trans-identified boys. These boys, especially those with ROGD, are increasingly targeted by predatory men online. The dynamic is eerily familiar: flattery, attention, the promise of something grown-up – then a shift into sexual exploitation. It may happen through screens rather than car doors, but the trauma can be just as deep. And the long-term harm is often the same.
In the meantime, ROGD kids are often mocked by online commentators. It’s pretty easy to ridicule a privileged kid in the midst of a mental health crisis – many of them come across as histrionic, arrogant and superficial. Just like many teenagers, they think they know it all. But living with the consequences of cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgery is a hell of a price to pay for teenage theatrics and overconfidence.
The targets of grooming gangs were often similarly difficult to reach and also easily mocked. These kids thought they were enjoying themselves, having a laugh, and in control of the situation, until suddenly they realised they weren’t.
We human beings have a strange but familiar knack for reshaping painful experiences into something we can live with. When reality feels too harsh, the mind quietly steps in to protect the heart. We tell ourselves stories that soften the blow – not because we’re foolish, but because we’re emotionally wired to survive.
It’s much easier to tell ourselves that something hurtful had meaning, that it was ‘meant to be,’ and even that we’ve grown stronger from it, than to face the awful truth that we made a massive mistake or that we were used, betrayed and led badly astray. Regret is sharp. It lingers. And most people can’t bear to sit with it for long.
This is why we tend to reshape our experiences into something palatable. We tweak the past just enough to make it bearable – even if, deep down, we know it’s not quite the truth. With this in mind, we can better understand the manic bravado of the medicalised, mentally ill young people who are all over social media. And we should also be especially appreciative of those who have the courage to speak out and say, without equivocation, that something has gone terribly wrong.
Both the survivors of the grooming gangs and the detransitioners deserve to be recognised and respected by society for their bravery. People like Chloe Cole, Laura Becker, Sinéad Watson, Forrest Smith, Abel Garcia, Soren Aldaco, and Keira Bell have come forward to share painful truths about their experiences with transition and regret.
Likewise, survivors such as Sammy Woodhouse who was 14 years old when she was groomed by 24-year-old Arshid Hussain, exposed this child abuse scandal in 2013. Emma Jackson who was raped by a man called Tarik, 24, when she was 13 years old has also spoken up. By the time Emma was 15, she'd been sexually assaulted by 54 more of his male acquaintances. Another target, Victoria Agoglia, died aged just 15 after being injected with heroin by one of her abusers. Like many detransitioners, numerous survivors have felt compelled to use pseudonyms when speaking out – such as “Ellie,” – and the girls featured in Channel 4’s documentary Groomed: Jade, Chantelle and three unnamed girls.
These are just a handful of names. There are too many to list, whether among those who regret medical transition or those who were targeted and silenced by grooming gangs. But they all have one thing in common: they survived. And now they are telling us the unvarnished truth. In doing so, they’ve thrown the dead dog on the table, and we need to honour their courage, both by listening to their harrowing stories and by ensuring those truths lead to real change
Fear of Racism Allegations Enabled a Cover-Up
The grooming gang scandal – involving the systematic sexual exploitation of young girls by groups of men, many of Pakistani Muslim heritage – has cast a long shadow over the UK for decades. Reports and investigations have confirmed the scale of the abuse. The Jay Report estimated that around 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Operation Bullfinch, launched by Thames Valley Police in 2011, uncovered a network of abusers in Oxford and led to the conviction of ten men. Further investigations – including Operation Silk and Operation Spur – resulted in more convictions, yet the same bleak patterns kept emerging.
There’s been plenty of media coverage over the years, and official inquiries have laid out the facts in grim detail. But even with all the evidence continuing to stack up, there’s still a deep reluctance to face what lies at the heart of this scandal.
There are very few in positions of authority who will acknowledge what is becoming increasingly clear: Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs purposely target white girls as a deliberate act of domination. Just like almost nobody within the NHS will admit that medical transition creates more problems than it resolves.
Instead, those in positions of authority dodge the truth. Terrified of being labelled racist, or transphobic, they minimise and obfuscate while vulnerable kids are being harmed.
Jess Phillips, the Labour MP responsible for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls in the UK, recently demonstrated this failure of political courage when she rejected calls for a national public inquiry into the grooming of children in Oldham. In a similar vein, Labour MP Lucy Powell dismissed discussion of grooming gangs as merely getting "that dogwhistle out" during a May 2025 BBC appearance. The UK government’s continued preference for small, localised inquiries – rather than a full national reckoning – speaks volumes. They don’t want to look too closely. They’re afraid to confront the truth.
Julie Bindel, writing for UnHerd, has been among the few who has consistently highlighted these issues. Despite everything we know – despite the Rochdale inquiry and despite the survivors demanding and receiving an apology from the police, nothing has been done to properly confront the issue.
Many of us have watched TV dramas and documentaries such as Groomed; Three Girls; Stolen Childhoods that told their stories. Girls were driven in taxis to be raped, forced to watch others being raped, had cigarettes put out on their skin. They were sodomised, threatened with murder, murdered, trafficked, and terrorised. In some cases, abusers branded their initials onto their bodies. These weren’t isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern. A system.
The abuse from grooming gangs led to further issues such as pregnancies, miscarriages and terminations. And how did social services and police respond? With a few honourable exceptions (some people tried to raise the alarm but they were invariably dismissed as “Islamophobic”) the authorities further hurt these girls by labelling them as “very promiscuous.” These were children – raped, manipulated, and then blamed for their own abuse. They were failed. And they were failed by adults whose job it was to protect them.
It is almost unbelievable that this wall of resistance holds firm, just as it does when anyone dares to question the prevailing ideology around the medicalisation of gender dysphoria. The same patterns emerge: denial, accusations, minimisation, discomfort, fear, evasion and avoidance. The body horror embedded in these stories seems to trigger a deep psychological discomfort, prompting many of us to retreat into denial rather than face the truth. Most people just don’t want to read about, hear about or watch these terrible stories.
Few among us feel able to confront something so messy, so distressing, so morally troubling that it feels safer to pretend it isn’t happening at all. It’s overwhelming; too big, too dark and too uncomfortable. And so, once again, heads turn, eyes close, and the silence continues.
The trans medical scandal has met with strikingly similar resistance from those who should know better. From 2016-2019, thirty-five clinicians resigned from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. Marcus Evans and Professor David Bell left in protest over what they described as unsafe and inappropriate treatment of vulnerable children. Keira Bell, a former patient who regretted her treatment, brought a landmark case in 2020 (Bell v Tavistock) challenging the clinic's practice of prescribing puberty blockers to minors—exposing serious safeguarding failures. In 2022, Hannah Barnes' book, Time to Think, laid bare the dysfunction inside GIDS at the Tavistock. Two key legal cases helped challenge the ideology driving this crisis: the 2021 Maya Forstater appeal (Forstater v CGD Europe) established that gender critical beliefs merit protection, while the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling (For Women Scotland) affirmed that "woman" and "sex" refer to biological reality. In 2024, Dr Hilary Cass and her team published what many of us had already explained in detail – that the so-called gender-affirming model has no evidence-base to support it and fails to safeguard children.
Just like with the grooming gang scandals, the official response has been slow, vague, and riddled with contradictions. Even though NHS England shut down GIDS, they didn’t really confront the main issue and instead opened regional centres in place of GIDS. Equally, puberty blockers were paused – but a £10 million study has been funded to explore their use further. The NHS has yet to confront the harms caused by the gender-affirmative model or by gender identity theory, instead they make familiarly vague pronouncements. Either the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or it knows exactly what it’s doing: offering symbolic gestures to soothe public concern while carefully avoiding the heart of the problem.
Fear of Transphobia Allegations Enabling Another Cover-Up
The parallels are clear; although grooming gangs typically preyed on working-class girls, while ROGD often appears among teens from affluent families (though there are exceptions in both cases) the underlying dynamics are strikingly similar. These girls are lonely, troubled, vulnerable, and searching for meaning. They are drawn to attention – whether from older, predatory men or from peers urging them to join the club – and once in, they find it difficult to find a way out.
In the early stages, both experiences can feel exciting. For the girls caught up in grooming, it seemed glamorous to be noticed by older men. It gave a sense of status, danger, and escape. Likewise, many ROGD teens feel a thrill when they first discover the online LGBTQ+ community – it offers them a place that feels grown-up, cool, edgy, and far removed from their ordinary, boring lives and complicated friendships.
And just as professionals looked away during the grooming scandals, the same is happening with gender. Terrified of being labeled ‘transphobic,’ clinicians have stayed silent as vulnerable children are rushed onto puberty blockers and irreversible surgeries. Youth workers and social workers also rarely challenge the surge of trans identification in residential homes: children in care continue to be disproportionately affected – whether by grooming gangs or by trans ideology.
The Need for Courage
The most important common thread linking the grooming gangs scandal and the ROGD controversy is institutional and media evasion. Middle-class sensibilities get in the way of the truth, creating a reluctance to engage with complex issues that might offend certain groups.
The consequences are profound. Victims continue to suffer, whether through prolonged sexual abuse or needless medical interventions, while the lack of open dialogue hampers those trying to protect the vulnerable.
Confronting these scandals takes real courage: the courage to face darkness, speak hard truths, and put children’s welfare above personal comfort. Without honesty, society stays blind to the harm. All we need to do is to keep telling the truth, then eventually, as has happened so many times before, society will wake up to the harm that is being done.
Thank you for drawing this parallel with such clarity and boldness.
In the U.S., many people still haven’t heard of the grooming gang scandals in the UK—coverage is scarce, and when it appears, it’s usually minimized. But the pattern of institutional complicity you describe—of adults looking away, minimizing, silencing—is disturbingly familiar.
We’ve grown up hearing horror stories of grooming by priests, coaches, and cult leaders. Yet the two forms of mass grooming happening today—through ideology and through calculated exploitation—are being enabled under the banner of “inclusion” and “progress.” And social justice slogans have trained parents, educators, and clinicians to suspend instinct, judgment, abandon discernment, and ignore red flags.
I couldn't help but think that parents aren’t just watching this unfold—they’re being groomed too. Just as individual groomers don’t only groom children—but often groom as much of their family circle as possible—our cultural institutions have played a similar role. In many high-profile abuse cases, perpetrators have formed close relationships with parents, offering friendship, financial perks, or social credibility while simultaneously targeting their children. Michael Jackson, for instance, is one of many alleged groomers known to have charmed families as a strategic means of access. The pattern is clear: gain the parents’ trust, disarm their instincts, and then exploit the gap.
Our society is now seeing this replicated on a systemic level. At least when it comes to gender ideology, parents are reassured with words of "inclusion" and "progressive care." As you well know, they’re told not to question, to affirm without hesitation, to medicate without delay. Like all grooming, it works best when those in charge make us doubt our own instincts. In the current scandals, we’re encouraged to believe that skepticism is bigotry and that silence is virtue. All while children are being offered up to institutions and ideologies that are causing them lifelong physical and psychological harm, and most of society is walking by it completely unfazed, or even cheering it on.
I've said this before, but It reminds me of the classic sci-fi film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In it, people are slowly replaced by emotionless replicas—and hardly anyone notices. The most chilling part isn’t just the takeover, but how quietly it happens…how ordinary people surrender their humanity while those trying to warn others are cast as unstable or extreme. It’s a story about what happens when conformity silences instinct and critical thinking.
In a very similar way, those of us raising the alarm today are the ones trying to keep something deeply human alive. Ironically, we are the actual “woke” ones—not in the current ideological sense that props up gender identity and queer theory, but in the original, human sense of being awake. Awake to danger, dangerous ideas and dangerous people. Awake to the real human, relational and developmental needs of children. Awake to the cost of staying silent. And still choosing to show up—present, discerning, courageous and protective.
Thank you again for making this very important connection. You are helping so many people, like myself, gain the courage to face and speak about reality. And, as you state, the courage to face what is happening is what will one day help us stop the grooming and exponential harm being done.
Thankyou Stella
We Need to name the horrors and the parallels are so clear
So much double speak and obfuscation in professions and wider culture