Far-right sensationalism and racial profiling of Muslims in UK newsrooms

The rise of far-right media bias has fueled racial profiling, stigmatising Pakistani and Muslim communities in the UK

As we enter 2025, the troubling rise in anti-Muslim race riots accross the UK comes as no surprise.

A large majority of Western based newsrooms thrive on anti-muslim and anti-immigrant discourse, warning the public about the danger posed by men of colour to the “civilised” white world, and as a result perpetuating in the global social imaginary an idea of a threatening, racialised ‘other’.

Largely driven by far-right groups that increasingly brutalise brown men, growing anti-Muslim rhetoric has manifested in a significant spike in hate crimes, including the normalisation of incessant verbal abuse, physical assaults, and attacks on mosques, specifically targeting individuals of Muslim and South Asian descent.

The issue of grooming gangs in the UK continues to spark debate. Rotherham, often cited as the focal point of this issue, exposed cases of British Pakistani men abusing young white girls, igniting public outrage.

Recently, Elon Musk aligned with Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) lawmaker Priyanka Chaturvedi in promoting anti-Pakistan rhetoric on the social media platform X, arguing that majority of child sexual abuse in the UK can be linked to British-Pakistani men. During their exchange, Musk amplified Chaturvedi's criticism, affirming her tweet that labelled Pakistan as "a rogue nation" solely responsible for the long-running Asian grooming gangs scandal.

Musk's inflammatory remarks reignited debates about the role of ethnicity and race in addressing the issue of child sexual abuse, prompting the question: What exactly is the nature of the prevailing anti-Muslim rhetoric in British journalistic practices and to what extent is it warranted?

To contextualise, the issue of grooming gangs in Britain has been the focus of multiple investigations and reports since the early 2010s. In 2011, The Times of London exposed the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in northern England and the Midlands dating back to 1997. This was followed by a 2014 official inquiry into abuse in Rotherham, which revealed that at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, had been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, with local authorities failing to intervene. Similar cases of grooming gangs were uncovered in other towns and cities across England, prompting a national reckoning over the issue.

The discussion on grooming gangs in the UK escalated after Keir Starmer, Labour leader and Prime Minister, reflected on his time as head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) where he highlighted his role in overseeing the first prosecution of the ‘Asian’ grooming gangs. Various media groups scrutinised the ambiguity of the term ‘Asian’, with BBC reporting that the gangs were "overwhelmingly" made up of British-Pakistani males. A number of Indian newsrooms also jumped on the bandwagon, criticizing Stamer’s terminology as unfairly implicating diverse Asian communities in an alleged attempt to "hide behind cultural sensitivities" in order to promote multiculturalism and as a result evade justice.

While high-profile cases in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford have involved grooming gangs primarily of Pakistani ethnicity, the slew of under reported low profile cases involving white men, coupled with the incessant framing of sexual abuse in the media through an exclusively racialized lens, prompts further investigation.

A 2020 UK Home Office report reveals that the majority of child sexual abuse gangs in the UK are made up of white men under the age of 30. Following this, in November 2023, the Labour government released data for the first time showing that 83% of perpetrators convicted of child sexual abuse were white, while 7% were Asian, reflecting the country’s overall demographics. The report also noted that while South Asians were disproportionately involved in specific street grooming cases, as seen in Rotherham and Rochdale, the majority of child sexual abuse nationwide is committed by white British men.

In an interview with Piers Morgan, Mehdi Hasan, referring to the grooming gangs scandal as “one of the great crimes of our time”, addresses calls for a new national inquiry into child sexual abuse in the UK. Hasan warns us against the racialisation of the nationwide phenomenon of sexual abuse, arguing that far-right extremists politicise controversial issues to push divisive narratives, whereby focusing solely on the ethnicity of perpetrators decenters the victims of such abuse and ignored other factors such as police corruption and class poltics.

He proceeded to highlight a number of unreported cases across the UK to illustrate his point, including a 2023 case in Glasgow where eleven white men were convicted for abusing three children over a span of seven years and a decade-long case in the West Midlands where 21 white perpetrators were responsible for abusing seven children under the age of 12. Another example Hasan referenced was the 2010 case in Cornwall, in which six white men were convicted for abusing 30 girls, some as young as five years old.

Instead of investing time and resources into another investigation, experts like David Greenman, lawyer of the girls from Rotheram, urges that immediate action be taken against identified perpetrators. Rather than making sweeping generalizations about specific communities, policymakers and the public should focus on supporting victims and implementing systemic reforms.

In the meanwhile, we also need to pay closer attention to the role ethnicity plays in reporting cases of sexual abuse.

The problem of sensationalised, racialised reporting has quickly become a transnational issue. Far-right commentators outside the UK exploit high-profile cases to advance a dangerous narrative framing brown men as inherently dangerous. When the perpetrator of an act of violence is a person of color, the incident often receives widespread attention, both nationally and internationally. In contrast, when the individual involved is white, the story tends to be underreported or overshadowed, reflecting a disproportionate approach to how such crimes are covered.

Grooming gangs undeniably exist, but it is striking how far-right forums and media outlets like The Sun consistently center their discussions of grooming and sexual assault solely around the Rotherham case. This narrative perpetuates the false notion that Asian men, particularly Pakistani and Muslim immigrants, are predominantly responsible for sexual violence in the UK.

Despite official statistics revealing that perpetrators of sexual violence in the UK are predominantly white, why it that such crimes are persistently depicted as a problem exclusively tied to Muslim, specifically Pakistani, men? If the press doesn’t define crimes committed by caucasian men in light of their christian or judaic faith, what prompts the prevalence of blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric?

What we have here is a classic case of Orientalism: brown, immigrant men are repeatedly, and disproportionately, framed as a threat to the “civilised” Western world, to further the right-wing racist and xenophobic anti-immigration agenda.

The exploitation of racial divisions, grounded in calculated stereotypes, serves only to fuel racial violence and deepen ethno-national fractures. Such racialized associations are detrimental to diasporic Asian communities settled in the Western world. For example, the white supremacist responsible for the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand, which killed 51 people, even marked his weapon with the words "For Rotherham," directly linking the tragedy to this manufactured racialized crisis.

Moosa Waraich, a historian and PhD candidate at Oxford University, speaks to the racial profiling of brown, muslim communities:

“The Pakistani body is uniquely racialized; Even within the category of ‘Muslim’ and the category of ‘brown’ in the UK”, he remarks. “There is a very strange situation where the Pakistani specifically is the problem. Other Asians are the accidental victims [of racial violence] while Pakistanis are the intentional victims. In the 2023 migrant boat of 260 people that died, yes, there is racialization. 90 out of the 250 people that died were Pakistani because they were in the basement, the most dangerous part of the boat. Why is there a racial structure existing even within a boat of migrant refugees, all from the Global South?”

In light of rampant Islamophobia and sweeping generalisations about Pakistani men, British Pakistanis face significant challenges to integration.

In this light, Franz Fanon’s writings about the experiences of black men in Western societies can very easily be related to brown communities in the UK and their lived realities. Fanon argues that the racialisation of Black bodies via European perceptions of Black individuals as sexual and biological threats perpetuates colonial narratives around Blackness as inherently dangerous, primitive, and deviant.

In the UK, this is particularly evident in how Muslims, especially those of Pakistani and Middle Eastern descent, are portrayed as dangerous, violent, or culturally incompatible with Western liberal values, paving the way for the kind of racist rhetoric Musk and other far-right moguls willfully perpetuate.

In the aftermath of race riots, heightened focus on surveillance and policing, especially in ethnic minority neighborhoods, leaves diasporic Muslims and Pakistanis increasingly vulnerable to harassment, contributing to further alienation and increasing mistrust among communities themselves.

In the face of racial profiling imposed by a colonial world order, the Pakistani diaspora is faced with a unique psychological and existential struggle, whereby the racialized subject begins to internalise white consciousness.

“As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. [. . .] I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal.” (Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks)

For Pakistanis settled in the UK, there is a debilitating absence of a consolidated racial consciousness. British Pakistani communities are roughly split into two groups: middle and upper class diaspora from urban cities like Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad that push for integration in Western society versus rural, “radicalized” migrants from smaller towns who are pushed further into isolation as a result of structural barriers that prevent assimilation.

The truth of the matter is this; neither group can escape the white supremacist superstructure that Western journalism upholds and perpetuates. Stories about Muslims in Western media only serve to dehumanise and villainize Muslim men, as well as disempower and victimise Muslim women.

To combat internalized white racial consciousness, Fanon advocates for a complete rejection of colonial education and cultural norms. Perhaps there is some hope in the process of psychological liberation, whereby diasporic Muslims must continue to recognize and reclaim their own identities, culture, and history to actively reject the oppressive stereotypes placed upon them.