I've spent close to a decade investigating far-right movements and misogyny in the UK, the US and Europe. Musk's online activity this week could be easily dismissed as the postings of a bored billionaire who has become fixated on the politics of a country he knows little about. But it's more than this, it is a clear and frightening demonstration of how today's far right operates: individual influencers disseminating disinformation across international networks, underpinned by a conspiracist ideology focused on a so-called 'white genocide'.
This latest row is part of a broader pattern of US and UK far-right extremists weaponising the very real harms done to women and girls, in order to attack democracy, whip up racist hate, and push a genocidal narrative into the mainstream.
Here's how it happened – and why.
A mass safeguarding and justice failure
To understand Musk's attacks, we first need to revisit the horrific child sexual exploitation that took place across numerous towns and cities in the UK during the 2000s and 2010s.
The issue hit the headlines in 2010, when five men were sent to prison for grooming teenage girls in the northern English town of Rotherham, followed by a series of arrests for similar crimes in Rochdale, a town an hour away on the outskirts of Manchester.
The arrests and subsequent convictions revealed a clear pattern of sexual exploitation, abuse and rape across the region, which had gone ignored for years. Ignored in part because, rather than seeing them as victims, police treated the girls as criminals, or as consenting to the abuse.
In 2014, a report commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council and headed by professor Alexis Jay, revealed that between 1997 and 2013 more than 1,400 children had been sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian males in the town, alongside multiple safeguarding and police failings.
These findings, as well as other child sexual abuse scandals, including those where white men were the perpetrators, led then-home secretary Theresa May to launch the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in 2014, which Jay was appointed to lead in 2016 after previous chairs stepped down.
Similar crimes were investigated in Oldham, Oxford, Telford, Bristol and other cities and towns across the UK. A recent Channel 4 News report exposed grooming and exploitation in Barrow-on-Furness, a northern port town. The details in all cases are extremely distressing.
This potted history tells us two important things. The first is that for years, groups of mainly white working-class girls were raped, exploited and trafficked by gangs of predominantly South Asian men across a range of English towns.
Second, the police and social services catastrophically failed to protect victims, often due to misogynistic and classist stereotypes that blamed the girls for the abuse perpetrated against them.
The 2014 Jay report noted that a reluctance to be seen as racist played a part in safeguarding and policing failures in Rotherham. Similar conclusions were reached in Oldham, while in other localities fears of racism were not found to be a factor.
Although these crimes were pernicious, child sexual exploitation and abuse are not racialised offences. A 2020 Home Office report into ethnicity and grooming gangs found "significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending" due to "limited research on offender identity and poor quality data".
The report said, however, that "it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending". One in 20 children has been sexually abused in the UK, and it is worth remembering that white men remain most likely to be the perpetrators.
In 2011, solicitor Nazir Afzal was appointed as chief crown prosecutor in north-west England and began bringing those who committed child sexual exploitation to justice, including by authorising charges against the Rochdale gang that same year. This paved the way for more prosecutions: after men in Rochdale were convicted, Starmer, who was then the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, put Afzal in charge of the national response.
As director of public prosecutions, Starmer also brought in important reforms to try and avoid a repeat of these horrors in 2013: changing official guidance so police were required to investigate the suspect and not focus entirely on the credibility of the victim. He persuaded the judiciary to allocate specialist judges to these cases, reformed how victims are questioned in court, and commissioned research to prove false allegations of rape are rare.
In the same year, David Cameron's Conservative government published a response to grooming and safeguarding that specifically praised Starmer and Afzal. It said: "Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as director of public prosecutions … His response should provide a model to the other agencies involved in tackling localised grooming."
This is a part of the history that Musk and his outriders have chosen to ignore, instead amplifying disinformation and spreading a conspiracy of Labour complicity in abuse.
Read the full investigation here. 
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