YC

November is Islamophobia Awareness Month. Good. Let us do some awareness of our own. A girl's tongue nailed to the table for threatening to talk. A kettle of boiling water held over a pinned down girl's face. Another threatened with a gun to blow her face off. A girl told her family would have their throats cut and be decapitated. Oxford victims scratched, choked, beaten, branded, burnt, gang raped, assaulted with knives and a baseball bat. Girls locked in bedsits like animals, no food, no toilet. Deliberate addiction to hard drugs and alcohol. Pregnancy as punishment, then backstreet abortions. A 13 year old found on examination to have been raped more than 50 times. A 12 year old, Samantha, abducted in Oldham, thrown out of a moving car, then locked in a room and raped by five men for nearly 24 hours. Another 12 year old was doused in petrol and told she would burn if she talked. Now the pattern. Average age of the convicted, 29. Most of them married. Most of them with daughters the same age. Not confused boys. Grown men who knew. Mainly from Pakistan. For a quarter of a century the word was racist. Not a case, not a report, not a counter argument. Just the word, thrown at every parent, every councillor, every copper and every journalist. It worked. Councils wrote reports commanding that culture must not be mentioned. Police told mothers to do the detective work themselves. The victims were called prostitutes. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to take Rochdale in 2009. A twenty minute film was made for exactly this, paid for by the state, trialled in a few Sheffield schools and left on a shelf for nearly twenty years. The man in it is Asian, not even Muslim, and still that was too much. Meanwhile the borders are wide open and the queue keeps growing. Eritrean, Sudanese, Afghan, Somali, Kurdish, Albanian and Roma names now sit in the conviction lists alongside the Pakistani ones. But the boats bring more than rapists. Two IRGC operatives who arrived by small boat were charged in 2026 with plotting an attack on Jewish targets in Manchester. An Iraqi already convicted of Islamic State membership came in on the identical route. Nineteen suspected of terrorist activity, some with Daesh links, were picked out of Channel arrivals, and officials admit Islamic State fighters could use it too. Every new cohort brings its own version of the con, and nobody at the top is counting. Islamophobic is the new word doing the old job. It is not an argument. It is a stop sign. For twenty-five years the pattern was known, the reports were written and the cases were coming through the courts, yet naming the men who did it was treated as the greater offence. The same refusal continues. Inquiries are narrowed or delayed. Police and councils still treat the ethnic pattern as a problem of messaging rather than a problem of crime. The result is plain: networks that rape, traffic and torture girls on an industrial scale have operated with relative impunity, while those who document the pattern face the greater official hostility. That is the cost of the word. A twenty-minute film was commissioned by a government agency, trialled in Sheffield schools and then left unused because the perpetrator was Asian. The girls it was meant to warn never saw it. The pattern it illustrated has not stopped. November is Islamophobia Awareness Month. Be aware.