The Scottsboro Boys were falsely accused of raping two white women—it was a high profile case of injustice in the US South

Fascist Tommy Robinson has been using anger at violence against women and girls to try to stoke up racism.

His “documentary” Lawfare is supposed to be about protecting women and girls from “Asian grooming gangs”.

Robinson wants to tap into the widespread horror at cases of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham, Huddersfield, Telford and elsewhere.

These are real cases where teenagers faced horrific abuse from organised groups of older men.

Victims were then ­systematically failed by cops, social services and other authorities who repeatedly ignored them—and in some cases criminalised them instead of the perpetrators.

The inquiry into the Telford abuse scandal, which published its report in 2022, was littered with examples of how victims were blamed and dismissed.

One cop said, “These girls had chosen to go with, I don’t know, ‘bad boys’.” Another said a child had “no credibility.” “Very often it is her word against the perpetrators and very often she does not co-operate,” the officer said.

Police described the victims as making “life choices”.

Like the cops, Robinson doesn’t care about the safety of women and girls.

He wants to utilise their suffering to bring him money, power, and influence.

And he’s wrong about who is most likely to commit CSE—all evidence points to most perpetrators being white.

In February 2024, a report from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse think tank analysed ethnicity data from defendants.

The statistics, from the Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics, showed that most defendants in England and Wales were white.

It found that in an overwhelming number of cases—some 83 percent—the defendant would be defined as White British, despite that group accounting for 75 percent of the population.

Defendants who classed themselves as Asian represented some 7 percent of cases, despite accounting for 9 percent of the population. Those classed as Black accounted for 3 percent of cases. They make up 4 percent of the population.

Despite this, the report noted that non-white offenders were more likely to go to jail when found guilty.

It noted, “Black and mixed ethnic groups were also associated with increased odds of receiving a custodial sentence for violence against the person offences and sexual offences.”

The idea that black and Asian people pose a threat of violence against white women has a rich and vicious history.

Marxist writer Angela Davis writes that the “myth of the black rapist” was “a distinctly political invention” to keep black people subjugated after the end of slavery in the United States.

Davis argues that this particular brand of racism asserts that “black men are motivated in especially powerful ways to commit sexual violence against women.”

“Once the notion is accepted that black men harbour irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality,” she writes.

In the southern states, lynching mobs would chase and hang black men who they claimed had raped, attacked—or sometimes just looked at—white women.

Emmett Till was one victim of such racist horror. He was just 14 years old in 1955 when he was abducted from his house, beaten and murdered. Emmett’s crime? Allegedly flirting with a white woman.

The 1931 case of the Scottsboro Boys is another example. Here, a group of black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women.

Racism infested every way the Scottsboro Boys were treated. Even after one of their accusers admitted lying, the legal process continued—such was the ­determination to find them guilty.

Lynching was never about protecting women. As one apologist for lynching admits, it is “in order to hold in check the Negro in the South”.

Davis showed how anyone who challenged the racist order of things could become a target. They included “the owners of successful black businesses and workers pressing for higher wages to those who refused to be called ‘boy’ and the defiant women who resisted white men’s sexual abuses.”

This “myth of the black rapist” has continued to echo throughout racist movements and ideas ever since. The logic insists that white women’s ­sexuality must be ­protected from the uncontrollable urges of black men, whether ­consensual or not.

These ideas are reflected in the letter of the law. In Britain, immigration laws unleashed a century ago were an attempt to control how many black men migrated to Britain.

Men that hung around with white women were routinely ­threatened with deportation and blocked from the world of work. Women who married them were also classed as “alien”.

Official government guidance was issued warning women not to marry anyone who wasn’t white.

The “yellow peril” of the 20th century focused on Chinese men accused of abducting white women and selling them into slavery.

And empires of Western nations enacted a number of laws specifically to “protect” white women from Indigenous men.

This state-led racism was taken up enthusiastically by the far right. The “threat” that black men posed to white women was a central rallying cry of the ­fascist National Front (NF). At its height in the 1970s, the NF printed accounts of black men raping white women on an almost weekly basis.

It also published literature declaring black men had a sexuality that was “animalistic” and violent. The NF described migrants as “coming over here, taking our jobs and taking our women”. And that became one of its most memorable slogans.

Now, racists aren’t using biological difference to explain the existence of “grooming gangs”. Instead, they’re blaming religion or culture.

Last year, the then home secretary Suella Braverman wrote an article in the Mail on Sunday newspaper to stoke fears about “Asian grooming gangs”.

She said they were “groups of men who hold cultural ­attitudes completely ­incompatible with British values”.

The only reason Robinson is able to get away with claiming that Asian men are responsible for grooming children is because of the rancid Islamophobic atmosphere of the last two decades.

There’s another element of Davis’s analysis that rings true today. When discussing the origins of the “myth of the black rapist”, she said that typecasting black men in this way also meant that black women suffered.

“Once the notion is accepted that black men harbour irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality,” she wrote.

Both the lynching crews of the 1930s and Robinson’s baying mob today claim to protect white women from the violence of men.

Racism has made out black men to be sexually violent and aggressive. In the same way it has defined black womanhood as being shaped by sexual availability and promiscuity.

Today, racist depictions of Muslim men as devious and perverted sit alongside ideas that Muslim women are subjugated by the men in their lives.

Muslim women are seen as having little agency to make their own choices. It is assumed that they are sexually repressed—and in need of rescuing.

Australian academic Susan Carland writes, “The assumption is that Muslim women need to be extricated from the religion entirely before anything close to liberation or equality can be achieved.”

This has practical implications for victims of abuse. White women are not taken seriously enough when they come forward with allegations of abuse—and black women receive even less support.

Imkaan, a specialist group addressing violence against black and minority women and girls, released a report in 2020 that looked at how racism impacted sexual violence. “Minoritised women from particular contexts and communities are more likely to be criminalised, viewed as complicit in violence towards them and thus less likely to be considered ‘victims’ of sexual violence,” it reported.

“They are also subject to harsher sentencing with less access to specialist support.”

Robinson is attempting to gain out of the horrific violence that young women have suffered.

Racialising CSE in this way obscures the wider social relationships that make abuse inevitable and leaves victims ignored.

It is a sick, sexist society that provides a fertile environment for sexual abuse of any kind.

And it’s this same society—with its class differences and prejudice, especially against young working class women, that mean victims are not listened to.

People should be held accountable for the suffering they inflict on others.

But attempts to portray CSE as a product of specific cultures or simply the result of evil individuals will do nothing to bring liberation.

Justice for victims of any kind of abuse and harassment means taking on the racism and sexism of Tommy Robinson and his band of thugs.

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