Survivors against fascism refuse to suffer in silence

Survivors of child sexual abuse have become political footballs: and we’re tired of being kicked. Survivors against Fascism refuse to suffer in silence.

We’ve seen in recent years everyone from Tommy Robinson to Rupert Lowe exploit the lucrative ‘Grooming gang’ narrative, professing to care for victims but actually doing more harm.

When Robinson set up his ‘Rape of Britain’ campaign in Telford in 2022, I was there to counterprotest – even though I absolutely agree victims there have been appallingly let down by authorities.

This created a vacuum Robinson was keen to fill: but his team and supporters ended up abusing victims even further.

Smokescreen

‘Protecting our women and girls’ is a smokescreen: it allows the far right to do three useful things:

• seem, for a change, to be the good guys
• whip up Islamophobia
• and castigate the left for supposedly ‘letting’ rapes happen for the sake of ‘woke.’

It doesn’t matter that most gang predators are white, or that paedophilia exists at a steady percentage – about 2% – across all populations, backgrounds and religions.

Facts are irrelevant – only emotions count. And it’s hard for us to counter – after all, who likes paedophiles (except other paedophiles), and who doesn’t want to protect children?

I was considering this whilst counter-protesting in Telford.

Antifascists didn’t have any survivors as speakers, whereas the far right, which has no qualms about the ethics of seeking them out, did.

It occurred to me it was statistically likely we would already have survivors present, however, and then that actually included me.

One of my friends is also a ‘grooming gang’ survivor; we agreed we needed to speak out. She can’t show her face publicly, but I decided as the far right had long since ‘doxed’ me, I could.

I told her story. It includes being approached by Tommy Robinson’s team after escaping abuse. They claimed to want to help but turned on her as soon as she refused to have her story used for racist ends.

Her words were so powerful in Telford, and brought more people to the antifascist side, as well as doing some damage to Robinson’s – we heard he was particularly unhappy about our use of the long list of far-right sex offenders, which includes Richard Price, a close friend of Tommy Robinson, with whom he founded the EDL.

• Robinson never had another Telford rally after this, although he had one scheduled, and completely abandoned the lucrative ‘grooming gang’ campaign.
• But then, Elon Musk suddenly jumped on the bandwagon from the US and revived the narrative, lionising Robinson.
• As tainted as Robinson knew his campaign to be, he went for the Musk dollars, and revived it.

Last September we saw the biggest fascist march ever in London and Musk publicly supported it.

We will keep fighting. Despite the attacks on me I’m working to make Survivors against Fascism a larger organisation, and make our voices louder.

The fight against fascism is the fight of our lives; we can, and must, win.

Find out more about our online event which starts at 12.30pm on 19 March.