Women around the western world keep learning, again and again, that their interests too often come second to other groups. 

In the UK, a reckoning is now underway after decades of left-wing feminists and activists ignoring the sexual abuse of young women at the hands of so-called “grooming gangs” — many of whom are made up of South Asian immigrants.

For years, these vulnerable teens and young women were denied justice. And activists didn’t speak up for them because calling out these alleged assailants wouldn’t be politically correct.

It’s a symptom of a worldwide progressive instinct to put women second behind other “vulnerable” groups. Here in the US, feminists have sneered at women who say that they do not want transgender females in their bathrooms or locker rooms or prisons.

It sends a message: Women are a protected class … unless they’re one-upped by another, supposedly more oppressed population. Then they become sacrificial lambs for the intersectional cause.

A report published June 16 by Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe claims young British girls have been groomed and sexually abused en masse, often by Pakistani and Muslim perpetrators, across some 149 districts in the UK. 

It called out the “systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly white British, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs,” which Lowe claims amounts to “one of the most horrendous failures in the history of the country.”

According to the report, which was a non-government independent inquiry led by Lowe, Muslim grooming gangs have been active in the UK since at least the 1950s. It claims that 87% of offenders convicted for child sexual exploitation have “distinctively Muslim names,” per court records and official inquiries.

The young women victimized by grooming gangs, some of them very young teens, have experienced abuse, gang rape, STIs, forced pregnancy and abortion, and even coerced Islamic conversion.

And this isn’t the first report to suggest that the situation has been going on for years, with little acknowledgement or minimal justice served. A separate 2025 inquiry, commissioned by the government, also found that “the ethnicity of perpetrators” has been “shied away from” in official reporting and police statistics.

You would think this sort of victimization would be a concern of feminists. Instead, it has largely been met with silence — because, in the world of progressive politics, calling out perpetrators who are members of a minority group is verboten.

Julie Bindel, a self-described “left-wing feminist concerned about child sexual abuse,” claimed that one of her editors at a premier British publication told her “we would be called racist if we publish” her factual reporting on grooming gangs.

Unfortunately, the few progressive feminists who did speak out were shamed and shut down. Labour MP Sarah Champion was forced to resign as shadow inquiries minister after she wrote an op-ed on the issue of grooming gangs. Her piece was described as “incendiary” and “dangerous” by a fellow female Labour MP Naz Shah.

It’s not that the female victims of sexual abuse don’t matter to the #MeToo crowd. But what women targeted by grooming gangs have learned is that the identities of their perpetrators make their own experiences less politically convenient.

The leftist worldview that emphasizes identity politics and intersectionality also places groups on a hierarchy — and, unfortunately, these frequently non-white, Muslim and/or migrant groomers check more boxes than the disadvantaged young women they victimize. 

This pernicious trend is not all that different from what’s going on in the United States. Here, too, women are being told that their concerns about their own safety come second. 

Women who object to biological males in their private spaces and even prisons have been maligned as bigots and summarily canceled by lefty activists who are, ostensibly, feminists.

You see, trans women outdo biological women in the victim hierarchy.

Women are so often asked to put their own needs, their concerns and even their own safety aside in favor of protecting other groups. None of this would be the case if the left could acknowledge something quite obvious: that calling out bad actors in a minority group is not bigotry — and, in fact, failing to call out predators and criminals is its own betrayal.