Today I deleted a Facebook post about UK rape statistics after a straightforward share turned into an argument about grooming gangs, race and immigration within minutes – which was not my intention.
The graphic itself didn’t mention ethnicity or immigration status, but a comment dragged the conversation there anyway, and once the source of a post becomes more important than what it actually says, the original subject gets lost.
It’s a pattern playing out across social media daily: people respond to who shared something rather than what was shared, and reasonable voices quietly stop bothering to speak up at all.
That’s what happened, and it’s worth walking through.
I deleted a Facebook post today.
Facebook didn’t remove it. Nobody reported it. The figures weren’t made up. I deleted it because I got sick of the bullshit.
And sitting here afterwards, that bothers me almost as much as the argument that caused me to delete it.
What I Actually Shared
The post was about rape statistics in the UK.
More specifically, I’d shared a graphic from a group called Women for Restore showing the number of rape offences recorded by police across the UK.
The graphic gave figures for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It showed the numbers had risen.
It didn’t mention race, Pakistanis, white British offenders, immigration or small boats.
I shared it with this:
“How can the nation stop this? The government keep turning a blind eye to it and apparently a city like London is safe. Suggestions below please.”
Perhaps the government line was too sweeping. I can question whether successive governments and various institutions have done enough without pretending I know what’s happening inside ministers’ heads.
That’s probably a fair correction.
But my point was pretty bloody obvious.
Look at these numbers.
How do we stop this?
How do we make women and girls safer?
How do we reduce the number of people suffering something most of us probably can’t begin to imagine?
That’s what I thought I’d posted about.
Apparently not.
How It Turned Into Something Else
Within no time at all, somebody I know had managed to turn it into a conversation about Pakistani grooming gangs.
His response was:
“So, according to the page, it’s only ‘Pakistani’ gangs who commit these crimes.
“It would help if they posted some figures – including white British gangs as well, but of course, there’s zero interest in them!”
Except that wasn’t what I’d shared.
The graphic didn’t say that.
My words didn’t say that.
Nobody in the post I’d shared had said that those tens of thousands of recorded rape offences had been committed by Pakistani men.
Race had now entered the conversation, but it hadn’t entered through me.
So I pointed that out.
He then went digging through Women for Restore’s Facebook page and found an older post where they had discussed Pakistani rape gangs.
Right. They have discussed them. I’m not disputing that.
Women for Restore themselves replied and said that they do highlight a particular demographic more than others, although not exclusively, because they believe there’s a serious problem which deserves attention.
That’s another conversation.
And it’s a conversation we should be able to have as well.
Are some communities disproportionately represented in certain types of sexual offending?
What does the available evidence actually tell us?
Where is the evidence strong?
Where is it incomplete?
Have authorities been reluctant to discuss ethnicity because they fear inflaming racial tensions?
Have other people exaggerated ethnicity because it suits their own politics?
Those seem like legitimate questions to me.
But none of them changes what I’d shared.
I eventually asked:
“Is that what I shared?”
I didn’t get an answer to that.
Because, in all honesty, the answer was no.
And that’s where I started getting genuinely irritated.
The Source Becomes the Argument
We’ve somehow reached a point where some people can’t respond to what somebody says anymore.
Instead many respond to whatever they associate with the person, organisation, newspaper, political party or website that said it.
FGS I wasn’t pledging an allegiance to Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe or any of the other names that gets people cancelled from all mainstream media!
If something comes from the Guardian, plenty of people on the right will have decided what they think before they’ve read it.
If something comes from GB News, plenty of people on the left will do exactly the same.
If it comes from an organisation associated with Restore Britain, then apparently we can skip over what’s actually on the screen and start arguing about immigration.
The source becomes the argument – regardless how alarming the subject is.
The subject disappears.
And that’s more or less what happened underneath my post.
One person brought up Pakistani gangs.
Someone else replied that rape was a “man problem”, not a brown or black man problem.
Another person suggested we should stop rescuing people in small boats crossing the Channel, even if hundreds started dying.
Hang on.
How the bloody hell did we get here?
I posted some dreadful rape statistics.
We went from women and girls being raped to Pakistani grooming gangs, racism, immigration and dead migrants in the English Channel.
In a handful of comments.
And somewhere in the middle of all that noise were the people represented by those numbers.
Actual victims. REAL WOMEN AND GIRLS!
Whatever their attacker’s race, religion or immigration status, whatever box somebody wants to put the offender into for the next political argument.
Can We Talk About Ethnicity Without Losing Our Minds?
Surely there has to be a point where we can say rape is horrific without checking which political tribe is allowed to say it first.
And that doesn’t mean ethnicity can never be discussed.
I find that argument equally ridiculous.
If there’s credible evidence that a particular group is disproportionately involved in a particular form of offending, I want to know about it.
Why wouldn’t I?
If something is happening, hiding it because the facts might be uncomfortable doesn’t protect anybody.
But the opposite has to apply as well.
We shouldn’t insert ethnicity into every crime statistic simply because we’re suspicious of the organisation sharing it.
Those are two completely different things.
I don’t know why we’ve become incapable of holding both ideas in our heads at once.
Perhaps social media has trained us out of it. Maybe Brexit was the start. COVID created massive division. And the merry-go-round reality TV show style of politics in recent years, along with ‘everyone is a broadcaster’ has made it worse.
Everything has to belong somewhere.
Left.
Right.
Racist.
Woke.
Far right.
Liberal.
Anti-immigration.
Pro-immigration.
Pick your badge and start shouting.
I’ve found myself doing versions of it too. I suspect most of us have.
You see a familiar newspaper masthead or somebody you already disagree with and there’s an almost automatic reaction before you’ve actually thought about what they’re saying.
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
We’re increasingly arguing with the identity of the messenger rather than the words in front of us.
I’m Not Signing Up to Anyone’s Politics
Which brings me back to Women for Restore.
I’m not a Restore Britain supporter.
I don’t agree with everything Rupert Lowe says.
I don’t agree with everything Nigel Farage says either.
I’m right leaning, certainly, although if you transported some of my political views back a few decades I’m not sure anybody would find them particularly remarkable. 20 years ago I’d have probably been considered centre. Maybe with one foot in the Conservative camp but, like many, I had hope in ’97 for New Labour and look how that went…
But apparently sharing something from a group connected with a political organisation now means I’m required to adopt every opinion anybody associated with that organisation has ever expressed.
Why?
Can I not agree with one thing?
Can I not look at a graphic about rape statistics and think, bloody hell, this is awful?
Do I first need to conduct a complete political audit of whoever created the image?
And if I discover they’ve previously said something controversial, does that mean the statistics suddenly disappear?
That seems an utterly bonkers way to have a conversation.
Where I Draw the Line on the Claims
There’s another part of the original Women for Restore post I wouldn’t personally repeat as established fact.
They described Britain as the “rape capital of Europe”.
I don’t know that. It wouldn’t surprise me but I don’t know it.
Comparing crime figures between different countries can get messy very quickly. Different laws, definitions, reporting rates and recording practices make dramatic league tables difficult to interpret.
So I don’t need that claim.
The numbers themselves are bad enough.
Why This Isn’t How Normal Conversation Works
And perhaps that’s another lesson from all this.
It should be possible to support the central concern somebody is raising without signing your name underneath every sentence they’ve ever written.
That’s how normal conversation works.
Or at least I thought it did.
Somebody can say ten things and I can agree with six of them, question two and think the remaining two are complete bollocks.
It just means I’m thinking for myself.
But social media increasingly seems to demand allegiance.
If I share something from the “wrong” person, somebody will tell me what I apparently believe.
If I criticise somebody on the “right” side, somebody else will assume I’ve joined the other lot.
If I ask a question about immigration, somebody will decide I’m racist.
If I raise concerns about racism, somebody somewhere will probably decide I’ve gone woke.
It’s exhausting.
And eventually people stop bothering.
Which is exactly what I did.
Why I Deleted It
I removed the post the next day.
That isn’t something I’m particularly pleased about.
Nobody censored me.
I censored myself.
There wasn’t some sinister government department knocking on my door telling me to remove a Facebook post.
I just reached the point where I thought, oh sod this (I even edited this line because I actually thought of more colourful words).
I can’t be bothered.
I know where this conversation is going and it isn’t remotely where I wanted it to go.
So delete.
How Many Others Do This Too?
And now I’m wondering how often that happens.
How many people decide not to ask something because they know what they’ll be accused of, don’t share an uncomfortable statistic because they can’t face the argument underneath it, or type something out, stare at it for thirty seconds and delete it before posting? My son and I have talked about this a few times; we both do it regularly.
And how many reasonable people have simply backed away from political and social conversations altogether because the loudest people at either end make the whole experience unbearable?
I don’t know.
And perhaps that leaves us with another problem.
If everybody in the middle gets tired of being shouted at and walks away, who does that leave controlling the conversation?
The people doing the shouting.
What I’d Actually Like to Hear
I’m not pretending there are simple answers to rape, sexual violence, grooming gangs, immigration, policing, prosecution or any of the other subjects that eventually got dragged underneath my Facebook post.
There aren’t.
I’m certainly not qualified to solve them.
That’s why I asked the question in the first place.
How do we stop this?
I still don’t know. And nobody made any realistic suggestions. Certainly none that I could publish here.
I’d like to hear sensible people talk about it: the police on what would actually make a difference, women, victims, people who work in safeguarding. I’d like politicians to explain what they believe isn’t working and what they’re actually going to do about it.
And yes, if ethnicity, culture, policing failures, prosecution failures, sentencing, pornography, attitudes towards women, immigration policy, education or anything else turns out to be relevant to particular parts of the problem, then we should be grown-up enough to discuss that too.
Without deciding beforehand which answers we’re permitted to find and how to shame the person asking.
What I don’t want is another bloody left versus right shouting match where everybody arrives carrying the answer they had before the conversation started.
Because underneath all those political arguments, the original question hasn’t gone anywhere.
How do we stop people being raped?
I deleted the Facebook post.
I haven’t deleted the question.