If you follow Elon Musk on Twitter, you might have a very distorted picture of one of the UK’s most controversial issues right now: child sexual exploitation.
“He [Musk] is completely rewriting history,” says Nazir Afzal, the former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, who prosecuted some of the most high profile cases in the country, including ones against British child rapists of Pakistani heritage.
In his first on-camera interview since Musk started attacking several British officials with accusations of failing to prosecute gangs responsible for child sexual exploitation, Afzal joined Zeteo for a Town Hall Q&A to discuss the history of this decades-old issue in the UK. Watch the full video above, where Mehdi and Afzal also took dozens of questions from paid subscribers.
Afzal corrected a lot of the misinformation Musk has been spreading online about the ‘rape and grooming gangs’ scandal - especially on race and religion! - and warned about the pain he’s causing, including to former victims of child sexual exploitation.
“Victims will be ringing me up and saying, ‘Look, you've dealt with my case 15 years ago. I thought I was getting better. This last week, I have been retraumatized. I have been retriggered. I believe myself to be back where I was,’” says Afzal.
“Retraumatized” and “retriggered”, that is the weight of damage that Musk’s tweets have carried over the past week as he repeatedly misrepresented facts, made false accusations, and sweeping generalizations around the ethnicity of perpetrators of child sexual exploitation.
“You're telling girls, ‘beware the brown man,’ when 88% of sex offending is carried out by white men” Afzal tells Mehdi and Zeteo subscribers. “The thing they all have in common, by the way, all the perpetrators, is they’re men.”
Let us know what you thought in the comments – and what other topics you’d like Mehdi to explore in these Town Halls with subscribers!
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