Race, class and the weaponisation of child safety

As we sit down to write this editorial, the ‘debate’ about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ in the UK has once again hit global news stories and is circulating in the corridors of Parliament. This is a decades-spanning debacle whereby far-right groups, conservative politicians and apparently now billionaire Big Tech moguls (Sky News, 2025) highlight the exclusive (and falsified) role of Pakistani men in the organised group-based sexual exploitation of working-class white girls in English towns to claim that the cultural and religious values of Muslim men are making these children unsafe and that multiculturalism has failed (Stephens, 2019).These unfounded claims are loosely based on events of child exploitation that took place in Rotherham and other UK towns from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s. The accompanying spread of false and misleading information has contributed to an exacerbation of fears and tensions, creating a climate where discriminatory and even physically violent actions are not only tolerated but, for some, also deemed necessary. In 2019, the massacre of 49 people in a mosque in Christchurch New Zealand was carried out by a gunman with the words ‘for Rotherham’ written on his ammunition (Independent, 2019). In the summer of 2024, racist pogroms across the UK targeted accommodation housing people seeking asylum, mosques and Black and Asian members of the public. This racist violence was sparked by false rumours that a Muslim migrant was responsible for the tragic murder of three children that had taken place at a dance class in Southport (Koram, 2024). This environment was manipulated by groups with specific political agendas, such as the English Defence League, whose slogan of ‘Save our Kids’ has been used to propagate the idea that immigrants and Britons of minoritised ethnicities are threats to children’s safety (Hope Not Hate, 2024).The centrality of race or culture to sexual violence against children has been repeatedly rebuffed by both academic studies and victims alike. They contend that race is one of the least significant factors (behind patriarchy, poverty, policy, austerity and so on) in understanding, responding to and preventing the sexual exploitation of children in the UK and beyond (Cockbain and Tufail, 2020). Indeed, in the UK Parliament at the time of writing, Labour MP Nadia Whitmore joined a cacophony of voices criticising the hawkers of such claims for ‘weaponising the trauma of victims’ (Guardian Online, 2025) for political and divisive goals.Sadly, real or imagined harm to children is often a political football, and it is not only far-right groups for which child safety acts as a rallying cry for diffuse political agendas. There are several themes within this otherwise superfluous debate that are prescient for the issues we intend to explore through this special issue for Critical and Radical Social Work: ‘Race, class and the weaponisation of child safety’. The first is the weaponisation of child safeguarding as a lever via which the state and its agencies legitimise and pursue other non-welfare goals, including the surveillance, control and criminalisation of marginalised groups of people. The second is the classist and racialised register in which this takes place, whereby harm to children is imagined and pursued as a pathology of working-class and racialised communities. The third is the interconnectedness of child safeguarding discourses and practices with those of the criminal and legal system and the intrusion into family life that concerns about child safeguarding authorise, what Becky Clarke and Leah (2025) describe in their ‘Voices from the frontline’ piece as ‘the interlocking nature … of institutional power’ in the lives of individuals and communities marginalised on the basis of class and race.