‘Elon Musk’s Venal ‘Rape Genocide’ Claims About Keir Starmer and Grooming Gangs Are Absurd’

For those of us employed in the criminal justice system the assertion by Elon Musk that there has been a “rape genocide” in the UK and that the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who held the officer of Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) between 2008 and 2013 is “complicit”, evoked feelings ranging from bewilderment to rage. 

During my career at the Criminal Bar, which has spanned a quarter of a century, I have watched as successive governments and every DPP has agonised over the unique challenge of ensuring that sexual offences are investigated meticulously, prosecuted effectively and tried fairly.

The challenge is a profoundly complicated one because sexual offences are, by definition difficult to investigate, prosecute and try. 

Sex offences committed against adults often take place within the parameters of a relationship and the distinction between a complainant who has consented to a particular sexual act, and a victim who has been groomed or coerced to ‘give in’, is not always clear.

Evidentially, allegations often involve drink or drugs and drunk witnesses who are not sure about certain parts of an incident; sometimes the allegation is accompanied by thousands of pages of telephone evidence which can take months to sift through or complicated DNA evidence, but, just as often the evidence doesn’t go beyond one person’s word against another. 

Offences committed against children have their own unique difficulties; children may not have the language to describe what happened to them, children may be embarrassed about certain aspects of what happened, and their accounts may change as they recall or feel able to articulate different parts of what happened. 

Defendants are also less helpful upon arrest — a person accused of drug offences, or even violence, may accept the crime or parts of the crime, but a person accused of child abuse or rape, will rarely offer the police anything beyond a stonewall “I didn’t do it, it’s all a lie,” meaning that the case will have to be investigated with a view to putting the evidence before a judge, barristers will become involved and a trial process embarked upon where the outcome is never guaranteed.

And, sadly, because of the backlog of Crown Court cases, which grew out of the austerity measures of the Cameron years, trials may only take place months if not years after the original complaint has been made. 

All of these things mean that the challenge of dealing with sex offences properly is massive.  

Which is why the suggestion that the United Kingdom as a country has a particular problem with sexual offences, and that our Prime Minister has contributed to that, is an assertion that doesn’t hold water whilst the attempts to make political capital out of this issue are brazen and unfounded. 

In my experience, the reality is that in the last twenty years profound improvements have been made in the investigation and prosecution of sex offences. 

When I did my first trials back in the first years of this century, complainant’s were still mainly treated in exactly the same way as any other witness, they would typically have their sexual history paraded in the full view of a jury in the hope that their previous behaviour might assist in the attempt to persuade a court that they were promiscuous; children would be asked questions that were excruciating, in language that was utterly inappropriate and totally confusing to them. 

Evidence would consist of statements taken by police officers who had had little by way of training and would usually speak to complainants and witnesses at locations and in circumstances which were bound to lead to inadequacies in the account that would come back to haunt the prosecution at a trial. 

Medical evidence was haphazard and of poor quality and there was often an assumption that the absence of any physical trauma, particularly to the genital areas, meant that the witness must have been lying. 

Slowly and systematically these deficiencies and limitations have been addressed.

The Blair Government enacted legislation in the form of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, that restricted cross-examination about anyone’s previous sexual history except in certain circumstances; this was followed by the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, which put into place laws concerning the use of previous convictions, procedure and sentencing; in the same year, the Sexual Offences Act was placed onto the statute books to codify and modernise the law concerning sexual offences, laws which had been largely unchanged since the 1950s. 

This improved legislative framework went hand in hand with the improvements in the way in which sexual offences were investigated — specialist police investigators were introduced at this time, and local police forces were directed to introduce and implement strategies to deal more efficiently with those who have complained of sexual assault or rape.

They dealt more closely with the CPS to ensure that the first accounts taken by police officers and doctors were more thorough and that any individual who makes such a complaint had their evidence video-recorded by way of what became known as an ‘Achieving Best Evidence’ video.

Only specially trained officers, used to dealing with the victims of sexual crime were allowed to carry out these interviews and the language used was carefully selected to ensure that all accounts would be fair, thorough and admissible as evidence. 

The number of SARC centres (Sexual Assault Referral Centres) expanded from a handful in the late 1990s to the 43 that operate today and the myth that you must have genital injury if you have been raped was busted to the extent that today Judges will routinely inform a jury that the absence or presence of genital injury is not necessarily an indication of a sexual assault or rape.  

In Courtrooms, the old equipment was slowly replaced, with new large televisions and more sophisticated audio equipment put into most courtrooms to enable witnesses to give their evidence remotely and for juries to be able to consider accounts that are not given in the stressful environment of a courtroom. 

Starmer’s appointment as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service was almost certainly made by the then Labour Government with a view to continuing these reforms and improvements to the way in which sexual offences were investigated and prosecuted and, to Starmer’s credit, this is exactly what he did: during his time as DPP, he set up the specialist rape and serious sexual offences units within the CPS, encouraged intermediaries to be used to help complainant’s and victims and introduced mandatory training for every lawyer and barrister seeking to conduct these types of cases. 

Today, every potential witness in a sex case is spoken to and offered care and assistance by a specialist liaison officer whilst in the crown court, complainants will have a court visit beforehand, meet the judge and the barristers beforehand and, if they want, give their evidence from behind a screen.

These changes won’t end sexual violence against women. These changes will not necessarily guarantee that the rates of convictions will increase and the bad people will end up behind bars, but, they go a long way towards ensuring that when it comes to the criminal justice system, the process of trying a case will not add to the pain already experienced by a victim or complainant. 

It also demonstrates that any suggestion that Starmer or indeed the Labour Party under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been ‘complicit’ in a rape genocide is absurd.

Indeed during Starmer’s time as DPP, decisions were taken to prosecute these gangs and every assistance was given to the regional CPS offices to prosecute them effectively and thoroughly — which is exactly what happened. Far from a cover up, or some kind of complicity, Starmer should be commended for what he did. 

Of course, no one would suggest that the job is done. 

There is clearly much that still needs doing — as was evidenced only this week when the Public Accounts Committee published figures from May 2024, showing that 59% of adult complainants in rape cases drop out of the criminal justice process before a charging decision has been made.

This reason for this, clearly cannot be laid at the door of the current government, which is why the attempts by the right-wing and in particular the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch and the staggeringly self-serving Robert Jenrick to make political capital out of the hysterical and misinformed words of Musk is ludicrous. 

The Jay Report into Child Sexual Abuse made 22 recommendations in 2022, the Conservative Government failed to implement any of them.

Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary have pledged to consider improving the reporting of child abuse and continue to improve the support offered to victims, which were recommended by Professor Alexis Jay in her report.

Whilst the CPS and in particular the RASSO units within the CPS will continue to work with the police and the independent Bar to make sure that every individual who makes an allegation of abuse, whether they be a child or an adult, will be dealt with as sensitively and as fairly as possible. 

To my knowledge Musk has never set foot in a British Courtroom, to my knowledge Musk has never had to grapple with the complex reality of putting together a case that will ensure that an allegation made by a complainant is fairly and properly and lawfully presented to a jury — if he had, then I doubt he would have expressed his views in such a venal and ignorant way.