What was claimed
The Guardian published an opinion article headlined “Labour’s inquiry into promiscuous children is just an Islamophobic witch hunt”.
Our verdict
False. The Guardian confirmed it has published no such article.
Fake ‘Grauniad’ grooming gangs column shared as if real on Facebook
A screenshot shared widely on Facebook supposedly shows an opinion article published by the Guardian columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, headlined: “Labour’s inquiry into promiscuous children is just an Islamophobic witch hunt”.
But the Guardian has confirmed to Full Fact that it has published no such article.
Styled to appear like an article published on the Guardian website’s opinion section, the screenshot features Ms Alibhai-Brown’s byline and headshot, and the subheading “This kangaroo court will focus on Muslims instead of where it should - sexually voracious children who preyed on them”, with a publication date of Sunday 15 June 2025.
This appears to be in reference to the government’s announcement last week, ahead of the publication of a national audit by Baroness Louise Casey, that a full national statutory inquiry into group-based child sex abuse—often referred to as “grooming gangs”— will take place.
The image appears to have originally been shared on X (formerly Twitter) by the parody account “grauniadmeme”, which regularly shares spoof articles like this, with the Guardian’s logo changed to “The Grauniad”. Despite this, many of the people sharing this image on Facebook appear unaware that it is intended as satire.
Some of the posts shared to Facebook have been cropped so the altered logo doesn’t appear, while others share the full screenshot but still appear to suggest it shows a real article published by the news organisation.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fake Guardian articles shared on social media as if they were real. We’ve previously fact checked claims about fake articles supposedly written by the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the comedian Eddie Izzard and the lawyer Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu.
We’ve also seen other examples of both entirely fake and altered content supposedly published by the BBC, Telegraph, Haaretz and other media organisations.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as satire because this image was first shared by a satirical account and the Guardian confirmed it has published no such article.