The Grooming Gangs of the United Kingdom: An Explainer
Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A graphic court transcript of a rape victim from a notorious Pakistani-heritage grooming gang operating in the north of England caught the eye of U.S. readers on social media platform X recently.
[url=] Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Greater Manchester Police, National Crime Agency[/url]Billionaire Elon Musk quickly jumped onto the subject, attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government, and rekindling a long-smoldering debate in the United Kingdom on what is often called the “Grooming Gangs” scandal.
But what exactly is the scandal? Why did it take so long for the systematic exploitation and rape of thousands of girls to be exposed?
Why are Musk and others taking aim at the current prime minister, given the scandal emerged more than a decade ago? And what have investigations revealed?
For decades, children, specifically poor white girls in various towns in northern England, were targeted and groomed by Pakistani-heritage men, while—as later investigations, court cases, and reporters revealed—local officials turned a blind eye to the abuse due to fears of being labeled racist or destabilizing community relations.
But it took decades to come to light.
In the 1990s, rumors began to emerge that men of Pakistani descent living in northern England towns were involved in raping children.
For example, the parents involved in the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (CROP), later renamed Parents Against Child Exploitation (PACE), participated in a 2004 documentary that claimed white schoolgirls were being groomed for sex by Asian men in Bradford.
The result was “Edge of the City,” which was due to be screened on Channel 4.
However, it was pulled hours before airing, after claims the British National Party wanted to exploit the situation and the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police saying it might trigger race riots.
Groups such as The National Assembly Against Racism also lobbied against the documentary.
Member of Parliament Ann Cryer, representing Keighley, publicly raised concerns about the abuse of two girls in her constituency in 2002.
In doing so, she became the first public figure in Britain to speak out about allegations of “young Asian lads” grooming underage white girls in West Yorkshire.
She was shunned by her party, which ran the country from 1997 to 2010, and she said no one wanted to know, despite holding “constant” meetings with West Yorkshire Police and social services.
[url=] Children walk along a street in the Eastwood area of Rotherham, England, on Oct. 6, 2014. An inquiry revealed on Aug. 26, 2014, that some 1,400 minors were sexually abused in Rotherham over a 16-year period. The inquiry followed the 2010 conviction of five men who were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images[/url]In 2014, Cryer said in The Guardian that she believed other politicians had heard similar stories but chose to ignore them.
Cryer added that she asked a Muslim councillor of Pakistani heritage to approach mosque elders with a list of 35 alleged perpetrators.
The imams reportedly dismissed the matter, saying: “It’s nothing to do with us.”
In 2007, the women and children’s rights campaigner and journalist Julie Bindel was one of the first to report in The Times of London that many northern towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire were experiencing a significant rise in “pimping” within the Asian community.
“It was a very uncomfortable scenario, not least because many of these crimes had an identifiable racial element: the gangs were Asian and the girls were white,” Bindel wrote.
“The authorities, in the shape of politicians and the police, seemed reluctant to acknowledge this aspect of the crimes; it has been left to the mothers of the victims to speak out.”
Andrew Norfolk 2012: The Times InvestigatesAlthough there were prosecutions the patterns didn’t come to light until a journalist joined the dots further.
Andrew Norfolk, a The Times of London journalist, was instrumental in breaking the Rotherham grooming scandal.
At least 1,400 children, girls as young as 11, had been raped by multiple attackers and sexually exploited in the South Yorkshire market town.
Norfolk’s series of investigations on grooming gangs resulted in many articles from 2011 onwards.
One investigation revealed a confidential 2010 police report that warned thousands of such crimes were being committed in South Yorkshire each year by networks of Pakistani-heritage men.
Offenders were identified to police but not prosecuted.
One of the alleged crimes—for which no one was prosecuted—included a 13-year-old girl who was found at 3 a.m. with disrupted clothing in a house with a large group of Asian men who had fed her vodka.
[url=] A teenage girl, who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse and alleged grooming, poses in Rotherham in Rotherham, England, on Sept. 3, 2014. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images[/url]Despite a neighbor reporting the girl’s screams to police, authorities arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly and did not question the men.
Norfolk’s reporting won him prestigious journalistic accolades, including such as the Paul Foot Award in 2012, the Orwell Prize in 2013, and the Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards in 2014.
Speaking to the BBC in 2024, Norfolk said that even he “massively underestimated” the scale of the abuse.
“They were treated like sub-human species for the pleasure of these men,” he said.
Norfolk said he came up against a “conspiracy of silence” when he tried to elicit responses from police forces and councils.
A 2012 Office of Children’s Commissioner study under a Conservative government was the first to set out the scale of the sexual exploitation of children and young people in Britain.
It identified 16,500 children who were at “high risk of sexual exploitation” between 2010 and 2011.
However, Norfolk criticized the report on the BBC at the time as a “missed opportunity,” saying it generalized the issue to all men and failed to address the racial and cultural factors central to the crimes.
“In a country which has a 7 percent Asian population, 35 percent of the identified abusers were Asian. And if you break that down further, less than 2 percent of the population of this country is Pakistani, and overwhelmingly, the men doing this are of Pakistani origin,” he said.
“And there was a chance to venture into sensitive areas here to try to begin the process of understanding why this crime model has put down such deep roots, and it’s been missed, and that’s a great shame,” he said.
There have been reports of grooming gangs in towns and cities, including Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Huddersfield, Newcastle, Bradford, Keighley, and more.
GB News said that it identified 50 towns and cities where child exploitation gangs have operated or are operating.
The gangs often operate through takeaway restaurants and taxi drivers, using these locations to groom and abuse children, according to a government report.
[url=] The outside play area for a children's center in Rotherham, England, on Oct. 6, 2014. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images[/url]Reports and InvestigationsNumerous reports and investigations have been conducted into the grooming gangs scandal, including those in Rochdale, Oxford, and Huddersfield, among others.
Professor Alexis Jay released a 2013 report that was commissioned by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council into the scale of abuse of 1,400 children, in Rotherham, from 1997 to 2013.
“In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect,” Jay said in the report.
“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered,” she said, adding that children had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness violent rapes, and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.
Jay said agencies relied too heavily on traditional community leaders such as elected members and imams as the “primary conduit of communication with the Pakistani-heritage community.”
In 2022, she chaired a national inquiry into various forms of child sexual abuse, which did not extensively address the racial elements of grooming gangs.
Some of her recommendations included setting up a national child protection authority and making not reporting abuse a criminal offense.
Political Correctness and Fear of Racist LabelSeveral investigations said that political correctness influenced authorities’ inaction and failure to make decisive interventions.
Commenting on Jay’s Rotherham report, former Conservative leader Theresa May said there was “inadequate scrutiny by councillors, institutionalised political correctness, the covering up of information, and the failure to take action against gross misconduct.”
[url=] British Prime Minister Theresa May attends a Serious Youth Violence Summit in Downing Street, London on April 1, 2019. Adrian Dennis/Pool via Reuters[/url]A government review covering 2004 to 2013 found that Greater Manchester Police and children’s social care failed to protect vulnerable children in Rochdale and said that they were “left at the mercy of their abusers.”
One senior investigating officer told the review investigators that at one point the issue was so widespread that they wanted “any Pakistani-looking taxi driver” carrying a female child passenger to be “stopped by division from tomorrow until further notice.”
“If the driver can’t account for the fare ... snatch them, arrest the driver, impound the car, let’s go into it big style and disrupt it,” the officer said. However, the officer said that none of these drivers were ever stopped.
The officer explained that there are “huge Pakistani, Indian communities up there, and a large proportion of the taxi drivers are from that background.”
“I can only guess that [Greater Manchester Police] patrols were frightened of being tarnished with a race brush for doing it,” the officer said.
The Telford Inquiry found that more than 1,000 children who had been groomed with child sexual exploitation were ignored because of “nervousness about race.”
[url=] The six men convicted of sexually abusing under age girls, (Top L–R) Salah Ahmed El-Hakam, Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar, and Asif Ali and (Bottom L–R) Nabeel Kurshid, Iqlak Yousaf, and Tanweer Ali. The men were sentenced in November 2018. National Crime Agency[/url]In one case, the Inquiry heard about a school where attempts to raise concerns about the involvement of a Pakistani heritage grooming gang led to overt allegations of racism on the part of school staff from council personnel.
“It is difficult to conceive of a more wrong-headed response or one more designed to discourage complaint,” the report found.
In 2023, former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set up a Grooming Gangs Task Force comprised of specialist officers.
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