Six things you must know about how the grooming gangs scandal was handled

1. Many Asian ‘rape gangs’ have been exposed across the UK and the cases have been truly shocking

The first signs of widespread child sexual exploitation by gangs in the UK emerged in Rotherham. In 2010, five Asian men were jailed for sexual offences against underage girls in the South Yorkshire market town.

This led to an investigation by The Times which revealed many more girls in the area were being groomed for sex by British-Asian males – and that for many years authorities had often not been taking action despite warnings. 

Continued allegations led to an independent report into Rotherham’s problems being established, which found that children as young as 11 had been beaten and raped by multiple people. Some were abducted and trafficked to other towns and cities. It said that abut 1,400 children had been sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 – and this was a “conservative estimate”. The majority of the abusers were Asian men, predominantly of Pakistani heritage. 

Similar exploitation was uncovered in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, when a child sex ring of nine Asian men were jailed in 2012 for exploiting girls as young as 13. Again it turned out that many victims had been dismissed as “child prostitutes” who didn’t want or deserve help. Rotherham and Rochdale have undoubtedly become the most notorious examples of these kinds of crimes, but many other areas have been affected too.

In the Shropshire town of Telford, up to 1,000 children could have been abused since the 1980s by sex gangs targeting girls as young as 11 and in Huddersfield, another 20 British Asian men were convicted in 2018, having “used and abused” girls, who were plied with drink and drugs. Gangs of Asian men have also been jailed for grooming girls in Oxford, Derby, Bradford, Halifax and the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury. 

2. Concerns about racism stopped some terrible cases being investigated properly

The issue of ethnicity has been a controversial factor in this scandal from the very start.

It was The Times‘ journalist Andrew Norfolk who publicly revealed that abuse in Rotherham was widespread and that authorities were failing to take action. Over the years, he uncovered what he calls a “pattern” of white girls in the Midlands and north of England being exploited by groups of men who were “overwhelmingly of Pakistani and Muslim heritage,” as he recalled in a BBC interview last year.

When Norfolk approached police forces and local councils about his findings, he faced a “conspiracy of silence”. He and his newspaper were accused of racism both before and after his investigation was published in 2012.

The independent report into Rotherham – carried out by Prof Alexis Jay, the former chief social work inspector for Scotland – was published two years later. It confirmed that sensitivities about the backgrounds of alleged offenders had stopped officials from believing the claims and taking action. It said: “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.”

There was a similar story in Telford and a review into grooming gangs in Oxford called for research into why a significant proportion of offenders in such cases are of “Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage”.

Although many of the largest gangs with the highest numbers of victims in recent years have involved British Asians, predominantly from Pakistani backgrounds, there have also been cases of white British paedophiles offending in groups. 

Six white men in a paedophile ring in Hertfordshire were jailed in 2017. Its leader, Michael Emerton, admitted to more than 20 offences, including child rapes and conspiring with other members to carry out rapes. Other abuse cases by white offenders have been uncovered in Hampshire, Devon and Glasgow . 

It has long been a problem that the ethnicity of offenders was not properly recorded or analysed by authorities. A Home Office report into group-based child sexual exploitation acknowledged that research was “limited” and based on “poor quality data”.

The police watchdog warned in 2023 that data collection was still “unreliable,” meaning that forces still did not have an “accurate” understanding of the problems. However, it said that of 27 investigations it had examined, “the most common ethnic group of offenders was white”. Although this was not a representative sample, it said that offending extends “far beyond the confines of towns and cities with a high concentration of residents of South Asian heritage”.

Nor is it only white girls that suffer. Prof Jay said last year that during her inquiry into Rotherham, women from the town’s Pakistani community came forward to say they had been abused.

3. There hasn’t been a national public inquiry on grooming gangs – but plenty of other investigations, reviews and inquiries have been conducted

Besides Rotherham, reviews devoted to scandals in individual towns have been conducted into Rochdale, Telford and Oldham. Although they found different failings at varying scales, all of them issued disturbing findings, provoking apologies and resignations. This is besides the many trials that have led to dozens of convictions around the country.

A serious case review was also carried out in Oxfordshire, concluding in 2015 that 373 children could have been exploited by gangs in the space of 16 years.

It was concerns about a different type of child sexual exploitation – involving abuse within institutions such as churches, care homes and boarding schools – which led to Theresa May announcing a public inquiry in 2014 while she was Home Secretary. But the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which covered England and Wales, was beset by one controversy before Prof Jay eventually took over.

Eventually it conducted 15 separate investigations, including one into abuse by “organised networks”. For this, the panel decided to not look again into cases that had already been examined or prosecuted locally, in order to broaden the lessons that could be learnt for national recommendations. This meant it did not cover Rotherham, Rochdale or Oxford, choosing six other places as case studies instead.

When the inquiry finally published its report in 2022, after seven years of work it issued 20 recommendations. These included the creation of a child protection authority and making it a crime for officials and workers in trusted positions to not report allegations of child sexual abuse. Despite years of doubts about the inquiry, many survivors backed the report and its demands. However critics say the report did not look at the root causes of the grooming gangs including the role played by religion and culture. There are also concerns that other grooming gang scandals have still to come to light.

Rishi Sunak became prime minister five days after the report was published. But two years later, his Conservative government had still not delivered on any of the 20 recommendations, despite accepting 19 of them. Prof Jay said last year that she was “frustrated” by the inaction and that victims had been “let down” by Tory ministers.

Despite her party’s failure to implement any of the existing recommendations while she was a cabinet minister, the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch called for a national public inquiry into the UK’s “rape gangs scandal” last week. “No one in authority has joined the dots,” she wrote on X.

4. The racial aspect of grooming gang cases remains controversial

The subject of offenders’ racial and religious backgrounds, and of how this has influenced the policing of some cases, remains highly contentious.

The far-right leader Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, almost caused the trial of a Huddersfield rapist to collapse in 2018 by broadcasting a Facebook Live video about “rape jihad gangs”.

While visiting Rochdale in 2023, Rishi Sunak said that many victims and whistleblowers had been “often ignored” because of “cultural sensitivity and political correctness“.

His comments followed an article by his Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, in the Mail on Sunday in which she wrote that “groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values” were to blame for the “grooming gangs phenomenon”.

The Conservative peer Baroness Warsi warned that Braverman had “emboldened racists” with this rhetoric.

Robinson, who is now in jail again for a separate contempt case, has continued taking advantage of the grooming issue, including by making a so-called documentary about grooming gangs titled The Rape of Britain.

Elon Musk – the billionaire who is now an adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump – has since used that same term while campaigning on Robinson’s behalf, accusing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of being “complicit in the rape of Britain”. It is Musk’s prolific comments about grooming gangs online that have seen the issue shoot up the political agenda again .

This week the former Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick wrote that grooming gangs are “perhaps the greatest racially motivated crime in modern Britain”.

Starmer has previously argued that although political correctness should not “get in the way” of prosecuting Asian grooming gangs, the “vast majority of sexual abuse cases” do not involve ethnic minorities.

This week he said that “too many victims have been completely let down by perverse ideas about community relations”. But he also accused Conservative and Reform MPs of “amplifying what the far-right is saying,” helping to spread “lies and misinformation”.

This led to angry reactions. The former Home Secretary James Cleverly said: “Accusing those who disagree with him, or who seek legitimate answers about repeated failures of child protection, as ‘far-Right’ is deeply insulting and counterproductive. He is the best recruiting sergeant for extremism.”

5. Starmer’s past CPS role has put him in the spotlight

Starmer was running the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to proceed with a case in Rochdale in 2009 because it thought the main victim was “unreliable”. But it was also a prosecutor appointed by Starmer – Nazir Afzal – who later overturned that decision.

In Prof Jay’s Rotherham report, she said that police felt the CPS was initially often unwilling to take cases to court, but it became “much more helpful” later on.

Following criticism from Musk and from some Conservatives for his record as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013, Starmer stated this week: “I reopened cases that had been closed, I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in Rochdale, I changed the whole prosecution approach.”

Maggie Oliver, a police whistleblower who runs a foundation helping victims, posted on X that “Conservatives and Labour are all equally to blame”. She wrote that Starmer is “perhaps as guilty as anyone I know in where we find ourselves today”.

But the former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve has defended Starmer against “baseless innuendo” about his record. He wrote on X: “Where is the evidence that when Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions the CPS wrongly refused such consents in rape and child grooming cases? There is none. On the contrary Starmer was pro-active in focusing on this type of crime.”

6. Victims feel overlooked, but many want government and police action instead of yet another inquiry

The sexual abuse survivor Samantha Smith, who was groomed in Telford and repeatedly raped for 10 years from the age of five, is among those backing calls for a national inquiry. “We have never had a comprehensive investigation into the systems, organisations and individuals that failed to protect victims, nor have we held those in power responsible for their inaction,” she wrote this week.

Smith, now a newspaper columnist who has been retweeted by Musk has also called for Labour to launch internal investigations “into all Labour-led local authorities that failed to investigate Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs in their area”. Her alleged abusers have not been prosecuted.

The lawyer Peter Garsden, who is fighting for dozens of victims to receive compensation, argues that the rejection of a public inquiry “will send a very bad message to the thousands of child abuse victims all over the country”.

But Duncan Craig, who has suffered abuse himself and is CEO of the group We Are Survivors which supports male victims of sex crimes, said Prof Jay’s inquiry had already made good recommendations and implementing those is much more urgent. “What’s left for us to learn about this issue?” he said. “It’s time for action.”

Prof Jay said this week: “We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions – especially for the victims and survivors who’ve had the courage to come forward.”

On Tuesday, Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper announced that the Government would be implementing what many consider to be the most urgent of Prof Jay’s 20 recommendations: for anyone who fails to report child sexual abuse to face professional or criminal sanctions.

Cooper stressed the importance of implementing the other recommendations in due course but this is unlikely to quell calls for a new national inquiry from those sensing there is still political capital to be gained.

@robhastings