Grooming gangs scandal

Several government reviews have reported failures by British institutions in preventing, identifying and prosecuting the widespread cases of group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation that mostly occurred between the 1990s and 2010s.^[1] Allegations of governmental and institutional failures to respond to the problem or to downplay or cover up the issue have been described as a grooming gangs scandal.^[2][3]

Media coverage of these crimes has especially focused on the ethnic and religious background of perpetrators in high-profile cases, many of whom were of Pakistani British origin, and whether this prevented proper investigation.^[4][5][6][7] Data in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire suggests that, in the 2020s, British Pakistani men are disproportionately represented among perpetrators in those areas, but there is insufficient national data to draw conclusions about ethnicity of perpetrators across the UK.^[1] Some scholars have accused politicians and the media of creating a moral panic over the issue that demonises Muslims.^[5][7][6]

The National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse ("Casey audit") called for better recording of ethnicity by police forces to prevent misinformation, aid examination of the underlying issues, and restore public trust.^[8] In 2025, following the Casey audit's recommendations, the British Government indicated it would fund a national inquiry into the issue of group-based child sexual exploitation, including the role played by the ethnic background of offenders and to what extent there were failings by local authorities in the prevention and policing of such abuse.

Background

According to the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (2025), 28.5% of cases of contact sexual abuse can be described as sexual exploitation (17,000 in 2024), whether by individuals or groups.^[9]

Group-based child sexual exploitation and localised grooming are terms used to describe the sexual exploitation or grooming of children and adolescents by groups. Group-based child sexual exploitation was first defined in UK law in the Department for Children, Schools and Families' statutory guidance, Safeguarding Children & Young People from Sexual Exploitation. Supplementary guidance to Working Together to Safeguard Children in 2009.^[9] The National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse noted that there is a lack of data on group-based offences, with the Complex and Organised Child Abuse Dataset (COCAD) recording around 700 in 2023, i.e. 4% of the exploitation offences.^[9]

This abuse tends to target girls who are particularly vulnerable, such as those who are in local authority care.^[10][11] The youngest recorded victim was 12 and the oldest was 18.^[12] A 2013 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee describes a group first making contact with the child in a public place. After the group's initial contact with the child, offers of treats (takeaway food, cigarettes, drugs) persuade the child to maintain the relationship. Sometimes a boy similar in age presents himself as a "boyfriend"; this person arranges for the child to be raped by other members of the group. Children may end up being raped by dozens of these group members, and may be trafficked to connected groups in other towns.^[13][11]

In August 2003, a television documentary reported details of an 18-month police and social services investigation into allegations that young British Asian men were targeting under-age girls for sex, drugs and prostitution in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley.^[14] The Leeds-based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (Crop) sought to bring this behaviour to national attention from at least 2010.^[15] In November 2010, the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw several convictions of child sexual abusers. In 2012, members of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring were convicted on various counts, and in 2016, following the largest child sexual exploitation investigation in the UK,^[16] 18 men in the Halifax child sex abuse ring case were sentenced to a combined total of over 175 years in prison.^[17]

Following further child sex abuse rings in Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Huddersfield, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, Telford, and others, several investigations considered how prevalent British Asian backgrounds were in localised grooming. In 2011 and 2013, the National Crime Agency's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) branch collected the available data on group-based child sexual abuse from police forces in England and Wales. It reported that, where ethnicity information was available, 28% (2011) and 75% (2013) of offenders had been recorded as "Asian" by the police. The Home Office said the figures should be treated with caution as the data was incomplete and was at particular risk of bias, and recorded ethnicity was based on police assigning offenders to broad categories, rather than on offenders' own self-report.^[18] In December 2017, the think tank Quilliam released a report that said 84% of offenders were of South Asian heritage.^[19] This report was criticised by child sexual exploitation experts Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, who said it was unscientific and had poor methodology.^[6][20]

A further investigation was carried out by the British government in December 2020, which concluded that most offenders were probably white, as with most child sexual abuse cases generally, and that there was insufficient data in this area to suggest South Asians, or any other ethnic group, were disproportionately represented among perpetrators.^[21] The British government originally refused to release the report but eventually did so after public pressure.^[22] In response to the report, then Home Secretary Priti Patel said: "This paper demonstrates how difficult it has been to draw conclusions about the characteristics of offenders."^[23] Reviews of the Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford cases identified several common factors, with offenders often working in night-time industries like takeaways and taxis, providing access to vulnerable children.^[23]

British media has been criticised by academics,^[24][25][26] journalists,^[27] politicians,^[28][29] the police,^[29][30] and community groups^[31][32] for its coverage of group-based child sexual abuse, including that it is sensationalist, misleading, and perpetuates Islamophobia.^[6][33][34] According to Miqdaad Versi, director for media monitoring at the Muslim Council of Britain, the media does this by "conflating the faith of Islam with criminality, such as the headlines 'Muslim sex grooming'".^[27]

A number of academics – including Shamim Miah,^[25] Muzammil Quraishi,^[35] Ella Cockbain,^[36] Aisha K. Gill, Karen Harrison,^[5] Vasil Karastanchev,^[37] Aviah Sarah Day, and others – have described the controversy as a moral panic.^[26] In one academic paper, Gill and Harrison describe media outlets including The Times, The Daily Mail's Mail Online, The Guardian and The Telegraph of boosting the moral panic by portraying young South Asian men as "folk devils".^[5] Cockbain, a scholar of crime science at University College London,^[38] suggests that "sweeping, ill-founded generalisations" in the discourse around group-based child sexual exploitation serves to "further a political agendum and legitimise thinly veiled racism, ultimately doing victims a disservice".^[36]

In 2025, the government commissioned Baroness Casey to make a detailed audit of these cases, published as the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. In her audit, Baroness Casey wrote: "Assertions that the majority of child sexual abuse offenders are White, even if true, are at best misleading. In a population with over of 80% of people of White ethnicity, it should always be a significant issue when people from a White background are not in the majority of victims or perpetrators of crime"^[9] The review found that there were serious shortcomings in the recording of ethnicity data about perpetrators of group-based sexual abuse.^[9]

Timeline

Rotherham grooming gang scandal

See also: Investigations into the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal

2013 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Report

In June 2013, after a year long investigation, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee published Child sexual exploitation and the response to localised grooming which reviewed evidence from Rochdale, Rotherham, and Oxford.^[39]

2020 Home Office report

In December 2020, the Home Office published the report Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation: Characteristics of Offending co-written by an "external-reference group" of members of academia, law enforcement, victim advocates and parliament workers. It concluded that most offenders were White, with some studies showing Black and Asian offenders proportionally over-represented. It added that a large amount high-profile cases involved perpetrators of South Asian origin, but that there was a general lack of data to make a definite conclusion for over-representation in all cases of group-based sexual abuse. The report also stated that external reference group "did not reach consensus around how the evidence should be presented, particularly with regard to cultural and community contexts."^[21][23] The British government released the report, originally due two years earlier, after a petition by The Independent garnering over 130,000 signatures.^[22]

2020–2024

In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that victims had been failed due to political correctness.^[40][41][42] That same year, he established a grooming gangs taskforce to target this specific issue.^[43] In 2023, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman said in an opinion piece that "grooming gang" members in the United Kingdom were "groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values". In response, the Independent Press Standards Organisation issued a correction stating that Braverman's article was "misleading", since it did not make it explicit that she was talking about the Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford child sexual abuse scandals in particular.^[44] Many experts and organisations called on her to withdraw her comments, saying she was amplifying far-right ideologies and making it harder to address the issue.^[45][40][31] The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said that by focusing primarily on South Asian men, Braverman was fuelling "misinformation, racism and division".^[31][32] The charity said that "a singular focus on groups of male abusers of British-Pakistani origin draws attention away from so many other sources of harm".^[32][45]

In 2025, former Home Office minister Robert Jenrick said group-based child sexual exploitation was "perhaps the greatest racially motivated crime in modern Britain",^[46] and said it was covered up by the British state to protect community relations.^[47] Journalist Nick Robinson said Jenrick did not raise the issue when he was a minister.^[48] Simon Danczuk MP also claimed a Labour Party chairman had told him not to draw attention to the ethnicity of the gangs in his Rochdale constituency in case it affected the party's electoral chances.^[49] Labour MP Nadia Whittome said the Conservatives and Reform were "weaponising the trauma of victims" for their own game. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the Conservatives were "playing politics with the safety of vulnerable children" by using the issue to fundraise for the party.^[50]

Professor Alexis Jay, a retired social worker who led the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (or Jay Report),^[51] had previously said in 2015 that such cases were not overlooked because of political correctness, instead attributing the authorities' inaction to "their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away".^[52] In 2024, Jay said she was "frustrated" that the government had still not taken action two years after her report was published.^[53] Sabah Kaiser, ethnic minority ambassador for the Jay Report, said it was "very, very dangerous for the government to turn child sexual abuse into a matter of colour".^[54]

2025 Casey audit and subsequent national inquiry

In 2025, the government commissioned Baroness Casey to make a detailed audit of these cases, published as the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. The audit found serious shortcomings in the recording of ethnicity data about perpetrators of group-based sexual abuse and recommended improved reporting of ethnicity and nationality for all suspects. The review found that improved data collection by police forces in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire indicated Pakistani men were overrepresented among perpetrators in these areas, but that generally the data was "not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level."^[1] Casey suggested the gaps in ethnicity data had led to competing and sometimes misleading claims, including by the media and academics, that had eroded trust in institutions.^[55] She said the 2020 Home Office report's conclusion that perpetrators were "mostly White" had been widely cited but that this "does not seem to be evidenced in research or data". She said the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was the only source to treat the Home Office report with "any balance" when it said "significant limitations" in the data prevented drawing conclusions nationally.^[9]

The Casey report also found the role of the night time economy particularly out of area taxi licencing contributed to child sexual exploitation. In the UK taxi licensing is done by local authorities. In areas at risk of child sexual exploitation, such as Rotherham, licensing requirements exceeded national statutory minimums, but this was undermined by drivers acquiring licenses in other areas of the country and then working instead in higher-risk areas.^[56][57]

On 14 June 2025, having previously resisted launching an investigation,^[4][58] Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the British government would launch a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs,^[59][60] following the recommendations of the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, which found that the ethnicity of gangs had been "shied away from". Noting that ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation was "not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level", the report said "there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination". Casey said there had been institutional "obfuscation" instead of "examination".^[61][62]

Research

In spite of high-profile cases being tied by media and public perception to the British Pakistani community, there is poor data regarding the background of grooming gang members on a national scale.^[63][62] In December 2017, the anti-extremism think tank Quilliam released a report that said 84% of offenders involved in grooming gangs were of South Asian heritage.^[64] Researchers Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail criticised the Quilliam report's conclusions, suggesting it had methodological and scientific flaws.^[6][20][65]

In December 2020, a report by the Home Office found limited evidence to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders, citing poor quality and incomplete data. It concluded that the ethnicity of perpetrators likely reflected national demographics for child sexual abuse in general, meaning most perpetrators were likely white, and that there was insufficient evidence to indicate whether there was an overrepresentation of Asian and Black offenders. It said that it was unlikely any one community or culture was uniquely predisposed to offending.^[66][23] In 2021, an investigation by the Times suggested South Yorkshire Police was not routinely recording the ethnicity of child sexual abuse suspects. In Rotherham, police omitted suspect ethnicity in 67% of cases. The force said it had increased reporting of ethnicity since 2019.^[67]

The 2025 Casey audit stated that ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation was "not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level", but however that "there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination".^[62]

The Jay Report suggested that the number of Asian victims may also be underrepresented. According to the Muslim Women's Network UK, Asian victims may be particularly vulnerable to threats of bringing shame and dishonour to their families, and may have believed that reporting the abuse would be an admission they had violated their cultural beliefs. One of the local Pakistani women's groups had described Pakistani girls being targeted by Pakistani taxi drivers and landlords, but they feared reporting to the police out of concerns for their marriage prospects. The report suggested "the under-reporting of exploitation and abuse in minority ethnic communities" should be addressed.^[68]

Responses

Media

British outlets including The Times, MailOnline, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph are widely viewed to have focussed on the ethnicity of the perpetrators in their reporting of such cases. Some researchers in the social sciences including Shamim Miah,^[25] Tufail Waqas,^[24] Muzammil Quraishi,^[35] Ella Cockbain,^[36] Aisha K. Gill, Karen Harrison,^[5] Vasil Karastanchev,^[37] Aviah Sarah Day, and others – argue the public image of grooming gangs is a moral panic fueled by sensationalist news reporting,^[26][69] with young South Asian men portrayed as folk devils.^[5][70] Cockbain, an associate professor in security and crime science at University College London,^[40] suggests that "sweeping, ill-founded generalisations" in the discourse around group-based child sexual exploitation serves to "further a political agendum and legitimise thinly veiled racism, ultimately doing victims a disservice".^[36]

In 2013, BBC Inside Out London investigated allegations made by members of the Sikh community that British Sikh girls living inside Britain were being targeted by men who pretended to be Sikhs.^[71] An investigation by the Sikh scholar Katy Sian of the University of York found no truth to the allegations and instead found it was an allegation being pushed by extremist Sikh groups.^[72][73] Further reports compiled by the British government and child sex exploitation scholars also confirmed there was no evidence to this.^[6][74]

The Muslim Council of Britain has called on investigations to "adhere to the facts of the matter, rather than deploying deeply divisive, racially charged rhetoric that amplifies far-right narratives and demonises an entire community".^[31] Rebecca Riggs, the lead on child protection and abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), said the media focus on Pakistani men could leave other victims "feeling that their type of crime isn't a priority".^[49] According to Miqdaad Versi, director for media monitoring at the Muslim Council of Britain, the media does this by "conflating the faith of Islam with criminality, such as the headlines 'Muslim sex grooming'".^[27]

Right-wing figures, particularly Elon Musk in early 2025, have also been criticised of over-amplifying the issue in social media.^[75] In April 2025, Channel 4 broadcast Groomed: A National Scandal (directed by Anna Hall), a documentary which revisits the theme of her 2004 film Edge of the City and centres on the stories of survivors of sexual abuse and the shortcomings of local councils in addressing the issue.^[76]

Political

In 2011, Jack Straw, the former Labour Home Secretary told Newsnight that while most sex offenders were white there was a "specific problem" of men of Pakistani origin targeting white girls who they viewed as "easy meat" and urged the Pakistani community to be "more open" about the problem. His comments were criticised by criminologist Helen Brayley who said that racial stereotyping could lead to only looking for cases where Asians were responsible, and by the MP Keith Vaz who said he did not think there was evidence of a cultural problem and that it was not possible to stereotype entire communities.^[77][78] Subsequently throughout the 2010s, Conservative and Reform UK politicians, such as Rishi Sunak have reasserted that race was a factor in grooming gangs^[6][32] and that concerns were not dealt with because of political correctness.^[41][44][47]

After a 2017 case in Newcastle, former Conservative policing and justice minister Mike Penning urged Attorney General Jeremy Wright to consider the offences against "young white girls" as racially motivated.^[79] The judge presiding over the case in question later ruled that the girls were not targeted for their race.^[80][81]

In 2017, the Labour Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities and MP for Rotherham Sarah Champion wrote in The Sun that "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls". Champion's remarks came after the prosecution and conviction of seventeen men from the Newcastle sex abuse ring, who were from Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian and Turkish communities, for forcing underage girls to have sex. Champion said that a fear of being called racist was hampering police investigations. Following criticism, including from fellow Labour MP Naz Shah, Champion apologised for the article and resigned as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities.^[82] Following her resignation, Champion accused the left of failing to speak out on grooming gangs for fear of being branded racist.^[83]

In response to claims that social services had failed to act through political correctness, the Jay Report "found no evidence of children's social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE".^[68][84][85]