The United Kingdom has long tried to bury its history of grooming gangs, which have sexually abused thousands of young girls over several decades. Over the years, authorities have been accused of deliberately turning a blind eye to horrific abuse, mostly of English children by gangs of men found predominantly to be of Pakistani heritage.
After a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s, the issue was largely erased from the public consciousness until US billionaire Elon Musk reignited the debate about the menace of gangs that groomed young girls and sexually exploited them. Over the New Year, the X owner took to his microblogging platform to accuse UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer of being “complicit in the rape of Britain”.
He asked Starmer to quit as he failed to prosecute these gangs during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008-2013. Musk also accused UK’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips of “shielding” Starmer by rejecting a call for a public inquiry into alleged grooming scandals in Oldham.
Critics have argued that Musk’s intention behind raising the issue was to target the Starmer government and elevate the voices on the far right of the political spectrum in the United Kingdom. But his criticism prompted calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation.
History Of Grooming Gangs In UK
The scandal came to public attention more than a decade ago in Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city, where authorities were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse of young white girls around 2001, according to the American publication The Free Press.
However, the convictions in the case came almost a decade later in 2010, when five men of Pakistani origin were jailed for multiple offences against girls as young as 12 years of age. This pattern was found to be repeated in as many as 50 cities across the UK, including Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and Bristol.
What Does The Data Show?
According to a 2014 report by Professor Alexis Jay, in Rotherham alone, more than 1,400 children were sexually abused over 16 years between 1997 and 2013. Many of the victims were abducted, raped, trafficked, and subjected to unimaginable violence, often with little to no intervention from authorities due to fears of being labelled racist.
In its last report, the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce found that over 1.15 lakh cases of sexual offences against children were reported in the UK in 2023. Of them, 4,228 (3.7 per cent) were found to be group-based crimes. The task force was set up in April 2023 by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to address grooming gangs. It arrested over 550 suspects in its first year of operation.
The report showed that 26 per cent of these crimes took place within families, while in 17 per cent of cases, groups including grooming gangs, were involved. As many as nine per cent of the group-based crimes were reported to have taken place in schools, religious places, community centres, and other such institutions.
In 2024, an independent review commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham found widespread organised sexual exploitation of children within Rochdale from 2004 to 2012. It highlighted that people who were at Rochdale Council during the period 2004 to 2013 did not recognise nor acknowledge the very serious failures that affected the lives of children. Following Operation Span in 2012, nine perpetrators were convicted, of which eight were British-Pakistani men. Since then, there have been 135 more arrests, 432 charges, and 32 convictions.
The Oldham case, which became the centre of the debate after Musk’s tweet, refers to the sexual exploitation of children and its alleged cover-up by the town council between 2011 and 2014. The case came to light in 2012 and led to the conviction of nine men for various offences, including rape, trafficking, and conspiracy. However, an independent report released in 2022 said that there was “no evidence” of such a cover-up of the crime, but pointed out that local authorities did fail to protect some children from grooming.
Questions Over Media Handling
After the renewed debate over sexual grooming in the UK, questions were also raised on how British media handles the issue. Matthew James Goodwin, a prominent British political scientist, recently suggested that British media did not give sufficient coverage to the grooming gangs scandal. Using Lexis, a database employed by researchers to track content across UK newspapers, Goodwin analyzed media coverage of the issue from 2011 to 2025.
He pointed out that until 2011, the media largely ignored the grooming gangs crisis, despite widespread rumours. He credited Andrew Norfolk of The Times for starting early coverage.
Today, a number of prominent journalists criticised my suggestion that the UK media class has failed to sufficiently cover the rape gangs scandal, which will go down as one of the biggest scandals in our history
So, I decided to take a closer look at the data.
Trust me, you’ll… pic.twitter.com/qeaTxPH5qA
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) January 5, 2025
Musk Vs Starmer
On New Year’s Day, Musk accused Keir Starmer of failing to act decisively on grooming gang cases during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions (2008-2013). Musk claimed that Starmer allowed “rape gangs” to exploit vulnerable girls without facing justice, alleging that institutional failures were linked to Starmer’s leadership of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
In response, Starmer hit back at Musk, saying “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims.”
Following the uproar, UK’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced that professionals who work with children will face criminal sanctions if they fail to report claims of sexual abuse.
The Race Question
In her 2014 report, Professor Jay noted that “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so,” according to a BBC report.
While launching the grooming gang task force in 2023, Sunak pointed out that perpetrators had eluded justice for too long due to “political correctness”.
In the same year, Conservative MP Suella Braverman, in a column for the Daily Mail, suggested that “almost all” culprits involved in the “grooming gangs phenomenon” are British-Pakistani men.
However, following Braverman’s statements, 50 researchers signed a letter warning that such assertions “perpetuate misinformation, racism, and division”. Tracy Brabin, Labour Mayor of West Yorkshire also called Braverman’s remarks as a “dog whistle”.
A report published by the UK’s Home Office also noted that there was not enough data to conclude that a majority of group-based crime offenders were Asian or Pakistani.
“Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations. However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE (child sexual exploitation) offending,” the report said.