UK Announces Rapid Review of Child Sexual Abuse by Grooming Gangs

The British government on Thursday bowed to the pressure and announced new investigations into the sexual exploitation and abuse of children, less than a month after billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk used his social media platform X to highlight the issue in a series of vitriolic posts .

Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said she had commissioned a three-month fast-track audit into “the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” which would examine the data on the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

She also said the government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called grooming gangs – groups of men found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, some as young as 11 , in the world. 2000 and early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.

The scandal, which was widely covered in the British media in the 2010s and has already been the subject national investigation, spanned a number of cities and towns in which the majority of white girls were exploited, assaulted and raped by groups of men.

According to a number of investigations, victims and parents who asked for help were often failed by the police and social services. Some police officers referred to the victims as “tarts” and the abuse of the girls as a “lifestyle choice”, while other officials feared being labeled racist if they highlighted the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Grooming gang represent a fractions of the total number of recorded cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. Of the 115,489 child sexual abuse crimes recorded in 2023, 4,228 cases – or 3.7 percent – the involved groups of two or more perpetrators, according to official data published in November. And of these cases, 1,125 were perpetrated by relatives or family members at home.

But the issue is very emotional and has been fueled by Mr. Musk who, this month, falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labor Party lawmakers of authorizing grooming gangs. His social posts include many inaccuracies and smearsincluding accusing Mr Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, of being complicit in “Britain’s breach”. However, his intervention reignited a debate on sensitive issues, including race, sexual abuse and the cultural values ​​of some immigrant communities.

The government had previously rejected calls to set up a new national inquiry from the UK’s anti-immigration Reform party and the main opposition Conservative Party, whose leader, Kemi Badenoch, said no one would had “joined the dots” on the series of grooming cases. , including the involvement of men of Pakistani heritage.

The government had said it would instead focus on implementing the recommendations of a previous national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay into the sexual abuse of children, which took seven yearsit processed more than two million pages of evidence and featured the voices of approximately 6,000 victims. This inquiry was concluded in 2022 and made a series of recommendations that the previous Conservative-led government did not implement.

Ms. Jay, what too supervised a 2014 survey in grooming gangs in Rotherham, a town in northern England where 1,400 minors were raped and trafficked by men of mainly Pakistani heritage between 1997 and 2013, had argued against a new national inquiry, instead of the Labor government. to act on his previous advice.

On Thursday, Ms. Cooper said she had asked Louise Casey, who performed a 2015 survey in the authority’s response to child sexual abuse in Rotherham, to conduct an audit of the scale of gang exploitation and to look at further evidence that was not previously available.

“It will carefully examine data on the ethnicity and demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, and look at the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending, including across different ethnic groups,” Ms Cooper said of the new audit.

Ms Cooper also announced plans to help the northern town of Oldham and up to four other municipalities to carry out inquiries “to get the truth and justice for victims and survivors”. Police chiefs have also been asked to review past cases of gang exploitation where no charges have been brought and reopen investigations where necessary.

The government’s announcement on Thursday followed calls for action from a handful of Labor MPs, including Sarah Champion, who represents Rotherham. She had proposed a five-point plan that called for ministers “to send local inquiries in the country to strengthen the authorities – which then refer back to the government”, and for a “national audit” to investigate whether the grooming gangs were still running. operation or if the cases were missing.

On Thursday, Chris Philp, who speaks for the Conservative Party in internal affairs, dismissed the initiative as insufficient. “The Government’s announcement of only five local gang violence investigations is totally inadequate,” he wrote on social media, saying many more cities were affected. “And the rest—don’t you mind?”