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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.
Andrew Norfolk 2012: The Times Investigates
Although there were prosecutions the patterns didn’t come to light until a journalist joined the dots further.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
It identified 16,500 children who were at “high risk of sexual exploitation” between 2010 and 2011.
“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.
Reports and Investigations
Numerous reports and investigations have been conducted into the grooming gangs scandal, including those in Rochdale, Oxford, and Huddersfield, among others.“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.”
Political Correctness and Fear of Racist Label
Several investigations said that political correctness influenced authorities’ inaction and failure to make decisive interventions.
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.
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.
The plans also included police recording ethnicity data to make sure suspects “cannot evade justice because of cultural sensitivities.”
“The safety of women and girls is paramount. For too long, political correctness has stopped us from weeding out vile criminals who prey on children and young women. We will stop at nothing to stamp out these dangerous gangs,” Sunak said.
Keir Starmer and CPS
In December 2023, GB News reported that Jess Phillips, Parliamentary under-secretary of state for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, rejected calls for a government inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham.Phillips said it was the council’s responsibility to commission such an inquiry, citing successful local investigations in Rotherham and Telford.
In his recent social posts, Musk criticized both Phillips and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
Musk suggested Phillips should face legal consequences for her stance on the Oldham inquiry.
And he accused Starmer of failing to prosecute grooming gangs during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) between 2008 and 2013.
Maggie Oliver, the former Greater Manchester Police detective, who helped uncover widespread abuse in Rochdale, also had strong words against Starmer.
“We all know what’s going on, but I don’t trust a single one of those who to date have been entrusted with keeping our children safe and prosecuting serial rapists. They’ve failed. Repeatedly. Knowingly. Criminally.”
“Child sexual exploitation is utterly sickening. For many years, victims were let down by perverse ideas about community relations or protecting institutions above all else,” Starmer said.
“As DPP, I reopened cases, challenged myths, and secured the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in Rochdale.
“This case set a precedent, and many followed its format. We changed the entire prosecution approach to ensure victims were heard.”
Starmer told reporters that he won’t tolerate “politicians jumping on the bandwagon, simply to get attention” when they failed to take action while in government.
Commenting on Musk’s support for jailed activist Tommy Robinson, Starmer said those who support Robinson are “supporting a man who went to prison for nearly collapsing a grooming case, a gang grooming case.”
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is an anti-Islam activist and a divisive figure. He is serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court after he admitted to repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee.
A Typical Example: Rochdale Town
The Greater Manchester town of Rochdale has seen better days.Once a booming mill town and textile manufacturing hub during the Industrial Revolution, it has faced years of decline.
Under Operation Span, Abdul Aziz, Adil Khan, and Qari Abdul Rauf were among nine men convicted in 2012 over the rape and trafficking of teenage girls.
Rauf and Khan are still living at their homes in Rochdale, despite repeated efforts to deport them to Pakistan.
Former Labour Member of Parliament Simon Danczuk told The Epoch Times that he was warned by senior party figures not to mention the ethnicity or religion of grooming gang members when he was the MP for Rochdale from 2010 to 2017.
He named the now-deceased Tony Lloyd, then chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
“He was hoping to run for Greater Manchester Police Commissioner and was worried that linking ethnicity and Islam to the scandal would hurt his electoral chances,” Danczuk said.
Danczuk said that he worked with Sara Rowbotham, a National Health Service (NHS) sexual health worker and whistleblower, who gathered evidence that helped lead to the imprisonment of the nine men.
“She worked for the NHS as a community worker and was trying to get the girls referred into social services for care. She knew they were being abused, but social services were rejecting her referrals,” Danczuk said.
“In November 2012, there was a debate on child abuse in Parliament. I made a speech that had two parts: one was about the grooming gangs and their attempted cover-up, and the other was about Cyril Smith. I named Cyril Smith, my predecessor as MP for Rochdale, as a pedophile,” he said.
Smith, who died in 2010, was unmasked as a serial pedophile who had raped and abused scores of boys in Rochdale for decades.
“That was the first time Smith had been named publicly,” said Danczuk.
“I connected the two stories, pointing out that the girls in the grooming scandal were abused because they were poor, working-class girls, and Smith’s victims were poor, working-class boys. Vulnerable young people had been failed again and again.”
Campaigner Sammy Woodhouse, who was a victim of a Rotherham child grooming gang, welcomed Musk’s intervention.
