What are grooming gangs? UK scandal explained

A new investigation has been launched into claims that officers from South Yorkshire Police were involved in the Rotherham grooming gang scandal.

Five women abused as children by the grooming gangs have come forward to say they were also abused by police officers in the town at that time, said the BBC. One of the women said a police officer told her that he would "hand her back to the gang if she did not comply". Other testimony the BBC has seen suggests the police officers failed to act despite knowing about the abuse.

Professor Alexis Jay, who led a "landmark" national inquiry into child sexual abuse and delivered her report in 2022, said she'd be "shocked" if South Yorkshire Police were to investigate the accusations itself, and that a "criminal investigation should be handed to another force or independent body".

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The prime minister announced in June that there would be a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, which would be able to compel witnesses to appear and provide evidence.

Do we need a national public inquiry?

Some experts thought not. Public inquiries are slow and expensive; there have already been local inquiries in Rotherham (twice) and Telford, reviews in Oldham and Rochdale, and a seven-year national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, led by Professor Alexis Jay, which included grooming gangs in its remit. The problem is well understood, some would say; the vital thing now is to tackle it.

Even Casey wasn't sure about the need for another national inquiry but she told the BBC that she changed her mind while writing her report because of "the reluctance" of local authorities to accept "that they have failings" and "didn't treat victims well enough".

How did the UK grooming gangs scandal emerge?

Reports of young girls being groomed by gangs of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, first began to emerge in 2002, when the then-Labour MP Ann Cryer warned that it was happening in her West Yorkshire constituency of Keighley.

In 2010, a group of five men who had committed sexual offences against girls aged 12 to 16 were convicted in Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The Times then launched a long investigation, exposing not only the shocking extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, but also a wider pattern of horrendous abuses of young girls by organised networks of predominantly British-Pakistani men.

The story began to gain wider traction. In recent years, child-grooming gangs have been jailed in more than a dozen other English towns, mostly in the north of England and the Midlands: notably Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, but also Bristol, Oxford, Huddersfield, Halifax and Banbury, among others.

Why are they called grooming gangs?

Child sexual abuse is mostly carried out by relatives and other trusted figures. But in these cases, gangs used grooming techniques to find their victims in public: girls aged 11 to 16, mostly white, often from troubled backgrounds, would be flooded with attention from men a few years older, who often worked as taxi drivers or in takeaways; many were involved in the illegal drug trade. The girls would be given alcohol or drugs and then deceived or forced into sex with one man, who would then pass them on to be raped, often violently, by his friends or relatives.

"It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered," noted Alexis Jay's 2014 inquiry report into abuse in Rotherham. "They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated." Children were "doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened [that] they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators." Some victims were murdered: in Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 with her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She was pregnant, for a second time, by him when she died.

How many children were abused?

Very large numbers. In Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls were estimated to have been abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013; in Telford, it is estimated that over 1,000 children were abused over three decades. In Rochdale, an inquiry identified 74 probable victims and evidence of a much wider problem. But the statistics are incomplete and highly contested.

How did the authorities respond?

A series of local inquiries have exposed an official response that was unforgivably inadequate. In her report, Jay said that South Yorkshire Police had treated child victims with "contempt", and that social workers had "underplayed" the problem.

In at least two cases, police arrested the fathers of abused girls when they attempted to remove their daughters from the houses where they were being abused. On another occasion, police attended a derelict house and found an intoxicated girl with several male abusers; they arrested the child for being "drunk and disorderly", but detained none of the men.

Inquiries in both Telford and Rotherham also found that child sexual exploitation was dismissed as "child prostitution"; teachers and social workers were discouraged from reporting abuse. Witnesses were not protected. Other inquiries and reviews in Rochdale and Oldham identified similar issues.

More recent testimony by victims has also alleged that some of the police officers abused girls themselves, and "corrupt police officers worked alongside the gangs or failed to act on child sexual exploitation", said the BBC. No public servants have yet been charged in connection with the scandal.

Why did officials fail to address grooming gangs properly?

There are a range of explanations, from lack of understanding and incompetence to snobbery, misogyny and fear of inflaming racial tensions.

Many of the victims came from care homes. Some police officers referred to them as "slags", and to their abuse as a "lifestyle choice"; the issue was given a low priority. Prosecutors saw victims as poor witnesses. Social workers in Rotherham were often "overwhelmed", Jay found. Another inquiry found that Rotherham Council was "in denial".

And then there's the issue of ethnicity. Early whistleblowers, including MP Ann Cryer, former police officer Maggie Oliver and journalists Andrew Norfolk and Julie Bindel, were dismissed as Islamophobic and racist and, in 2004, a Channel 4 documentary about Asian men grooming girls in Bradford was postponed over fears that it could lead to race riots. There is evidence that many officials feared being accused of racism: Jay found that councillors had fretted that discussion of the issue could harm "community cohesion"; Telford's inquiry also identified a "nervousness about race". A vast amount of evidence was ignored and there have been many claims of cover-ups.

In her recently published report, Casey said that the system "consistently failed" to acknowledge that the perpetrators were disproportionately from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds and targeted white girls. "Flawed data", she said, was "used repeatedly to dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs' as sensationalised, biased or untrue". State institutions often avoided the topic for "fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems".

How has the government responded?

Keir Starmer's government had been under pressure to launch a national inquiry for some time. In January, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a compromise solution: a "rapid" nationwide audit of grooming gang evidence led by Baroness Casey, and five government-backed local inquiries.

When her report was published in June, Casey said that the system had "consistently failed" to acknowledge that the perpetrators were disproportionately from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds and targeted white girls. "Flawed data", she said, was "used repeatedly to dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs' as sensationalised, biased or untrue". State institutions often avoided the topic for "fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems".

Starmer accepted Casey's recommendations to hold a national police operation to review any cases that have not been acted on, and to set up a national inquiry overseen by an Independent Commission.

The government has also announced increased funding for the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme, which includes equipping police forces with AI-enabled technology to analyse large swathes of data and communication patterns between suspects, as well as translate messages sent in foreign languages.

What is Starmer's role in the scandal?

"Deeply complicit in the mass rapes." That's how Elon Musk characterised his role in the grooming scandal. But is this accurate? The short answer is an emphatic "no".

As director of public prosecutions, Starmer headed the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013, with overall responsibility for bringing criminal charges in England and Wales. Musk's claim appears to refer to a decision taken by a CPS lawyer in July 2009 to drop a child grooming case in Rochdale because the victim wasn't considered credible (despite her attacker's DNA being found on her underwear). The abuse continued after the case was dropped.

However, Starmer was not involved in that decision, and, in 2011, he supported the decision of Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor for North West England, to reopen the case. As a result, nine men were jailed in 2012, for sexually exploiting up to 47 girls. In 2013, Starmer introduced CPS rules for grooming cases, to try to ensure that victims were heard and "stereotypes" about them challenged; prosecutions rose to record levels. That year, Starmer and the CPS were commended by a Commons Home Affairs Select Committee for trying to uncover "systematic failure and to improve the way things are done".