What is the UK's 'grooming gangs' scandal, and why has it resurfaced?

Less than a year after it swept into power with a massive majority, the UK's centre-left Labour government is struggling to keep a grip on the political narrative.

And thanks to recent interventions from none other than X owner Elon Musk, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now grappling with the resurgence of a long-running scandal: a series of incidents stretching back two decades in which organised gangs sexually exploited hundreds of vulnerable young women and girls.

These so-called "grooming gangs" operated separately in multiple towns and cities for a number of years before their activities came to full public attention in the early 2010s.

Most of the victims were female, many of them were underage, and many were living in state children's homes or already known to local social services while being exploited, sometimes for years.

It quickly transpired that many of the groups were at least partially known to local law enforcement for some time before their members faced many criminal charges. Scores of men in different towns have been arrested, tried and imprisoned for their actions.

While the scandal has faded in and out of national attention for more than a decade, it resurfaced in recent weeks after it emerged Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had refused a request from Oldham City Council to set up a national inquiry into the issue and instead told the council it should mount a local one itself.

The story sparked a national debate and drew international attention, including from Musk, who has lately paid close attention to UK politics and tweeted about the country's supposed problems with racial integration in increasingly extreme terms.

As the opposition pounced on the issue, the government has announced it will set up a national panel to listen to grooming victims, and Phillips says that if those who testify demand a national inquiry with the statutory power to compel witnesses to appear, she will listen to them.

Decades of abuse

Among the worst cases were gangs operating in the northern towns of Rotherham and Rochdale, but a number of others have been exposed around the country over the last decade-and-a-half in numerous towns and cities: Oldham, Oxford, Telford, Peterborough, and several others. Ministers and members of the opposition have acknowledged that similar gangs may still be operating.

The Rotherham case has lodged particularly deeply in national memory, thanks both to its sheer scale and to a public investigation conducted by Alexis Jay, a professor of social work.

Her searing government-ordered report, published in 2014, detailed how an organised gang active in the town abused girls as young as 11, trafficking them across numerous towns and sometimes picking them up from children's care homes in taxis without any effort to hide what they were doing.

The total number of minors abused across the various places gangs have been exposed is estimated by authorities to have run into the thousands, and some of the groups are known to have operated for decades.

Worse still, while Jay and others who have investigated found that many people working with the children exploited identified and raised concerns, there seems to have been a pattern of police and senior management staff disbelieving their warnings or simply disregarding them.

'Sub-communities within those countries'

When some of the worst cases became public — in many cases thanks to the efforts of victims, whistleblowers and investigative journalists rather than law enforcement — much of the ensuing national outrage focused on the fact that the perpetrators in several cases were men of Pakistani descent. And as the scandal has risen back to the top of the news agenda, this theme has resurfaced with it.

A report on group-based child sexual exploitation released by the Home Office in 2020 made clear that based on the available evidence, the organised groups that perpetrate this type of abuse "come from diverse backgrounds, with each group being broadly ethnically homogeneous" — and that the people involved in the phenomenon as a whole are "predominantly white".

However, opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, who was elected to lead the Conservative Party last year, has not held back on discussing the grooming scandal in terms that many of her predecessors would have considered beyond the pale.

"There is a systematic pattern of behaviour not even from just one country, but from sub-communities within those countries," she told right-wing TV channel GB News in an interview about the grooming saga.

"People with a particular background, particular class background, work background ... very, very poor sort of peasant background, very very rural, almost cut off from even the home origin countries that they might have been in, they're not necessarily first generation."

Badenoch acknowledged that also important was the state's failure to protect the vulnerable children who were abused, even when the abuse was repeatedly flagged to authorities.

But she doubled down on her diagnosis of the perpetrators — explaining that what struck her was the apparent sense of impunity with which they operated, as opposed to the punishments they would supposedly face in their home countries (even as she acknowledged many of the perpetrators who have been arrested are not immigrants).

"There are some places where, when people behave in that way, a mob turns up and burns their homes down, and then they know that they can’t do that sort of thing," she said.

Badenoch's comments have been condemned by various MPs in other parties. But when it comes to the grooming scandal, even some Labour politicians have previously said that fear of being labelled racist has created a taboo around saying there is a specific problem with a cohort of men of Pakistani descent participating in sexual exploitation.

Among them is Sarah Champion, who has been the Labour MP for Rotherham since 2012. In 2017, she was widely slated for writing an op-ed for a tabloid newspaper in which she stated: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

Champion claimed at the time that the piece had been edited to remove nuance from her argument, but she found herself shunned by many in her party over the issue.

However, she remains an MP, and has now joined the cross-party calls for a new inquiry, saying she has come round to the idea because only a full national inquiry will "restore faith in our safeguarding systems".

Dimensions of racism

Musk's intervention in the saga did not come out of nowhere. Like many situated on the US and international far right, the X owner and éminence grise of US President-elect Donald Trump has lately become fixated on the presence of Muslims in Europe, and in the UK in particular.

He, Trump and US Vice President-elect JD Vance have all taken issue with the fact that London has a Muslim mayor, Labour's Sadiq Khan. When Labour formed a government last summer, Vance told a conference of far-right thinkers and politicians that the UK is now the "first truly Islamist country" to have nuclear weapons.

This theme of "infiltration" by Muslims has a long history on the British right, surging particularly during the "War on Terror" years and then coming back to the forefront when the grooming gangs scandal broke.

And as the Tory Party has embraced increasingly extreme anti-immigration rhetoric in recent years in an effort to cling on to right-wing voters, its hardliners have pointed to Muslims and people from predominantly Muslim countries in particular as threats to British society.

Not everyone in and around the party holds these views. But among those who do is Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, whom Badenoch defeated in this year's leadership contest, who has sparked a firestorm in the party with his latest remarks about the grooming scandal.

“This appalling affair is the final nail in the coffin for liberals who still cling to the argument that Britain is an integration success story,” Jenrick said on X. “The scandal started with the onset of mass migration. Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.”

His post was immediately controversial, and anonymous sources within the party were quick to brief British newspapers that they considered them repugnant. But the incentive for the Conservatives to continue focusing on the racial aspect of the story is strong.

Revolt on the right

Having governed the UK for 14 years until last summer, the Conservatives have recently slipped behind Nigel Farage's far-right Reform UK in the polls, a once-unimaginable state of affairs that comes just months after Farage repeated false claims that an asylum seeker had stabbed several children to death in the city of Southport.

He was one of a number of prominent right-wingers widely accused of condoning and even fuelling organised racist violence in several areas, leading to hundreds of arrests.

At the time of that eruption, Musk himself commented on the violence on X, replying to a user blaming the violence on migration that "Civil war is inevitable".

While Farage has been disowned by Musk since flying over to Florida to meet with him and Trump, he is now pushing a hard line against the government on the grooming gangs matter, accusing it not just of negligence but of deliberately covering up the scale of the problem.

He has also said that a national inquiry should focus squarely on the ethnic and national identity of the perpetrators.

"What we need and what [the victims are] calling for is a rifle shot: this inquiry – one that looks specifically at to what extent were gangs of Pakistani men raping young white girls," he told the House of Commons during a debate. "Because ultimately, it seems to me, there’s a deep racist element behind what happened."

In the same debate, one of Farage's Reform UK colleagues, Rupert Lowe, went much further, using grisly and violent language as he called for all Pakistani visas to be refused by the UK government until the issue was fully investigated.

"The mass rape of young, white working-class girls by gangs of Pakistani rapists is a rotting stain on our nation," he said. "This is not about Elon Musk. This is not a bandwagon of the far right. This is about the victims and ensuring swift and brutal justice is delivered to those demons responsible."

But despite Lowe's claims, there is no avoiding that Musk's recent interventions have amplified Farage, resurfaced the grooming gangs scandal and given the British right a new stick with which to beat Starmer's struggling Labour government — even though it was under the Conservatives that the worst of the scandal originally emerged.