The British government bowed to pressure on Thursday and announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech tycoon, 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 rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” which would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.
He 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 UK . 2000s and early 2010s. Most of the authors were of British Pakistani descent.
The scandal, which was widely reported in the British media in the 2010s and has already been the subject of local and national investigations, affected a number of towns and cities where mostly white girls were exploited, assaulted and gang raped of men.
According to several investigations, victims and parents who asked for help were often let down by the police and social services. Some police officers had described the victims as “sluts” and the abuse suffered by the girls as a “lifestyle choice”, while others feared they would be labeled racist if they highlighted the ethnicity of the perpetrators.
Grooming gangs represent a fraction of the total number of recorded cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. According to official data published in November, of the 115,489 child sexual abuse crimes recorded in 2023, 4,228 cases – or 3.7% – involved gangs of two or more perpetrators. And of these cases, 1,125 were perpetrated by relatives or family members who remained at home.
But the issue is deeply emotional and has been fueled by Musk who this month falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labor MPs of aiding grooming gangs. His social media posts contained many inaccuracies and smears, including accusing Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, of being complicit in the “rape of Britain”. However, his speech 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 launch a new national inquiry from the anti-immigration Reform UK party and the main opposition Conservative Party, whose leader, Kemi Badenoch, said no-one had “connected the dots” on the series of cases of solicitation. , including the involvement of men of Pakistani origin.
The government had said it would instead focus on implementing the recommendations of an earlier national inquiry into child sexual abuse led by Professor Alexis Jay, which lasted seven years, processing more than two million pages of evidence and gathering the voices of around 6,000 victims. The inquiry concluded in 2022 and made a number of recommendations that the previous Conservative-led government failed to implement.
Ms Jay, who also oversaw a 2014 inquiry into grooming gangs in Rotherham, a northern English town where 1,400 minors were raped and trafficked by men of predominantly Pakistani origin between 1997 and 2013, had spoke out against a new national inquiry, instead urging the Labor government to act on its previous recommendations.
On Thursday, Ms Cooper said she had asked Louise Casey, who led an investigation in 2015 into the authorities’ response to child sexual abuse in Rotherham, to undertake an audit into the extent of gang exploitation and to examine further evidence that they had not previously been found. available.
“It will adequately examine the ethnic data and demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, and examine the cultural and social factors underlying these types of crimes, including across different ethnic groups,” Cooper said of the new audit.
Ms Cooper also announced plans to help the northern town of Oldham and up to four other boroughs undertake investigations “to achieve truth and justice for victims and survivors”. Police chiefs were also asked to revisit past cases of gang exploitation where no charges had been laid and to reopen investigations where appropriate.
The Government’s announcement on Thursday followed calls for action from a handful of Labor lawmakers, including Sarah Champion, who represents Rotherham. He had proposed a five-point plan which would see ministers “hold local inquiries across the country to hold the authorities to account – who would then report back to Government”, and a “national audit” to investigate whether grooming gangs were still in activity. operation or if cases were lost.
Chris Philp, the Conservative Party’s home affairs spokesman, dismissed the initiative on Thursday as insufficient. “The government’s announcement of just five investigations into local rapist gangs is completely inadequate,” he wrote on social media, saying many more cities had been affected. “And the rest… doesn’t it matter?”