The British government bowed to pressure on Thursday and announced a new inquiry into child sexual exploitation and abuse. It comes less than a month after billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to highlight the issue with a series of vitriolic posts.
Speaking in parliament, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she had commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of exploitation by gangs across the country”, which would look at data on the ethnicity of perpetrators. .
She also said the government would support and fund up to five local investigations into the issue of so-called grooming gangs. The Grooming Gang is a group of men found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in the UK, some as young as 11. 2000s to early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani descent.
The scandal was widely covered in the British media in the 2010s and has already been the subject of local and national investigations, with predominantly white girls being exploited, assaulted and raped by groups of men in many towns and cities. It was done.
Numerous studies have shown that when victims and parents seek help, police and social services often refuse. Some police officers called the victims “tarts” and called the abuse of the girls a “lifestyle choice,” while highlighting the ethnicity of the perpetrators could lead to them being labeled racists. Some police officers were worried that they might be attacked.
Grooming gangs account for a small proportion of the total number of child sexual abuse cases recorded in England and Wales. Official data released in November showed that of the 115,489 child sexual abuse crimes recorded in 2023, 4,228 (3.7%) involved a group of two or more perpetrators. And of those incidents, 1,125 were committed by relatives or family members at home.
But the issue is a highly emotional one, fueled by Mr Musk who this month unfairly accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labor MPs of allowing gang grooming. His social posts contained a number of inaccuracies and slurs, including accusing former chief prosecutor Starmer of being complicit in the “rape of Britain”. But his intervention reignited debate over sensitive issues such as race, sexual abuse and the cultural values ​​of some immigrant communities.
The government had previously rejected calls from the anti-immigration Reform UK Party and the main opposition Conservative Party to set up a new national inquiry. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said: “No one has matched the dots” over the grooming incident. , including the involvement of Pakistani men.
The government had said it would instead focus on implementing the recommendations of Professor Alexis Jay's previous national inquiry into child sexual abuse. The investigation took seven years, processed more than two million pages of evidence and featured the voices of around 6,000 victims. The inquiry, due to conclude in 2022, made a series of recommendations that the previous Conservative-led government failed to implement.
Ms Jay also oversaw a 2014 investigation into a grooming gang in Rotherham, a town in northern England where 1,400 minors were raped and trafficked, mainly by men of Pakistani descent, between 1997 and 2013, but new It opposed a national investigation and called on the Labor government instead. To act on her previous recommendations.
On Thursday, Ms Cooper asked Louise Casey, who carried out the 2015 investigation into the agency's response to child sexual abuse in Rotherham, to audit the scale of gang exploitation and look into further evidence not previously available. He said he had requested it. Available.
Ms Cooper said the new audit “properly examines ethnic data and the demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, and examines the cultural and social factors that drive this type of crime, including between different ethnic groups. We will consider it.”
Mr Cooper also announced plans to help the northern town of Oldham and up to four other local authorities carry out an investigation “to obtain truth and justice for victims and survivors”. Police chiefs are also being asked to review past gang exploitation cases in which no charges were filed and reopen investigations if necessary.
The Government's announcement on Thursday follows calls for action from a number of Labor MPs, including Sarah Champion, who represents Rotherham. She calls for ministers to “require local investigations across the country to hold authorities to account, who then report back to government” and for a “national audit” to investigate whether grooming gangs still exist. He proposed a five-point plan. Whether any operations or cases were missed.
On Thursday, Chris Phillip, Conservative Party leader on home affairs, dismissed the efforts as insufficient. “It is totally inadequate that the government announced that there were only five investigations into local rape gangs,” he wrote on social media, adding that more towns were affected. “What about the rest? Aren't they important?”
