The scandal is decades old but continues to this day, and long-running accusations of a cover-up have inflicted both a huge black eye internationally for Britain, and a serious political damage domestically to the ruling Labour Party. It has exposed the dark underbelly of politics and the lengths to which people will go, including the betrayal of societies most vulnerable and members, to to stay in power. 

Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, described the scandal as “a damning indictment of modern day Britain.”

“I am absolutely shocked by what’s happened to the U.K.,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Our country has become unrecognizable and it is a powder keg.” 

Dastardly deeds allowed and obscured by the dictates of political correctness appear finally to be leading to a national reckoning and putting the spotlight on the failures of law enforcement, political leaders, and news media. Despite this, British lawmakers again refused last week to launch a national inquiry into the scandal after objections to the way the vote was being put forward. 

What is the UK grooming gang scandal?

The scandal dates back to 1997 when thousands of white English girls were sexually groomed and serially raped by gangs of men of mostly Pakistani Muslim descent in several towns and cities across England’s north and Midlands. 

At the time, Alan Edwards, a detective, claimed that everyone was “too scared to address the ethnicity factor” of the crimes because racial tensions in the area were so high.

Since then, cases involving the rapes or gang rapes of mostly young, white, poor girls have been referred to as the “grooming gangs” scandal. 

The scandal itself, including Elon Musk’s numerous tweets about it over Christmas and New Year’s, has trained the spotlight again on the heinous crimes themselves that many believe were either not investigated adequately or covered up entirely by the political establishment. A look into the atrocities revealed that almost every level of government failed the young victims. 

“Multiculturalism has played a big part in the grooming gangs scandal,” Gardiner said. “It is suspected in Britain this is widely due to a culture of political correctness and unwillingness to arrest and jail large numbers of Pakistani men. This whole ideology of multiculturalism in Britain, which has been advanced by the left for several decades really, has been a disaster and has played a very big part in the coverup of the grooming gangs scandal.”

When did it start?

Taxi drivers allegedly picked up girls from orphanages or foster homes in Rotherham, a market town in South Yorkshire, to take them to places where they were abused. The taxi drivers’ names were given to the police and the town council in 2001. 

Three years later, a documentary by television’s Channel 4 delved into claims that young white girls in Bradford were being groomed by “Asian” abusers. The documentary was put on hold for three months after law enforcement warned it would inflame racial tensions. 

This move was among the first moves by officialdom to sway news media and discourage them from reporting on the appalling crimes. 

The documentary eventually ran, but it produced very little action for at least a decade, and even when genuine investigations finally got going, there were only a handful of token prosecutions, nothing remotely like a thorough effort to eradicate the problem, and the abuse, and punish the criminals.

In 2010, five Pakistani men were jailed for offenses against girls as young as 12. 

Two years later, the Times of London published a series of articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by grooming gangs. Tucked into the copy was a confidential 2010 police report warning that thousands of similar crimes were being committed in South Yorkshire every year by networks of men most of whom were Muslims. 

Reports have emerged that social workers were intimidated into silence and told they would lose their jobs if they reported rapes. Local law enforcement routinely ignored and in some cases even abetted the rapists.

What’s worse is that senior police officials and others even higher up the totem pole of power deliberately avoided taking action against the rapists, supposedly because they thought this would keep a fragile racial peace. The inaction was referred to as an extension of “community relations.” 

Politicians looked the other way when parents and caregivers begged them for help. When nonprofit organizations, doctors, and victim advocate groups pushed harder and told what they knew to the press, they, too, were labeled racists and Islamophobic. 

“It’s a combination of a lack of police forces together with local authorities, local councils turning a blind eye and then you add to this the failure on the part of much of the British media to cover the horrendous rapes of thousands of young girls,” Gardiner said. “There are multiple actors here who really failed to do anything.” 

How widespread was it?

It is believed that thousands of girls over the years and across the United Kingdom have been raped, abused, passed around, beaten, and in some cases tortured by these grooming groups.

The men lured the most vulnerable girls, who were often poor, fatherless, or orphans, with treats such as food, candy, and car rides. Young men typically found the girls in public places such as shopping malls or outside schools and gradually introduced them to drugs and alcohol. That was followed by a sexual relationship with one man who ultimately demanded the girl prove her love and loyalty by having sex with his friends. 

The girls were then repeatedly raped and pimped out to networks in other cities and ultimately tossed aside after they reached 16, the legal age of consent in the U.K. 

In 2014, the findings of an investigation into abuse in Rotherham set off alarms, but again, little was done in response. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation and trafficking between 1997 and 2013.

The report noted that local authorities had known about the industrial scale abuse but ignored it. Some police officers called the underaged girls “tarts” and referred to their rapes as a “lifestyle choice.” 

The report also revealed that similar gangs were operating in at least 50 cities in England. 

As of January 2025, more than two decades since the allegations were first made, only 61 convictions have been secured, despite the fact that by some calculations one in every seven ethnic Pakistani men in some towns participated in the rape industry.

Was it for the votes?

One of the more unsettling claims made by politicians themselves is that they were told by their party leaders to keep quiet about who the rapists and traffickers were. 

“What surprised me more than anything is that I had senior politicians tell me not to mention the ethnicity or religious bias of those perpetrators,” former Labour MP Simon Danczuk told GBN. “They said it would affect the Labour vote. It was quite clear. They were quite clear about it.”

Danczuk, who represented the constituency of Rochdale as a member of parliament from 2010-2017, named Tony Lloyd, then-chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, who was campaigning to become police commissioner for Greater Manchester, as one of the people who told him to pump the brakes and not reveal the ethnicity of the suspects. 

Lloyd, Danczuk says, wasn’t the only one who put party or personal ambition over victims. 

Gardiner told the Washington Examiner that politicians in some areas of Britain had come to count on the vote of Pakistani immigrants to stay in office.

“You have local political leaders in a number of northern towns who turned a blind eye to what was happening because they did not want to offend immigrant communities and in some cases relied upon Pakistani immigrants for votes,” he said. 

How many official inquiries?

There have been a total of 10 official inquiries into the grooming gangs.

The first was in 2013. The Home Affairs Select Committee published a report into the Rochdale cases and faulted police, social workers, and Crown Prosecution Service prosecutors for failing to protect victims. 

The next was in 2014. Following that inquiry, then-Home Secretary (and future prime minister) Theresa May commissioned the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales. Professor Alexis Jay was named chairwoman. 

In 2015, a West Midlands Police report from 2010 was reluctantly released following a Freedom of Information request. It showed that law enforcement officials knew about grooming gangs and the targeting of children outside schools but worried that allowing the facts to be known would inflame racial tensions. The report claimed almost 500 children were sexually exploited or at risk of sexual exploitation.

That same year, a review by Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership found 373 children could have been sexually exploited and blamed the Thames Valley Police of not believing victims when they came forward t tell their stories. 

Fast-forward several years to a 2022 report by Jay, who had also led the 2014 Rotherham inquiry, that found child sexual exploitation had remained a major problem across the U.K. even after several incidences had been exposed. The report laid out 20 recommendations for protecting vulnerable children but the Conservative government of the time acted on very few of them. 

The report revealed that police officers in Telford described parts of the town as “no-go” areas and it faulted police for showing favoritism towards the Pakistani community. The inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race … bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community.” 

Racial integration in the UK

The grooming scandal is most combustible because of its mix of racial, cultural, and religious differences and sensitivities that allowed immigrant communities a free pass to prey on the native white population. Official cowardice and political correctness are said to have facilitated a massive and depraved network of crime lasting more than a generation.

When India was split into two countries in August 1947, many Indian and Pakistani immigrants moved to the U.K. in search of jobs and other opportunities. Of the South Asian groups that migrated to Britain, the largest was the Pakistanis. Unlike Indians who had assimilated into British culture, Pakistani Muslims held on to theirs, sometimes policing their communities and applying sharia, the Islamic legal system wholly alien and apart from the British legal system.

“Local authorities in some parts of Britain have allowed sharia councils and sharia courts to operate,” Gardiner said. “So in some parts of Britain, there is a dual justice system with Muslim communities facing the jurisdiction of sharia courts, which, of course, have no legal basis in Britain, but they are allowed to operate in some parts of the country. This is a very dangerous development because it has encouraged a lack of British policing in some areas. There is a lack of law enforcement that has taken place and you have sharia courts operating often openly and applying Islamic law instead of British.” 

What is two-tier policing/justice?

Two-tier policing or justice is the belief that police have failed to protect white people from crimes committed by immigrants out of fear they will be labeled racist.

Believers in two-tier policing claim that assaults, in this case by grooming gangs, were allowed to exist or let off easily because of the race of the perpetrators and that if the crimes had been committed by white men, they would have been harshly punished.

Opinion formers on the Right have raised awareness that crimes against whites aren’t being taken as seriously as those against minorities.

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, a populist conservative party, has spoken about two-tier policing, while others such as Musk have taken to social media to amplify it. 

What’s next?

Gardiner believes the only way things will get better is if there is a political overhaul in the next general election, slated four years from now. 

“I predict there will be a landslide for the political right in Britain, which will be a combination of the Conservative Party and the Reform Party and I think the socialists will be thrown out of office because they are hugely unpopular,” he said, adding that he expects there to be a “whole rejection of multiculturalism ideology and policies.”

Musk, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has used his social media platform to demand British Prime Minister Keir Starmer resign, accusing him of being “complicit in the rape of Britain.” 

Starmer was the director of public prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013. The CPS is an independent body that prosecutes criminal cases. After law enforcement investigates a crime, the CPS decides whether to prosecute. The CPS, and Starmer by extension, are criticized for not proceeding with a grooming gang case brought to it from Rochdale, claiming that the main victim was “unreliable.” In 2011, Nazir Afzal, who was appointed by Starmer as a chief prosecutor, reversed the decision and chose to prosecute.

During a news conference on Jan. 6, Starmer called the rape scandal “utterly sick” and said too many victims had been let down by “perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else.” 

He also pushed back on Musk’s claims that he was complicit, saying that when he was chief prosecutor he had tackled the issue “head on” and added that by the time he left office and entered politics in 2015, his office had “the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record.” 

But Jay’s report into the Rotherham cases slammed the CPS and said local law enforcement often cited CPS as being unwilling to prosecute perpetrators.

A 2013 report from the Home Affairs Committee faulted the CPS and said that “unlike many other official agencies implicated in this issue,” the CPS “readily admitted that victims had been let down by them and have attempted both to discover the cause of this systemic failure to improve the way things are done so as to avoid a repetition of such events.” 

But that same report praised Starmer for trying to “improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecution.”

Musk also took aim at Jess Phillips, Britain’s safeguarding minister, calling her a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch” who “deserves to be in prison.” 

Jess Philips is a rape genocide apologist https://t.co/vmLKtIQ6YV

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2025

Phillips called his claims “ridiculous.”

Phillips had turned down a request for a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal, arguing that local inquiries were more effective in implementing change. But she told Sky News that “nothing is off the table.”

“If the victims come forward to me in this victims panel and they say, ‘Sctually, we think there needs to be a national inquiry into this,’ I’ll listen to them,” she said.

A spokesman for Starmer said even though victims’ groups had previously shown that they “do not want to see a national inquiry,” he remained “open-minded” on the subject. 

What lessons can America take from the UK scandal?

“The biggest lesson is do not pursue European-style multiculturalism,” Gardiner said. “There is only one culture that can prevail in America and that’s American culture. Once you start allowing multiple cultures to hold sway this leads to scandals like the grooming scandal whereby society does nothing about mass rapes by Pakistani gangs.”

He added that letting sharia law and courts operate would lead to a “breakdown of society” and also warned about the need to control the borders.

“You’ve got vast numbers of people in Britain that shouldn’t be there in the first place,” he said. “It has allowed the rise of massive criminality, frankly, in some British cities. The United States has got to secure its borders, has to control who comes into the country, and has to deport foreign criminals — get them out.” 

Gardiner said that foreign nationals in the U.K. often don’t face deportation. 

“United States has a lot more power to deport, and they should do it,” he said.