UK: The facts that prove the far-right 'grooming gang' narrative wrong

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, a close supporter of incoming US President Donald Trump, has spent the last week in a public spat with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over Britain’s notorious so-called “grooming gangs” scandal. 

Last week Musk accused Starmer of being "complicit in the rape of Britain" during his tenure as director of public prosecutions (DPP) for supposedly failing to tackle "grooming gangs".

On Monday Starmer hit back, saying that online discourse had "crossed a line". 

He further accused opposition Conservative MPs of "amplifying what the far-right is saying" on child sexual abuse after failing to act "for 14 long years".

As of this week, Musk has shown no sign of reining in the rhetoric.

“There is an Islamic crime problem within the UK,” posted influencer Andrew Tate on social media platform X on Tuesday. “This is an objective fact.”

Musk, the platform’s owner and the world’s richest man, shared the post. “True words,” he commented.

The "grooming gang" issue has become a national crisis, with Starmer and the opposition Conservative Party’s leader Kemi Badenoch clashing for nearly 20 minutes in parliament on Wednesday over whether there should be a new public inquiry over the abuses.

Over the past two decades, many Asian-origin and Muslim men have been prosecuted for severe sexual crimes, including rape, in several high-profile group cases.

This is typically referred to, including by the British government, as the “grooming gang” phenomenon.

The topic has been widely covered on far-right media outlets, as well as by anti-Muslim influencers.

As a result, innocent Muslims have been attacked, falsely imprisoned and even killed in the last several years over a narrative blaming Islam and Pakistani culture for the staggering child sexual abuse scandals.

The narrative states that “grooming gangs” are overwhelmingly made up of Muslims and ethnic minorities, and that they target almost exclusively white English girls. 

It credits mass immigration, as well as the religion and culture of immigrants, for the crimes and says they were ignored and covered up by police forces and local authorities due to “political correctness” over fears of being called racist. 

True words https://t.co/6BdIVSRlXy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2025

Middle East Eye has examined the available data and found the narrative to be false.

No ethnic minority, including Pakistanis, is disproportionately involved in sexual abuse, according to the available data, while abuse victims are not exclusively white girls.

Fears of racism accusations and concern over “race relations” did sometimes contribute to police and political inaction but they were far from major factors.

Yet the popular narrative is propagated not just by far-right activists, but becoming increasingly mainstream.

Last week, the Conservative Party's shadow justice secretary, former minister Robert Jenrick, wrote in a column for the Telegraph: "Not all cultures are equal: importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here."

He added: "And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this."

Jenrick has since doubled down his comments, as has party leader Kemi Badenoch.

Not a legal category

The phrase "grooming gang" is often used by commentators and politicians, but it is not a legal category and there is no "grooming" offence in English law.

Instead, the phrase is commonly used to describe Muslim or South Asian-origin abusers.

In the words of Nazir Afzal, who was chief prosecutor for the North West England region from 2011-2015 and led an unprecedented drive to prosecute offenders: "One day I was prosecuting a 'grooming gang', the next a 'paedophile ring'.

"For me they were all child sex abusers, but the two terms are often used by others, and it’s notable that the first tends to be used when the perpetrators are disproportionately non-white, while the second is deployed when the abusers are invariably white."

'One day I was prosecuting a "grooming gang", the next a "paedophile ring"... For me they were all child sex abusers, but... the first tends to be used when the perpetrators are non-white'

- Nazir Afzal, former chief prosecutor North West England

Although most media and political focus is currently on specific sexual abuse scandals involving gangs of Pakistani-origin and Muslim perpetrators, these constitute only a small percentage - three percent as of 2023 - of all group-based child sexual exploitation in Britain, according to data gathered by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. 

The popular notion that men of Pakistani heritage are disproportionately involved in group-based child sexual abuse has been proven false in a series of recent studies.

A report by the now-defunct Quilliam Foundation in 2017, regularly cited to this day, asserted that 84 percent of offenders convicted for “grooming gang” offences were Asian.

But in 2020, the Home Office released a report on group-based child sexual exploitation which dismissed the Quilliam study as unreliable.

The Home Office report stated "that group-based offenders are most commonly White".

It also said: "Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.

"However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE [child sexual exploitation] offending".

This means that there was no reliable or representative evidence of any ethnic group being overrepresented in offending.

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A few years later, the Home Office-funded Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse (CSA Centre), which works closely with the government, local authorities and police, released a report on child sexual abuse in 2022-23.

"We estimate that at least one in 10 children in England and Wales are sexually abused before the age of 16," the report said.

Drawing on the "latest evidence from official data released by child protection, criminal justice and health agencies", it found that 88 percent of defendants proceeded against for child sexual abuse offences in England and Wales were white British. 

Some 83 percent of the general population over the age of ten are white British.

The study found that two percent of defendants were Pakistani, the same percentage of the general population being Pakistani.

And two percent of defendants were Bangladeshi, also in proportion to the general population.

The most recent major report was released by the Labour government in November 2024 and focused on group-based offending. 

It revealed that 83 percent of perpetrators convicted in 2023 were white and 7 percent were Asian, broadly in line with the general population. 

'Race' concerns sometimes prevented action

A prominent accusation in discourse surrounding the "grooming gang" scandals has been that police forces and local authorities often ignored or covered up abuse by Asian men.

Some high-profile commentators and politicians, including Jenrick, have said this was due to fears of being labelled racist.

There is indeed strong evidence that this played a role in failures - but not that it was always the sole or even most important factor, contrary to what is often claimed.

To sustain order in multicultural Britain, the state considered it necessary to apply the law selectively.

For decades the most appalling crimes from predominantly British-Pakistani men were legalised and actively covered up to prevent disorder.

The rule of law was abandoned to…

— Robert Jenrick (@RobertJenrick) January 4, 2025

According to Dr Ella Cockbain, who leads University College London's research group on human trafficking, smuggling and exploitation: "In a few places (eg Telford and Rotherham), fears of upsetting race relations were indeed identified as a problem.

"But even there, 'political correctness' has never been the sole or even the main explanatory factor for inaction,” she added. 

“Focusing on that detracts from major issues, such as derisory attitudes to victims and survivors of child sexual abuse - who were all too often ignored, blamed and even criminalised."

Julie Bindel, a campaigner who has worked on child sexual abuse cases for decades, wrote in 2024: “In many cases, girls subjected to such abuse, no matter the racial and religious background of their abusers, are not believed by the police, and at times they are even blamed for what happened to them.”

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Particularly significant in indicating these issues is the widely cited 2014 Jay Report, a local inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town of Rotherham, one of the most notorious sites of "grooming gang" activity. 

The report, which covered all child sexual exploitation and not only the "grooming gang" category, estimated that a staggering 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. 

It found evidence that race-related sensitivities influenced policy responses, although not individual cases: "Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, rather than in individual cases."

The report also stated: "‘Frontline staff did not report personal experience of attempts to influence their practice or decision-making because of ethnic issues."

Damningly, it judged that the police regarded “many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime”.

Elsewhere, reports have come to markedly different conclusions and found that fear of upsetting race relations played a major role in the approach to the issue. 

The Telford Inquiry, published in 2022, found that among police officers “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”. Meanwhile senior council staff were afraid that the abuse “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”. 

But it is a mixed picture. The 2016 Drew Review of South Yorkshire Police’s responses to child sexual exploitation found that an undue focus on "red light areas . . . and gangs of men principally of Pakistani heritage led not only the force but also probably the whole partnership to look for signs of exploitation in the wrong places".

Victims are not exclusively white

A particularly common trope is that while “grooming gang” members are overwhelmingly from ethnic minority backgrounds, the victims are white girls targeted for their race.

The reality is more complex. 

Victims are largely, but not exclusively, vulnerable working-class white girls. 

Some victims do not fit the stereotype: they have been boys or from ethnic minority backgrounds 

In some cases, abusers have been documented expressing racist views about their victims, calling them slurs like “white slags” and “white bitches”. In many instances, this has indicated that they chose their victims on a racial basis.

But this is not always the case. One judge who sentenced 14 gang members in Newcastle in 2017 found that the abusers “selected their victims not because of their race but because they were young, impressionable, naive and vulnerable”. 

Moreover, some victims do not fit the stereotype: they have been boys or from ethnic minority backgrounds. 

In a 2018 report on media coverage of abuse in Rotherham and Rochdale, Dr Tina Patel wrote: “Although some of the victims were also of the same ethnic background as the abusers, media attention selectively focused on those victims who were of white ethnic background.”

Other studies have similarly warned that press coverage often erases victims of sexual abuse that do not fit racial stereotypes.

Culture and religion not major motivators

The idea that Pakistani religious and cultural attitudes have been responsible for the “grooming gang” phenomenon was recently espoused by Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, but it has a long history. 

In 2011 Labour’s Jack Straw, a former home secretary, said “grooming gangs” were a result of regressive British Pakistani culture, including the practice of arranged marriage and view that white girls were “easy meat”.

Numerous researchers, however, have challenged the notion that a mainly cultural or religious explanation lies behind the “grooming gang” phenomenon. 

In reality, there has never been evidence that a particular ethnic, religious or cultural group in Britain is more likely than others to commit sexual abuse.

As former prosecutor Afzal has argued, opportunity and circumstance are more significant than religion and culture, with ethnic minority men in some towns dominating the night-time economy, working as taxi drivers and takeaway owners. 

“It is not the abusers’ race that defines them, but their attitudes to women and girls,” Afzal asserted in 2023.

“They target young women and girls because of their availability and vulnerability, as a result of shortcomings on the part of those who should have safeguarded them.”