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UK - Grooming Gangs

As the scale of the grooming gangs scandal in the United Kingdom began to dawn on the rest of the world, there was a gravely large amount of blame to be shared about. It’s a well-known fact that this type of abuse has been committed by various demographic groups, but the clearly racialised nature of the gangs in places like Rotherham was being weaponized by those who hope to stir up social tensions.

Grooming gangs in the United Kingdom represent a disturbing and complex form of organized crime, characterized by the systematic sexual exploitation of vulnerable individuals, predominantly children and young people. These gangs employ a predatory methodology of building trust and emotional connection with their victims before subjecting them to manipulation, coercion, and abuse. The issue gained significant national prominence following the exposure of the Rotherham scandal, which unveiled the vast scale and devastating impact of this criminal activity.

The term "grooming gangs" can encompass various structures, from online networks and street-based groups to more sophisticated organized criminal enterprises. The core of their operation lies in the grooming process itself. Perpetrators, often working in groups, identify and target vulnerable individuals, building relationships with them over time.

Many perpetrators have been identified as coming from Mirpur, a city in the Kashmir region of Pakistan, with some noting cultural attitudes toward women and outsiders as contributing factors. Judge Gerald Clifton, who sentenced eight men of Pakistani origin in Rochdale, said the offenders viewed victims as “worthless and beyond respect”. He added that one of the motivating factors was that the victims “were not part of… community or religion”. The prevalence of certain group was acknowledged in 2018 by then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid. He comes from a Pakistani background and was born in one of the worst-affected towns, Rochdale.

The offenders often operated within the nighttime economy, with many working as taxi drivers or in takeout restaurants. The grooming typically began with younger men targeting children in public places such as shopping malls, bus stations, or arcades, where they were lured with attention, free rides, and small gifts. Once trust was established, older men were introduced. The “boyfriend” figure manipulated the girls into sexual exploitation, involving other men. Drugs, alcohol, and psychological control were used to trap victims in cycles of abuse, with threats and violence ensuring their silence. Authorities, including police and social services, often dismissed the victims as “troubled” or “rebellious teenagers” who had willingly engaged in risky behavior.

Editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo News Mehdi Hasan returned to "Piers Morgan Uncensored" on 09 January 2025 for a heated debate with Piers on Elon Musk’s disinformation campaign about the UK’s “grooming gangs,” the role of race and religion, and whether there should be a new UK national inquiry into the issue. “Why are we defining child sex crimes and grooming gangs by race, unless you're a racist or trying to make political hay out of this?” Mehdi says to Piers. “If you’re only obsessed with the perpetrators as Elon Musk, as Robert Jenrick is, then you don’t actually care about these girls.”

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal stands as one of the most shocking and well-documented cases of grooming gang activity in the UK. A 2014 report by Professor Alexis Jay revealed that an estimated 1,400 children, mainly girls, in the town of Rotherham were subjected to sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013.

The report detailed horrific accounts of abuse, including rape, trafficking, and violence, and exposed systemic failures by the local council and police to protect the victims. The perpetrators in Rotherham were predominantly of British-Pakistani origin, a detail that has been a sensitive and complex aspect of the public discourse surrounding grooming gangs. The scandal led to numerous criminal investigations, convictions, and a widespread re-evaluation of how authorities handle child sexual exploitation. Similar patterns of abuse have since been uncovered in other areas, including Rochdale, Oxford, and Telford.

The Rotherham scandal involved hundreds of men (for the most part of Pakistani origin) grooming a large number of young girls (for the most part white) for illicit sexual purposes – that took place in some 40 migrant-dominated British towns (most famously Rotherdam) between 1997 and 2013. Subsequent inquiries disclosed that widespread grooming took place, and that the immediate response by police, local councils and the director of public prosecutions DPP was tardy and unenthusiastic, to say the least.

Men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, were found to have raped and tortured a large number of vulnerable young girls over a 25-year period in numerous English towns and cities. The victims, mainly white girls aged between 11 and 18 from troubled homes, were tortured, drugged and pimped out. At the epicenter were post-industrial towns in northern England and the Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh established communities in the 1960s. Years of inquiries and investigations found systemic failures, and concluded that local politicians and police covered the crimes for fear of being seen as racist. However, no officer or government employee has been convicted for their misconduct.

Complaints by parents of the young girls were initially ignored by police, and the mainstream British media failed to comprehensively report on what was happening at the time. Conservative commentators and some Tory politicians have for the past decade sought to politicise the “grooming gangs” issue, claiming that these failures were caused by institutionalised woke reluctance to expose the criminal activities of members of an ethnic community, and rigorously prosecute wrongdoers.

Starmer was the DPP between 2008 and 2013, and this was the basis for Elon Musk’s attack on him. He accused Starmer of being “evil”, failing to prosecute offenders because of his ideological commitment to diversity politics and of being complicit “in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. Musk also intemperately called Jessica Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” – an absurd term – and a “witch”. Such crudities appear to be the norm for Musk.

US billionaire Elon Musk single-handedly brought back into the spotlight one of the darkest unresolved scandals of child exploitation in the UK. The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X posted a series of tweets about grooming gangs, and shamed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer into explaining what was he doing while serving as chief prosecutor at the time the scandal broke. Musk described the case as “the worst mass crime against the people of Britain ever.” The Tesla CEO erroneously claimed he was jailed for “telling the truth” about the rape scandal.

The “grooming gangs scandal” became a political issue again in October 2024, when Phillips rejected calls for a further national inquiry into the matter. Musk called for a wide-ranging inquiry into the scandal and Starmer’s personal involvement in it. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has also called for a government inquiry.

Starmer firmly rejected Musk’s allegations – he claims, in fact, to have prosecuted some offenders – and it was not yet apparent precisely what Starmer’s personal role, if any, in the scandal was. Starmer has predictably accused Musk of “peddling lies and misinformation” and refused to establish an inquiry.

There was no doubt that Musk’s intervention was politically motivated. As an influential member of the incoming Trump administration, Musk was no doubt seeking to curry favour with the new president by attacking Starmer – whose unwavering support for NATO and Zelensky were anathema to Trump.

Musk, who was recently named as a special adviser by Trump, posted several times on his X account on 01 and 02 January 2025, stating that Tommy Robinson, a notorious far-right activist who campaigns against immigration and Islam, “should be freed” from prison. "Why was Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth? He should be freed and those who covered up this travesty should take his place in that cell."

The Tesla CEO falsely claimed Robinson was jailed for “telling the truth” about the rape scandal. Tommy Robinson, a one-time football hooligan whose real name was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has been involved in various criminal activities over the years.

In March 2018, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. In 2017 Robinson was found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside a rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence, which was suspended for a period of 18 months.

In May 2018 Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.

In 2024 Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison for breaching a High Court injunction by repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee, Jamal Hijazi. Robinson claimed in two Facebook videos that the Hijazir was "not innocent and he violently attacks young English girls in his school". In clips viewed by nearly one million people, Robinson also claimed Hijazi "beat a girl black and blue" and threatened to stab another boy at his school.

Robinson's repeated jailings down the years - including nine months for interfering with a trial of a sexual grooming gang - failed to silence him. Robinson was jailed for 18 months after admitting contempt of court by repeating false claims against the Syrian refugee. On 28 October 2024 Robinson admitted 10 breaches of a High Court order made in 2021.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage distanced himself 03 January 2025 from Elon Musk's support for jailed far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. Musk's support for Yaxley-Lennon was uncomfortable for Farage, who has made it clear over a number of years that he does not want him in his political party. Musk called 05 Janaury 2025 for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, just weeks after reports the multi-billionaire was in talks to donate to the party. In a post on his social media site X, Musk said Farage "doesn't have what it takes" to lead the party - but did not explain his reasoning.

Previous inquiries have conclusively shown that widespread grooming took place – although its extent was not clear – and that the police and other authorities were exceedingly slow to take appropriate action. It was also apparent that woke media organisations failed to adequately report on the entire “grooming gang scandal” when it was happening. It was not until 2010 that the first convictions occurred, with five British-Pakistani men found guilty of sexually abusing girls aged 12 to 16. Then in 2012, The Times’ journalist Andrew Norfolk published a horrific exposé revealing that groups of mostly Pakistani older men were using young girls for sex in Rotherham “on an unprecedented scale,” a matter that was well known to the authorities.

Professor Alexis Jay’s investigation uncovered a shocking “conservative” estimate of 1,400 children exploited between 1997 and 2013. Rotherham has a population of 260,000. The majority of the perpetrators were described as being of Asian descent, targeting victims that were primarily young white girls. “There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”

The same thing happened in Telford, later labeled the “child sex capital of Britain”. First a media report found the scale of the abuse was downplayed. In 2018 a Sunday Mirror investigation found that grooming gangs had abused over 1,000 girls since the 1980s. Four years later a local inquiry confirmed the Sun report. Following the same pattern, the evidence had been ignored for decades, and agencies blamed victims instead of perpetrators and hesitated to act due to “nervousness about race.”

This, of course, as conservative media outlets and politicians assert, can only be explained by a deep-seated ideological reluctance to pursue perpetrators who happened to have come from an ethnic background. As with all “culture wars “ issues in the West, the search for truth was compromised from the outset by emotive moral posturing and irrational allegations and counter allegations of “racism” and “wokeism”. Neither side of the impassioned political debate was willing to put their ideological prejudices aside and determine exactly what occurred in Rotherdam and other towns – let alone ensure that appropriate action was taken against the perpetrators.