What is the British ‘Grooming Gang’ scandal seized by Elon Musk?

On By Littum

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has plunged into British politics in recent weeks, using his social media platform X to attack and spread misinformation about Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other members of the Labor government.

In a series of vicious posts to his 211 million followers in recent days, Mr. Musk falsely accused Mr. Starmer and other Labor Party lawmakers to enable Britain’s so-called grooming gangs. The term refers to a decade-old scandal involving a series of child sexual abuse cases in which girls were assaulted and raped by gangs of men in several cities. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.

Mr. Musk’s post contained several inaccuracies and treated a widely covered topic as if it had never been mentioned. But the posts nonetheless throw the spotlight back on a painful child sexual exploitation scandal that has troubled Britain and long sparked heated debate on issues of race, immigration and abuse.

In 2011, The Times of London published a number of studies articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in the North of England and the Midlands from 1997 onwards. A detective at the time, Chief Inspector Alan Edwards, told the newspaper: “Everyone has been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.” The cases became known as the “grooming gang” scandal.

In 2014, the results of a year-long official examination into such abuse in the northern English town of Rotherham set off a national reckoning. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, while local authorities looked the other way for years. Similar gangs were also found in other cities in England.

Grooming in Rotherham, population 257,000, tended to follow a similar pattern: young men courting the girls in public places such as town centers and shopping centres; gradual introduction of alcohol and other drugs; then a sexual relationship with a man who demanded that the girl prove his love by having sex with his friends.

The local government’s report showed that victims and parents who asked for help were mostly let down by the police and social services. Some police officers were found to have referred to victims as “pies” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice”.

The case was highly combustible because of the racial contrast between the victims, who in the Rotherham case were mostly white, and the perpetrators. Charge in Oxford and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012 for abusing dozens of girls, including men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan heritage, who received lengthy prison terms.

Experts say data on child sexual abuse should be treated with caution because many victims never come forward, or do so years later. still, data on the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse was released by the Labor government in November – the first of its kind published by any UK government – and showed that 83 per cent of offenders convicted in 2023 were white and 7 per cent were Asian, broadly in line with the country’s overall demographics. (In official UK statistics, “Asian” is a very broad term that can refer to people of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese heritage, or from other parts of South Asia.)

Nazir Afzal, chief prosecutor for the North West England region from 2011-2015, himself of Pakistani heritage, said in 2015: “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs who are grooming vulnerable girls.”

He went on to say that South Asians were “disproportionately involved” in specific types of street care which was highlighted by the cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, although more common forms of child sexual abuse nationally are predominantly carried out by white British men.

The racial element in these high-profile cases became a common right-wing mouthpiece, even as experts noted that ethnicity is not a predictor of propensity to abuse children, and widespread child abuse has long been covered up in other societies and institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church. The trope has also been armed by the far right, including by terrorists. The white supremacist who killed 51 people in two New Zealand mosques in 2019 carried a gun branded with the words “For Rotherham.”

In October, Jess Phillips, a Labor lawmaker and Minister for Protectionrejected a request by the local government in Oldham, a town near Manchester, for a national public inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in the area in the 2000s and 2010s. ONE 2022 report commissioned by the Labor mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, found that children were being failed by the police and local authority in Oldham between 2011 and 2014.

Mrs. Phillips, who has spent much of her career fighting for women and victims of sexual violence, said the local council, the city’s governing body, should instead conduct a local inquiry, as a number of other cities had done.

Her answer was seized last week by GB Newsa hard-right network, which ran an online story headlined: “Labour REJECTS Oldham’s call for government inquiry into grooming gang scandal.”

A short time later, Mr. Musk weighed in, calling Ms. Phillips a “rape-genocide apologist” and a “witch” who “deserves to be in jail,” smearing Mr. Starmer as an accomplice in the scandal.

The leader of Oldham Council, Arooj Shah, said in a statement that the council began setting up its inquiry in October. “We are working closely with survivors and survivors’ families to ensure that they don’t just have a voice, but will have a central role in the development of this investigation,” she said. “We expect the mandate to be agreed in the coming months.”

Mr. Musk has said that Mr. Starmer, whose Labor party won a landslide victory in the July election, “must go” and falsely claimed Mr. Starmer was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”

Before entering politics in 2015, Mr. Starmer as Britain’s chief prosecutor from 2008 to 2013, when the issue of grooming gangs burst into the national spotlight.

While in that role, Mr. Starmer prosecutes a grooming gang in Rochdale, made up mainly of men of South Asian heritage. At a press conference on Monday, Mr. Starmer denounced child sexual exploitation as “absolutely sick” and said too many victims had been let down “by perverse ideas about social relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else.”

He added: “When I was chief prosecutor for five years, I tackled this because I could see what was happening. When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases ever prosecuted .”

Starmer and his colleague at the Crown Prosecution Service, Mr. Afzal, was praised in a 2013 parliamentary report published under a previous Conservative-led government. “Mr Starmer has endeavored to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his tenure,” the report said, adding that his “response should be a model for the other agencies that is involved in tackling localized care.”

The issue of grooming gangs has been the subject of numerous local and national investigations and reports in the UK since the early 2010s.

Beginning in 2015, a national public inquiry funded by the government held more than 300 days of hearings. In the end, it conducted 15 investigations, including into networks of abusers and abuse in schools and churches.

A February 2022 report found that sexual exploitation of children by organized networks remained a major problem nationally. The final inquiry report in October 2022 contained 20 recommendations to protect children, but the then Conservative government acted on very few of them. In a statement this week, the Home Office said it was “working at pace” to implement them.

Prof. Alexis Jay, who led both the national review and the 2014 Rotherham inquiry, told the BBC on Tuesday that “people should get on” with implementing her recommendations. “We have had enough of enquiries, consultations and discussions,” she said, “especially for the victims and survivors who have had the courage to come forward.”