The discussion around the infamous grooming gangs in the United Kingdom involving Pakistani men has re-ignited after Elon Musk, JK Rowling, and several journalists started talking about the police complicity and utter failure of the UK administration to deliver justice to the grooming gang victims. This comes amidst the Labour government’s decision to reject Oldham town council’s plea seeking a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.
🚨🇬🇧UK GOVERNMENT REJECTS NATIONAL INQUIRY INTO PAKISTANI RAPE GANG SCANDALS
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 1, 2025
The UK government has refused calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation scandals in the town of Oldham, leaving local authorities to investigate.
Survivors of abuse argue that only a… pic.twitter.com/p5pPvdEkTo
Taking to X, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk commented on the police complicity in the prevalence of grooming gangs, inaction against them for many years, and the unfair arrests of victims and their family members. “So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this,” Musk said.
So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this. https://t.co/PtM39RGrFi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2025
Musk has also launched a scathing attack on Britain’s current Prime Minister Keir Starmer who was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008-2013 which approves the police requests to charge suspects in serious crimes like rape.
Musk said that when the “rape gangs” were exploiting young girls, Starmer headed the CPS and allowed the crimes to take place. In a subsequent post, he pointed out that till 2013, Starmer himself was the director of CPS and now heads the government, however, even now Safeguarding Minister Jesse Phillips refused a national inquiry into the crimes of rape gangs since it would involve blaming Starmer.
“In the UK, serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service’s approval for the police to charge suspects. Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008 -2013,” Musk wrote,
“Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Stamer. The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the CPS at the time),” he continued.
Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Stamer.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2025
The real reason she's refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the CPS at the time).
Meanwhile, globally renowned author JK Rowling known for her advocacy of women’s gender rights emphasised that the grooming gangs should be called “rape gangs” and also called the allegations of police complicity in the horrific crimes against women and girls in the UK “beyond belief”.
“The details emerging about what the rape gangs (why call them ‘grooming’ gangs? It’s like calling those who stab people to death ‘knife owners’) did to girls in Rotherham are downright horrific. The allegations of possible police corruption in the case are almost beyond belief,” Rowling wrote.
The details emerging about what the rape gangs (why call them 'grooming' gangs? It's like calling those who stab people to death 'knife owners') did to girls in Rotherham are downright horrific. The allegations of possible police corruption in the case are almost beyond belief. https://t.co/0SVoxuqw6K
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 2, 2025
Police complicity, crackdown on victim families, lenient sentences
Beginning in the 1980s in the town of Telford, vulnerable girls as young as 11 were picked up, raped, beaten, sold, and even killed by grooming gangs or rape gangs for a full forty years. The young girls, mostly white, were tossed from one rapist to another, most of whom were of British Pakistani origins. Three girls were murdered and two others died in tragedies linked to the scandal. As many as 1,000 girls suffered in a town of 170,000 people. In Telford, these Pakistani grooming gangs were literally running a rape house while they made the victims believe they were in love by buying them alcohol, cigarettes, doing their mobile top-ups, buying gifts etc.
A similar racket was unfolding in Rotherham wherein around 1,500 girls were raped, abused, sold, and bought by men of Pakistani descent in a town of 260,000 people. Many victims were gang-raped and the abuse went on unabated from 1997 to 2013. In Rochdale, the horror began in 2002. At least 47 young girls were subjected to abuse. Such has been the (Non) response of administrative and legal authorities that the grooming gangs continue to walk freely on the streets of “Great Britain”.
Sexual abuse scandals were widely uncovered in a series of locations in the UK, including Huddersfield, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Bristol, Peterborough, and Newcastle. Nearly 19,000 adolescents in England are estimated to have been sexually groomed based on government numbers. Despite multiple reports and inquiries, investigative operations like Stovewood, Tourway, the true scale of sexual exploitation by the grooming gangs is not known.
These ‘grooming’ crimes continue to haunt the United Kingdom as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) reported in 2023 that there has been an 82% increase in online grooming offences against youngsters over the past five years.
The issue of Pakistani-origin men-led grooming gangs raping vulnerable white and other non-Muslim girls first became widely known in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford. According to the 2014 Jay Report on Rotherham, almost 1,400 children were sexually exploited over 16 years, predominantly by men of Pakistani descent. The pervasive inaction by the authorities can be attributed to concerns of triggering racism against Pakistani immigrants. To put it in simple words, the UK authorities were reluctant to act and adopted a silence and denial approach against the grooming/rape gangs believing that acting against the Pakistani-origin rapists would reinforce ‘negative stereotypes’ about the ‘minority’ community.
In many cases, instead of arresting the rapists, the police ended up arresting the victims and their families. This was commonly due to a ‘misreading’ of the situation, a failure to probe the grooming part and in most cases a deliberate cover-up, with young victims being treated as offenders for small violations while still in contact with their abusers. This demonstrates an intentional diversion in the approach to child safety, spurred by an obsessive avoidance of racial profiling. Fear of being perceived as racially ‘insensitive’ appears to have taken precedence over safeguarding young girls culminating in a serious miscarriage of justice.
In one of the cases, a grooming gang victim’s father narrated how he was arrested when he tried to rescue his daughter from the apartment she was being held in by her abusers. Speaking to Hearts of Oak, a grooming gang survivor Elizabeth Harper’s father said in 2020 that he was arrested twice in one day by the Police for trying to rescue his daughter. It is notable that Harper won the landmark case against her abuser Asghar Bostan. In 2023, the High Court awarded £425,000 in a verdict. In 2018, Asghar Bostan was jailed for 9 years at Sheffield Crown Court raping the Harper in a flat in Rotherham for 10 weeks when she was just 14 years old.
In November 2020 Hearts of Oak travelled to Rotherham to spend the day with Elizabeth, a Grooming Gang Survivor who was recently awarded £425k against her rapist in a landmark ruling.
— Hearts of Oak (@HeartsofOakUK) April 2, 2023
This is her father who was arrested twice in one day by the Police for trying to rescue his… pic.twitter.com/3pp6oFjxTm
Meanwhile, Elon Musk expressed his anger over the unfair arrest of the family members of the grooming gang victim saying that “Whoever ordered the arrest of fathers trying to protect their daughters from gang rape should be in prison for life.”
Whoever ordered the arrest of fathers trying to protect their daughters from gang rape should be in prison for life https://t.co/jJj0pmoqSD
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2025
In a blatant mockery of the rape survivor’s ordeal and travesty of justice, Bostan was moved to an open prison without Liz being informed in 2020. Just two years later, he was set free having served only half of his sentence.
Expressing her utter disappointment, Harper said in 2023, “I was badly let down by South Yorkshire Police, Rotherham Council, the courts, the prison system, and many others, but this landmark case proves that survivors can now get their own justice even if the establishment fails them.”
In December 2023, the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) published a report revealing that police continued to blame the victims for the crimes committed against them by Pakistani grooming gangs.
In its report, HMICFRS said that instances of group child sexual exploitation were overlooked, with some cases handled by non-specialist officers who were unable to know what to find. It also stated that law enforcement did not have a clear definition of group-based child sexual exploitation.
In one instance, crucial evidence from mobile phones was not analysed for a year. In another case, a teenage girl and her friend who were being exploited by a 30-year-old male were first arrested before authorities altered their approach and began treating them as victims.
HMICFRS report said that in three of the six forces it inspected, it discovered more than twelve instances of victim blaming, which they attributed to the force’s poor culture rather than individual officers’ failures.
In one incident of police staff victim blaming, the police accused a victim by noting that “concerns [were] raised [due] to her general proclivity with older men”. In another case, a missing child was classified as “medium-risk due to age – streetwise and tends to return the next day”. In another example, a child was referred to as “putting herself in precarious situations,” and another child as a “difficult victim to engage with.”
Besides victim blaming, the UK authorities also suppressed reports about Pakistani men grooming school girls in Birmingham with drugs and alcohol. The reason to suppress this report was the fear that making this report public would incite ‘racial tensions’ ahead of the 2010 general election. This report released under the Freedom of Information Act, only to be redacted later, had identified 140 potential victims from a school with most of them being around the age of 13. These girls were intoxicated and raped by men of Pakistani origin.
However, despite there being a clear indication that Pakistani men were deliberately targeting White girls, the police prioritised preventing supposed ‘backlash’ against the ‘Asian/Pakistani’ community instead of arresting the perpetrators and prosecuting them.
“The predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males… combined with the predominant victim profile of white females has the potential to cause significant community tensions. There is a potential for a backlash against the vast majority of law abiding citizens from Asian/Pakistani communities from other members of the community believing their children have been exploited,” the police report said revealing how misplaced racial sensitivity took precedence over protecting minor girls from their abusers.
This clearly indicates that police deliberately covered up the persistent child sexual exploitation by Pakistani-Afghani grooming gangs and this police inaction further emboldened these paedophiles and rapists to carry out their horrific deeds unchecked because the police and governments were more concerned about averting any criticism or what they called triggering ‘racial tensions’ than punishing those targeting girls of specific race and outside their religion.
The highest rates of child grooming victims in Britain were reported in areas including Birmingham, Lancashire, and Bradford. One of the most horrific cases was of Charlene Downes who disappeared from Lancashire. She was feared to be groomed by these gangs and murdered. Her body was allegedly minced into pieces and served as kebabs to customers at a takeaway restaurant in the area.
32 individuals were charged by the police in West Yorkshire, England in 2020 for more than 150 sexual offences committed against eight underage teenage girls. According to reports, several victims continued to suffer horrific crimes when they became adults.
A report prepared by Malcom Newsam tracing the failures of the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in handling grooming gang cases between 2004 and 2013, said that the local police were absolutely apathetic towards the grooming gang victims, who were mostly white girls. In one incident, the GMP secretly took the aborted foetus of a 13-year-old victim to carry out a DNA test without even informing the victim or her parents.
In another case, a victim was treated as a ‘co-conspirator’ by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
The review uncovered a “significant probability” that 74 of the 111 children on police records during the time period were sexually exploited. The investigation stated that in 48 of those cases, agencies failed to adequately protect children. Malcolm Newsam, the report’s author, stated that many abusers had gone unpunished due to police and local council failures. In 2022, the GMP Police Chief had ‘apologised’ to the Rochdale grooming gang victims.
It was only after Maggie Oliver, who served as a detective constable, resigned from her post and became a whistle-blower exposing the gross failures of the GMP to arrest rapists and the inhumane treatment of the victims.
In the early 2000s, a grooming gang comprising of 97 men of Pakistani-Afghani origin were freely abusing nearly 57 young girls in Manchester, because the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) officials were instructed to focus on apprehending offenders of “other ethnicity”.
While in Manchester, the police were told to focus on arresting culprits of other ethnicity other than ‘South Asians’, the South Yorkshire Police did not record the ethnicity of child sexual abuse accused persons, omitting ethnicity of the perpetrator in 67% of cases in Rotherham.
Formation of Grooming Gangs Taskforce and mass arrests
In April 2023, then British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak established a new Grooming Gangs Taskforce to support police agencies in looking into the significant issue of grooming gangs in the nation. This was a step towards recognising past errors and punishing perpetrators. However, the people of the UK have criticised the authorities over the sentencing of those convicted, since in many cases penalties were too lenient or the court system was sluggish to deal with these cases due to the intricacies of race and community ties. Despite arrests and convictions, numerous criminals have not received sufficient punishment, with some still free or serving relatively short sentences.
Within the first year of its formation, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce arrested over 550 suspects and identified and protected over 4,000 victims. Besides arresting the perpetrators and protecting the victims, this task force also trained police officers to handle child sexual exploitation cases.
In November 2024, twenty men were found guilty of rape and assault of young girls and have been handed over a total of more than 219 years in prison. The men were found to have sexually abused and exploited four girls in Calderdale after a succession of individual investigations and prosecutions.
South Asian grooming gangs or Pakistani grooming gangs?
Be it Rotherham, Telford, or Rochdale grooming and sexual exploitation cases, the pattern remained the same, non-Muslim girls including Hindu, Sikh, and White Christian girls being systematically targeted in the United Kingdom by Pakistani men. An important reason for the cover-up was the fear of offending the minority community.
Prioritising avoidance of potential racial tensions against the community to which the grooming gang members belonged to is outrageously wrong. The UK authorities and the media advertently or inadvertently failed to comprehend that there would have been no need to ‘fear’ incitement of racial tensions if they had focussed on the motivations of the perpetrators.
The grooming gangs in the UK were shielded by the media and pro-Islamist politicians by passing them off as “Asian” or “South Asian grooming gangs”.
Cultural sensitivity, fear of racial profiling and political ramifications: How appeasement and woke politics enabled grooming gangs
From governments to police, the authorities in the United Kingdom remained wary of addressing the crimes being committed by people predominantly from one ‘ethnicity’ fearing that acting against the perpetrators from this ‘ethnicity would trigger hatred and prejudices against ‘South Asians’. This mindless zeal to protect cultural/racial sensitivities over protecting sexual abuse victims resulted in the continuous exploitation of young girls for nearly four decades.
The political discourse around the grooming gangs and their crimes in the UK indicate that the appeasing politicians feared racial profiling and the supposed spread of ‘Islamophobia’. It is evident from the 2013 Jay Report on Rotherham which said that “several [police] staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.”
It must be recalled how Keith Vaz, a Labour Party leader and Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2012, had downplayed the grooming jihad crimes calling them not racially motivated and emphasised that the entire community should not be ‘stigmatised’. His overemphasis on not singling out the identity of the grooming gang members reflected the Labour Party’s appeasement politics and downplayed the crimes of the grooming gangs involving men of Pakistani origins.
In 2011, former Home Secretary Jack Straw attributed the cultural practices of Pakistani men to their crimes against white girls. He said that Pakistani men see white girls as “easy meat”. A Nottingham Crown Court judge who convicted two Pakistani men who groomed and raped several minor white girls, downplayed the identity of the perpetrators by asserting that the race of both, the victims and the abusers were ‘coincidental’.
Back in 2017, Sarah Champion, Labour Party leader and the then Rotherham MP, had written an article in The Sun, wherein she wrote that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”.
She pointed out that the child sexual exploitations being reported in the UK involved “predominantly Pakistani men” adding that the apprehension of getting labelled ‘racist’ was hindering the investigation by the authorities. “These people are predators and the common denominator is their ethnic heritage.”
While what Sarah wrote was not entirely wrong, she too failed to see that more than any ethnic reason, it was more a religious and cultural problem. Sarah Champion even had to apologise for the supposedly ‘offensive’ article and even resign from her position as the shadow minister.
Such is the situation in the UK, an elected representative had to retract her statement, apologise, and resign from her post for simply saying that Pakistani men were targeting white girls, which was indeed the case. No wonder, grooming gangs thrived in UK for decades with such political leaders who either fail to acknowledge the problem or when they attempt to do so, they cave into the pressure of being politically correct.
Driven by fears of racial profiling, cultural sensitivities and desperation to take the moral high ground, the United Kingdom, its police, and politicians allowed Pakistani men to rape and exploit vulnerable girls in the country for nearly four decades and continue to evade accountability. This suicidal empathy for those who deserved nothing but condemnation and punishment caused a massive travesty of justice to the young girls who had their childhood ruined and their dreams destroyed by these monsters. Had the UK shown even a shred of kindness, empathy and compassion for the victims of the grooming gangs than their abusers, the country could have got rid of such monstrous gangs much earlier and many young girls could have been saved.
