The National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse has made disturbing revelations in the UK grooming gangs scandal. The 197-page report prepared by Baroness Louise Casey says that a “culture of blindness, ignorance and prejudice” allowed continued failures to investigate cases of minors being sexually abused by grooming gangs. The majority of these grooming gangs were comprised of Pakistani and ‘Asian’ men, the report says.

Notably, the issue of child sexual abuse at the hands of grooming gangs led by British Pakistani men has been a serious issue demanding attention for years. In the late 90s, young girls, a minimum of 11 were picked up, raped, beaten, sold, and even killed by grooming gangs or rape gangs for a full forty years. In Rotherham alone, it was found that 1,400 children had been sexually abused over 16 years by British Pakistani men.

In the foreword of the report itself, Lady Casey said that “group-based child sexual exploitation” is a sanitised version of the crime it is. “I want to set it out in unsanitised terms: we are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions; beatings and gang rapes. Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth,” she said.

The scale and nature of grooming gang crimes in the UK and how social media became a hub of child sexual exploitation

The report estimated that more than 500,000 children a year were likely to experience child sexual abuse, with police recording some 100,000 offences in 2024. Of these, an estimated 17,100 were flagged as child sexual exploitation. The only figure for gang grooming came from a new police database, totalling just 700. Lady Casey said it was “highly unlikely” that this accurately reflected the true scale of grooming gangs.

Detailing the nature of grooming gang crimes in the UK, the report says it is similar to the ones identified in well-known cases such as Rotherham. These cases often involved a man targeting a vulnerable adolescent child – often those in care, or children with learning or physical disabilities – grooming them into thinking they are their ‘boyfriend’, showering them with love and gifts and taking them out. Subsequently, they pass them to other men for sex, using drugs and alcohol to make children compliant, often turning to violence and coercion to control them.

“This model has not changed significantly over time, although the grooming process is now as likely to start online, and hotspots might have moved,” the report reads.

The National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse report says that these grooming gangs are often loosely interconnected, based around existing social connections and so are often broadly homogenous in age, ethnic background and socioeconomic status. “Acting in a group likely has a disinhibiting effect on the perpetrators, while misogyny or ‘othering’ allows them to disregard victims,” the report states.

The report also adds that the nature of child sexual abuse in general has been changed by the growth of online sexual abuse offending which now accounts for 40% of all sexual abuse crime.

Disturbing numbers

As per the report, UK’s National police data confirms that the majority of victims of child sexual exploitation are girls (78% in 2023) with the most common age for victims being between 10 and 15 years old (57% in 2023). Most perpetrators are men (76% in 2023).

“The data suggests that the age profile of perpetrators varies, with 39% of suspects aged 10 to 15 and 18% aged 18 to 29 in 2023. This younger age profile is likely to be resulting from an increase in reporting of online and child-on-child offending. The ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation is not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level,” the report reads.

The report pointed out that while the pattern of abuse remains not much changed, the methods of approaching the targets has slightly changed with social media’s mainstreaming. Where previously initial contact with the victim might have started in the shopping centre, the park or a takeaway, contact today is as likely to start on a social media platform and then lead to contact offences.

Highlighting other ways employed by the groomers, the report says that while locations for grooming and exploitation may have changed, the model is similar: frequent missing episodes, moving around of children from one place to another to be exploited, the use of drugs and alcohol to make them compliant, using hotels and AirBnBs, taking advantage of anonymous checking in and out facilities, and hot spots that attract children such as vape shops and shops selling alcohol to underage children.

The perpetrators use obscene images of the victims for sextortion. The grooming gangs lure the minor girls into sharing images of themselves and then use those images to blackmail them by threatening to circulate those images online. This way, the victims are coerced into suffering further sexual abuse and this cycle continues for many years.

The report also highlighted the growth of obscene images of children offences (IIOC)which have increased by 863% between December 2014 when there were 4,261 offences, to December 2024 when there were 41,033 offences . It was found that most of these crimes occur on social media.

Describing features of grooming gangs, the report mentions a point requiring special attention, “A 2020 Home Office paper noted that in several cases they examined, offenders and victims came from different communities, and officers suggested that disregard for victims from outside the perpetrators’ own community may be an enabling factor for offenders.”

While the 2020 Home Office paper missed out on mentioning the names of the community, it essentially means that Muslim rape gangs, mostly of Pakistani origin, harboured disregard, rather hatred for non-Muslims and this hatred and perverted mindset of asserting religious dominance by sexually exploiting non-Muslim women, has been an enabling factor behind these crimes.

It also noted that empathy with victims is a likely barrier to offending behaviour, and therefore disregard for victims – whether through misogyny or so-called ‘othering’ – enables offenders to overcome this barrier. “Operation Stovewood consider this to have been a factor at play in Rotherham, where nearly two-thirds of offenders were from a Pakistani ethnic background, and the majority of the girls were White,” the report says.

The report mentions that Pakistani men are responsible for 64 per cent of cases of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

Moreover, of the total 42 individuals convicted for child sexual exploitation offences under Operation Stovewood, had 62 per cent Pakistani men.

UK’s law enforcement authorities shied away from the ethnicity of grooming jihadis

Another disturbing pattern traced in the audit was the deliberate reluctance of the authorities from recording ethnicity of the perpetrators.

“We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data,” the report reads, adding that despite limited data, it was found that most perpetrators were of Asian ethnic backgrounds.

The report found a persistent failure of the UK authorities in creating a proper data set of groomers/rapists or conducting serious case reviews in child-sexual exploitation cases, let alone acting against the perpetrators.

“There is no data published by children’s services about group-based child sexual exploitation. There has also been a decline in the number of serious case reviews about child sexual exploitation in recent years. In policing, data and intelligence for identifying and investigating child sexual exploitation is stored across multiple systems which do not communicate either within a force, between police forces or with partners. National data or analysis on group-based child sexual exploitation was not found in health services,” the report reads.

It adds that while the criminal justice data on prosecutions showed an increase, it did not differentiate between different forms of child sexual abuse or on offenders operating in groups.

In what the Casey report called a “collective failure”, the UK authorities failed to address the question about the ethnicity of grooming gangs, which although dominated political discourse, has mostly been about proving the point or downplaying the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

The report says that despite there being numerous reports, reviews and inquiries regarding “Asian or Pakistani” men grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has “consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.”

While the report says that flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue, and that it does a disservice the victims, the report itself does disservice to the victims and law-abiding Asian communities in the UK when it hyphenates Pakistani men with Asian men.

Although it is a progress that the United Kingdom is finally openly the Pakistani origins of grooming gang members, and delving deeper into the ethnicity of the perpetrators, the country is yet to reach the root of menace. It is not a ethnicity problem, it is a problem of religiously-motivated perversion. This perpetuation of this perversion has been facilitated by not only the police which remained too scared to come across as racist by acting against Muslim grooming gangs and politicians who did everything they could to ensure that these Pakistani rape jihadis are never called out, their religious motivations never condemned.

It must be recalled that the Labour Party, which is currently in power in the UK, had in 2019, adopted the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG) definition of Islamophobia in 2019. This definition essentially implied that criticising Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs/rape gangs is ‘racist’ against Muslims.

Coming back to the Casey report further delves into the disgraceful victim-blaming by the authorities and society in the UK.

“On top of the avoidance of ethnicity issues, we also retain an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations. We too often judge them as adults (so-called ‘adultification’) especially those in local authority care, who too often are fast-tracked into ‘growing up’ before their time. Nevertheless, they cannot consent to their own abuse – they remain children. One effect of this is that children are still criminalised for offences they committed while being groomed,” the report reads.

“Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions, all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm,” it adds.

The report further found many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15 year-old had been mentioned as having been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.

The Casey report put out several recommendations regarding age of consent, and the approach of police toward tackling cases of child sexual abuse.

Casey’s report has prompted a national inquiry into grooming gangs. However, it must not be forgotten that the British PM Keir Starmer had earlier this year, not only rejected the demands of a national inquiry into the historical child sexual exploitation but also deemed demands for a national inquiry into Pakistani rape gangs a “far-right” position.

In her June 2025 report, Louise Casey referenced police data from the 1990s, revealing that over 4,000 children between the ages of 10 and 18 received police warnings for prostitution-related offences. It was only when the Serious Crime Act was amended in 2015, the phrase “child prostitution” was finally dropped and replaced with “child sexual exploitation.”

Police, politicians, courts and media: How everyone collectively shielded grooming gangs due to fear of offending the perennially offended

Evidently, the fears of appearing Islamophobic and racially insensitive prevented UK authorities from effectively acting against Pakistani Muslim groomers/rapists for years and the Muslim-appeasing political parties of the United Kingdom also ensured that the Muslim community remains sacrosanct to criticism even as members of this community, especially those of Pakistani origins continued to sexually abuse White and other non-Muslim girls.

It must be recalled how Sarah Champion, a Labour Party MP had to apologise for an article published in The Sun in 2017 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.”

Champion was not only made to apologise under the pressure of Muslim appeasing politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, but also to resign from her position as the shadow minister.

In 2012, Keith Vaz, a Labour Party leader and Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, 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’.

Driven by fears of misplaced sympathy, 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. 

Gifts, attention, chimaera of love, drugs, sexual abuse, and violence: How rape jihadis ‘groomed’ their non-Muslim targets

The National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse report cited the findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) headed by Alexis Jay, which many years ago highlighted the importance of the coercion, manipulation and deception of victims by perpetrators within the definition of child sexual exploitation.

It is through grooming that rape jihadis develop total control over their victims. “It might start by showering a child with gifts, telling the victim they want to be their boyfriend, treating them kindly, giving them attention, sharing secrets with them. In this way they isolate children from friends and family, making them more reliant on their abuser, who they might regard as their ‘boyfriend’. Drugs and alcohol might be offered to create further dependency and to offer ‘in exchange’ for sex with one or more men. Any sort of refusal by the victims to continue to endure the perpetual sexual abuse was met with violence and further coercion by the perpetrators.

The report also gave an elaborate timeline highlighting system failures or improvements, risk and vulnerability factors of victims and perpetrator ethnicity. The timeline included the 2009 Protection of Children in England: A Progress Report, which prompted the government to set up a cross-government National

The report mentions the 2010 conviction of 10 British Pakistani and 1 White British man in Derbyshire for systematically grooming and sexually abusing 26 teenage girls, the Rotherham conviction wherein 5 ‘Asian’ men, although all these grooming gangs were largely comprised of Muslim men of Pakistani origins. It also mentions the 2012 high-profile convictions of nine ‘Asian’ men sex offences in Rochdale.

While the UK authorities over the years and now the Casey report to made very limited mentions of even the Pakistani ethnicity of the perpetrators, OpIndia has extensively reported how these grooming gangs were essentially the groupings of Pakistani Muslims who specifically targeted White and other non-Muslim girls.

The timeline also mentions the 2013 cases from Oxfordshire and Northumbria wherein the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani, Albanian, Kurdish, Bangladeshi, Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, Eastern European between age group 27 and 44 while the victims ranged in age from 13 to 25.

Notably, a Serious case review in 2015, in the child sexual abuse cases (as many as 373 between 2005-2010) uncovered in Operation Bulfinch in Oxfordshire, recommended research into why a significant proportion of people convicted were of “Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage.

In 2015, the Birmingham Mail, West Midlands Police published a Child Sexual Exploitation Problem Profile, which detailed the similarities in the modus operandi of the on-street and online grooming gangs there with those in Rotherham.

Alarmingly, the 2015 report found that out of the 75 grooming suspects identified, a large proportion are from a Pakistani ethnic background (62%), 12% are White and 5% African Caribbean.

The Casey report further highlighted that the local police knew exactly what was happening for many years, however, they deliberately alert the people, owing to their concerns about community tensions because of links to Pakistani men. The timeline in the Casey report mentions Operation Tendersea, Operation Lenten, Operation Sanctuary, Operation Shelter,  Bradford and Keighley convictions among other cases wherein most of the perpetrators were found to be of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Turkish, and Albanian origins, essentially Muslims. In some cases, however,  the perpetrators were of a White ethnic background.

Prevalence and under-reporting of child sexual abuse and group-based child sexual exploitation

The Casey report highlighted while incidents of child sexual abuse were rampant, these cases were highly under reported. As per the audit report, estimates of reporting rates for rape or assault by penetration before age 16 suggest that only around 7% of victims and survivors inform the police at the time of the offence, with only 18% informing the police at any point. Many a times, the victims would not disclose their ordeal to anyone, let alone police. 76% of adults who experienced rape or assault by penetration as a child did not tell anyone about their experience at the time. The victims chose to stay silent out of fear not being believed, and fear of humiliation and embarrassment.

While the report found numerous flaws in police data pertaining to child sexual abuse and group-based child sexual exploitation cases, it stated that in 2023, there were 4,228 group-based contact child sexual abuse offences across England and Wales, of which 719 reported offences (17% of all group-based child sexual abuse offences) were classified as child sexual exploitation.

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.

For many years, 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”. While the audit report by Louise Casey does highlight that the grooming gangs are largely comprised of Pakistani Muslims, it fails to even touch upon the religious drivers of these crimes.