Britain needs to hold Nuremberg-style trials for those involved in the grooming gang scandal. That was the message endorsed by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
He was responding in the aftermath of the publication of a report on the Rape Gang Inquiry by Rupert Lowe MP, the leader of Restore Britain. The 200-page report has been retweeted over 60,000 times so far. It has also been posted by major American political commentators like Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire.
The report is the product of the inquiry, which was held last year. It heard from a wide range of grooming gang survivors, whose stories are recounted in its pages. In addition, the report contains an analysis of Islamic attitudes to women, which it blames for the grooming gangs, and a series of recommendations, including the possibility of bringing back the death penalty for abusers.
The testimony from the victims is frequently horrific. Young girls, often although not always from vulnerable families, were groomed with attention and gifts by men they felt were their boyfriends. Soon the relationship would take a darker turn, with demands for sex and the girls being forced to have sex with others, sometimes for money. They were given drugs or large amounts of alcohol. Sexual violence was common, often of a sadistic nature.
These horrors are familiar to British audiences, who have been hearing similar stories since the early 2010s, when the scandal first broke. That was down to Andrew Norfolk, a journalist at The Times. He covered the north of England and noticed a trend of ethnically Pakistani sex abuse gangs targeting underage white girls. He later admitted that he originally wanted to “look away”, but as a good journalist he did not.
Authorities Ignored Warnings As Abuse Spread
The story led him to Rotherham, a town of around 100,000 people, famous for a medieval chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the steelworks there. Norfolk revealed that there had been a wave of abuse there, while the authorities looked the other way or even tried to suppress the story.
In one incident, a researcher who pointed out the Pakistani ethnicity of the abusers was sent on a diversity course. In another, the offices of a youth group who had raised the alarm were broken into. The thieves knew the codes to enter the building and stole files relating to the abuse. Nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime.
The Conservative government at the time stepped in. A report by Alexis Jay revealed that in the period 1997–2013, at least 1,400 girls had been abused. Most had been white. Most of their abusers were described as “Asian” or “Pakistani”. A dedicated investigation in the town by the National Crime Agency has found 1,569 victims so far.
The girls were underage. They were raped, often by multiple abusers. They were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England. They were abducted, beaten, given drugs and intimidated. One girl was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. Another was threatened with a gun. Yet another was forced to witness a gang rape and told that they would be next. Some of the girls were as young as 11.
A subsequent report by Louise Casey found that the council had been culpable. Despite having been made aware of the abuse years before Andrew Norfolk began investigating, council officials had done next to nothing. Some had tried to suppress the story. Ethnically Pakistani councillors were singled out for having a “disproportionate” influence, especially on issues that affected the local Pakistani community.
Despite this, nobody was ever held responsible. Some in the council had to resign, but they faced no further action. South Yorkshire Police, who had failed as well, were investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), but the investigation resulted in nothing stronger than management action. An IOPC report into senior officers was only published with their names redacted. Nobody in the authorities who had failed across nearly two decades ever went to jail.
From Local Scandal to National Crisis
Similar stories soon appeared across the country. In Telford, an independent inquiry said that 1,000 girls had been abused “at a conservative estimate”. In Rochdale, Oldham, Oxford and other places there were reviews which found dozens or hundreds of victims. In many cases, victims could not be tracked down or did not want to cooperate with the police who had so often let them down. The true number of victims remains unknown.
The Rape Gang Inquiry report calculates that there may have been 250,000 victims. Some have cast doubt on that estimate, pointing out that the methodology assumes every location with a grooming gang suffered abuse on the scale of Rotherham. Nonetheless, the number of victims will be in the tens of thousands, making it Britain’s worst-ever sex crime.
The real opprobrium should be reserved for those in authority, who have shied away from using their much more granular data to come up with a more robust estimate. This is very much a deliberate choice: in 2020 the Home Office published a report into the issue, which was supposed to do this. Instead of using its access to the original data, the report simply summarized other research, pointed out the flaws in the data on which those reports were based and concluded that it was hard to know for sure.
For years, many on the Left have downplayed the grooming gangs. They assured people that most child abusers were white, that to focus on the gangs was feeding a “moral panic” and that it was only the far right pushing this message. By making the subject toxic, they were able to make it difficult to discuss in polite society.
That has changed over the last few years. The launch of GB News as an unashamedly right-wing television news channel meant that investigative journalists like Charlie Peters had the resources and support to reopen the subject. Last year, selections from sentencing remarks went viral because of the horrific abuse they revealed and were picked up by Elon Musk.
That has led to a range of new projects, including Open Justice, which has raised money to pay for the release of more sentencing remarks and the transcripts of grooming gang trials. The change also allowed Rupert Lowe to raise £600,000 ($795,000) for his Rape Gang Inquiry.
This mounting pressure is leading to official changes too. After initially resisting calls for a national inquiry on the grounds that they were the work of the far right, Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave in. Unlike Lowe’s inquiry, the National Inquiry has statutory powers and a £65m ($86m) budget.
However, the previous poor record of government investigations means that many will be suspicious as to whether it will lead to lasting changes. Should it fail, growing anger in Britain means that the pressure to finally tackle these terrible crimes will only grow.
