Will UK Come Clean On British-Pakistani Grooming Gangs?

News18

17-07-2025

The effort to water down the 2020 report on grooming gangs is palpable, as also the coverage of its main findings by mainstream media
For years now, the euphemism 'South Asian" has been used, particularly in the UK, in a vain, although not inexplicable, attempt to hide the culpability of British-Pakistanis in heinous crimes perpetrated there. And nowhere has this been more egregious than in the case of the long-running so-called 'grooming" scandal in which underage white girls in the northern UK were lured, abducted, and then sexually abused by gangs of mostly Brit-Pakistani men, often for years.
Although the specific ethnicity of the criminals was known from the beginning, local councils and even national watchdogs glossed over that detail and even sought to minimise the implications of it. Even though Professor Alexis Jay had conducted a seven-year inquiry into child sexual abuse, grooming gangs were not the sole focus and her recommendations were actually aimed at better supervision of the authorities responsible for the care of abused children.
Now, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, feigning that he had just gotten wind of the 'real story", has ordered a fresh inquiry into the grooming issue, and the Pakistani angle has finally been brought out of the shadows. After stonewalling for months, Starmer has suddenly accepted the recommendations of Baroness Louise Casey's audit of the data and evidence of group-based child sexual abuse and ordered a national inquiry covering England and Wales.
In April 2023, when Rishi Sunak was PM, the government promised more specific data on those notorious grooming gangs, including their ethnicity, to ensure they could not 'hide behind cultural sensitivities as a way to evade justice". At that time, Sunak and his Home Secretary Priti Patel, were accused of bias, racism, and 'dog whistling" by Labour because they are of Indian ancestry ,even though there was no doubt that the culprits were of Pakistani descent.
So what are the chances that the Labour government will be honest in this matter now, especially given the emergence of a significant and united 'Muslim vote" in the last general elections there? Even Prof Jay had concluded that in Rotherham, most 'known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage," including five convicted in 2010; in 2012, the men convicted in the Rochdale abuse case were also all British Pakistani. As were the seven men convicted in Telford in 2013.
The effort to water down the 2020 report on grooming gangs is palpable, as is also the coverage of its main findings by mainstream media. The writers of that official report asserted that the majority of child sexual abuse gangs comprise white men under the age of 30, but they do not provide relevant evidence. If that is indeed the case, the fact that most of the men who were tried and convicted for grooming and abusing young girls have not been white should raise questions.
Interestingly, Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham since 2012, wrote an op-ed in August 2017 averring that 'Britain has a problem with British-Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?" Just before that, she told BBC Radio 4 that 'more people are afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse".
She had to resign from her post as Shadow Women and Equalities Minister for her candour that same month. And her party became an avid advocate of the 2020 report's conclusion, supposedly based on the findings of multiple studies on child sexual exploitation, that there was not enough evidence to conclude that grooming gangs were disproportionately made up of 'Asian" offenders. Voices challenging that were dismissed as far-right, racist Islamophobes.
The statutory public inquiry will summon witnesses and examine to what extent the police, local councils, and officials were negligent in their duty towards vulnerable girls by mishandling, downplaying, or ignoring their complaints. It can reinvestigate old cases and demand answers to complaints about wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the National Crime Agency will lead the initiative to reopen grooming gang cases and identify those men who had evaded justice earlier.
Already, 800 cases have been reopened in 2025. Ironically, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper now says the girls had been ignored for 'too long" and this was the way to get 'truth and justice", adding that 'not enough people listened to them then. That was wrong and unforgivable. We are changing that now." Chancellor Rachel Reeves also weighed in, saying, 'PM wanted to assure himself that everything possible was being done. This is about justice—not grandstanding."
Well, these admissions certainly indicate the extent of the cover-up or bungling earlier and the probable reasons for it. There must be a considerable build-up of popular anger around the UK about the whitewashing of these horrific crimes for Starmer to backtrack from his instinctive wariness and announce a wider probe. But has the government really had a change of heart, or is the probe a clever ploy to find the 'evidence" to shift the focus from the British Pakistanis?
After all, as recently as this January, Labour MPs had ensured that an amendment tabled by the opposition Conservative MPs to force a vote on establishing an inquiry did not get passed, leading to suspicions of intentions to cover up official negligence. But now ministers are at pains to convince people that the 'culture of denial" about the grooming scandal will be discarded and there will be an impetus for local-level inquiries with national-level supervision.
The most egregious denial has been the 'over-representation" of men of Pakistani origin. To obfuscate, they were even labelled as 'South Asian", to misleadingly draw Indian-origin men into the equation. At the forefront of that battle to protect Brit-Pakistanis have been Left-oriented academics who accused anyone who pointed at that demographic of being racist, 'demonising" communities, and stereotyping Muslim men as patriarchal, misogynistic religious fanatics.
The Left argument to draw the flak away from Brit-Pakistani men is to aver that the grooming issue is not about the ethnicity—and therefore also not about any obvious cultural disconnect either—of the perpetrators. Instead, the Left wants the focus to be on the 'systemic failures" that led to children being abused. They also refused to accept any Muslim angle, asserting that the 'broader context" is poverty, institutional neglect, and gender inequality.
The near-term political exigency for such a stance by the ruling party is clear, and its stance is given an intellectual heft by slanted academic attacks on any findings that point to significant Brit-Pakistani involvement. One such 'research" concluded that 'Muslim grooming gangs" is just a right-wing trope (never mind the overwhelming evidence in the form of the convicted men), amplified by rogue feminists. They even blame 'partisan" studies by the other cohort.
They even say the term 'grooming gangs" itself is misleading, and crimes singled out under this heading are actually no different from other sex offences involving children. That way, the incriminating ethnic specificity of this genre of crime can be merged into a wider cesspool of child sex offences. Will this latest 'investigation" instituted by the Labour government be an exercise to bolster the Left narrative on this issue or an honest effort to nail culprits, Brit-Pakistani or not?
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
tags :
Britain pakistan sexual abuse UK
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Location :
New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
June 18, 2025, 21:48 IST
News opinion Opinion | Will UK Come Clean On British-Pakistani Grooming Gangs?
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