Hundreds of working-class girls were abused in Rotherham by a criminal network made up of mostly British-Pakistani men. The last part of that sentence has been the primary focus of right-wing newspapers and politicians for years, but this is not a reason to ignore abuse.
What’s horrifying is that Rotherham is just one of dozens of towns in the UK where child sex abuse networks operated for decades. Seven men have just been convicted of forcing girls into sexual slavery in Rochdale.
Most of the known victims in Rotherham were white girls, while a minority were South Asian girls. The National Crime Agency reported that 80% of 110 suspects in the Rotherham case were men of Pakistani heritage.
My hometown, Derby, was one such place where these gangs ran amok. Six men were sent down in 2010 for sex offences against 26 girls, including multiple charges of rape. All of the men convicted were South Asian, except for one white man.
New Labour politician Jack Straw came out to decry the crimes. He said the offenders saw these vulnerable white girls as “easy meat”. These remarks were criticised at the time for being inflammatory.
What should have followed was a sober discussion of the scandal. More importantly, there should have been a reckoning to fully assess why this happened in so many towns for so long.
It didn’t help matters that the British National Party was quick to seize on stories of grooming gangs. Long before Tommy Robinson, Nick Griffin had campaign leaflets drawn up on this issue.
Today, Reform UK is running on the same stories with far more mainstream credibility and reach. Nigel Farage has made the grooming gangs a key part of his narrative about immigration. He invariably mentions the scandal in his statements on the migrants coming over the English Channel in boats. It hits a nerve in the public mind.
Meanwhile, former Reform MP Rupert Lowe has been raising money to conduct his own inquiry. Lowe has been calling for mass deportations as a solution. The risk of violent reprisals against South Asians shouldn’t be underplayed after last year’s racist riots.
Right-wing political consultant Charlie Downes was on LBC arguing for a tough response. He suggested that the British government should respond to the scandal the way the Israeli Defence Force responded to the 7 October attacks.
It’s hard to say precisely what Downes has in mind. Perhaps Downes thinks we should start carpet bombing Muslim areas across Britain or attack Pakistan for good measure.
Compounding the political difficulty for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, billionaire Elon Musk reignited the grooming gangs scandal on his social media platform, mainstreaming it for an international audience.
As a result of this political pressure, Starmer has finally made the decision he should have reached months ago, launching a national inquiry into the scandal.
Once again, Starmer capitulated after the damage had already been done. He could’ve got ahead of the story in January by announcing new child protection measures. Instead, Starmer allowed this story to become yet another reason to support Reform UK.
The courts are still processing the Rotherham scandal, more than fifteen years since the first convictions. Those years have been marked by investigative reports, court cases, reviews and inquiries, yet so many questions remain unanswered.
Denial, Anger, Acceptance
Baroness Louise Casey has been tasked with initiating the inquiry process. She has issued an audit of available evidence. Police have identified 800 cases for formal review. The government expects this figure to rise to 1,000 cases.
So far, Casey has struck a cogent and nuanced tone. She moved fast to respond to the most divisive question: the demographics of the grooming gangs. She is also clear that this issue should not be exploited for political gain.
The Casey Report acknowledged that the majority of sex offenders in these cases were South Asian, particularly of Pakistani heritage. This is the crux of the issue for many right-wingers who blame mass immigration for these crimes.
We will pay the price as a country for this horror story not being dealt with properly at the time. This scandal will fuel the nativist right for many years to come.
Yes, it’s true that the majority of child sexual abuse is committed by whites in the UK. Most sexual abuse happens in the family circle. All the available data, as incomplete as it is, reflects this from arrests to convictions.
A lot of leftists, including me, responded to the far right taking up this scandal as propaganda. We responded to the agitprop and took apart the claims.
Unfortunately, some of us lost sight of the victims in the process.
We missed the point. Stating that whites are responsible for the majority of sexual abuse does not help the victims of the gangs in these towns, which were disproportionately South Asian. Deflecting from this doesn’t help the survivors either.
The demographics of the gangs reflect something else in these towns. Many South Asian men work in the nightlife economy of these towns, particularly in takeaway restaurants or as taxi drivers, giving them access to young people.
Majority white areas in places like Cornwall have mostly white grooming gangs. The story is very different to Northern towns, where certain ethnic groups disproportionately work in certain parts of the local economy.
The Jay Report first raised the role of taxi cabs being used to access vulnerable, working-class girls in many of these cases. The Casey report has elaborated on this crucial fact.
Casey pointed out that the loopholes of local licensing allowed sexual predators to operate. The lack of uniform rules across the country meant that the safety of passengers couldn’t be guaranteed from town to town.
The Jay Report outlined recommendations for the Conservative government to implement. Yet the Tories never acted on the report’s demands, including making it mandatory to report child sexual abuse.
The Labour government could have remedied this failure on day one by making mandatory reporting a law. Instead, Labour was busy proposing cuts to the winter fuel allowance.
The Labour Party deserves a kicking, especially given its role in many local authorities in these towns. But so does the Conservative Party, and so do the institutions that failed these children.
Predictably, it’s only now, in 2025, that the Tories are speaking up about this issue. Suddenly, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings are giving interviews claiming the Department for Education tried to frustrate a newspaper investigation into the Rotherham case.
Of course, Gove and Cummings claim they forced the department to cooperate with The Times investigation by Andrew Norfolk in 2011. Gove claims they did so because they believe in transparency.
Why Gove and Cummings stayed silent about this for 14 years is an interesting question. Both men claim to despise “the blob” – the name Gove has bestowed upon the civil service – and would like to gut Whitehall to advance right-wing goals.
Sadly, the issue of child sexual abuse has become a political football. It’s now the favourite toy of right-wing politicians who rail against multiculturalism, immigration and what used to be “political correctness” and is now called “woke”.
Systemic Failure
No one should be beyond reproach in this saga. The local authorities, social services and the police all failed to protect thousands of children across the country. The fact that so many of these girls were living in care is no coincidence.
This goes beyond negligence. Yet we’ve not seen droves of councillors, social workers and cops put on trial for allowing children to be abused. Although some of the perpetrators have been convicted, that is not enough.
More than 1,500 children were sexually abused by this criminal network in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, according to the National Crime Agency. This is a conservative estimate of the scale of sexual violence.
Many people have rightly been asking why South Yorkshire Police did nothing to stop this gang for so long. It’s an excellent question.
The public wants answers, but the abuse survivors need answers.
There have long been rumours of corrupt police collaborating with the gangs in some of these towns. Some of the survivors have made claims themselves that the police either didn’t help them or were complicit in their abuse.
There are reports of police officers driving a child back to her abusers. In one case, they even arrested a distressed father trying to rescue his daughter. The police dismissed other cases.
Shockingly, the children abused were viewed as “child prostitutes” in many cases. Some of the girls were even convicted of prostitution by the same judicial system that has failed the survivors of rape and sexual abuse.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) published its findings on Rotherham in 2022. The IOPC said there was no evidence of police corruption in the scandal. Instead, the watchdog claimed South Yorkshire Police feared for “community cohesion”.
This is plausible given that the North of England had seen a wave of race riots in 2001. These riots, which ripped through Burnley, Oldham, and Leeds in May and June, finally peaked in Bradford in July.
Racial tensions are still high in many of these towns. Self-segregation has long been common with white flight and the formation of ethnic enclaves. However, this may not be the only factor.
Two retired South Yorkshire police officers have now been arrested as part of the IOPC investigation into the child abuse network in Rotherham. The former police officers are facing allegations of historic sex offences.
There will be no justice until the questions about the roles of the police, social services, and local authorities have been answered. Anything short of a reckoning will not repair the damage done.
Unfortunately, British governments tend to hold inquiries as a form of damage control. The tendency will be to mitigate and manage the fallout for the political class. If this is what happens, Labour will face the full brunt of public anger.
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Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.
