National Review
Sexual Terrorism in Britain
By Abigail Anthony
January 3, 2025 6:36 PM
What are the ‘grooming gangs,’ what has been done about them, and why the renewed public interest?
Users of Twitter/X have been inundated recently with material about Britain’s “grooming gangs.” For those who are outside of England and infrequently read British newspapers, the sudden onslaught of information is overwhelming: What are the “grooming gangs,” what has been done about them, and why the renewed public interest — particularly since some of the crimes occurred over a decade ago? Well, I’ll try to provide a simple synopsis. Here are some key facts.
Since at least the 1990s, networks of abusive men in England have sexually exploited thousands of young girls. Generally, the gangs recruit youngish males to pose as generous boyfriends and seduce young girls with gifts; eventually, the girls (sometimes as young as eleven) are introduced to drugs, older men, and prostitution. To call these pimps “groomers” or “grooming gangs” is woefully misleading, since such terms distract from the repulsive sex crimes. Consider the sentencing remarks from a 2013 case in Oxford. Mohammed Karrar (who was in his 30s) anally raped an eleven-year-old girl. When she became pregnant at age 15, he took her to receive an illegal abortion. He gave her drugs, including crack cocaine and heroin. On one occasion, Karrar prepared her for anal gang rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. Later, she simultaneously had four men inside her, while a ball was placed in her mouth to silence her. Karrar treated that girl like cattle, branding his initial on her rear with a hot hair pin. Simply put, the “grooming gangs” are better characterized as torturous child prostitution rings that commit sexual terrorism.
Some brave people sounded the alarm years ago. For example, British feminist Julie Bindel published a well-investigated article in 2007 addressing the “growing problem” of “groups of men who had been preying on young, vulnerable girls and ensnaring them into prostitution.” Bindel later stated that, despite the evidence she had collected, it took until 2007 to publish an article on the topic because “in this particular geographical area, many of the members of grooming gangs were of Pakistani origin” and “some editors feared an accusation of racism.”
Devastatingly but unsurprisingly, it was not only editors who feared being called “racist.” The Rotherham scandal began in 2010 when five men — Zafran Ramzan, Razwan Razaq, Umar Razaq, Adil Hussain, and Mohsin Khan — were sentenced for sexual offenses against children. Everything escalated in 2012, when British journalist Andrew Norfolk published articles releasing evidence from hundreds of documents showing widespread child sexual exploitation in South Yorkshire since 2000, particularly in Rotherham; one report dated 2010 stated that police intelligence bureau was aware that thousands of such crimes occurred each year.
Yet Norfolk’s reporting found that the authorities, including the police and social services, had been concerned that pursuing justice would inflame racial and religious tensions. Why? Well, in part because there was a clear trend among the offenders: “There is a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally,” reads an excerpt from one document. “There appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females.” A 2010 report for the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board stated that the crimes had “cultural characteristics . . . which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity.” The report continued: “There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting . . . this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.” And so, in Rotherham, the perpetrators were largely ignored. The police misconduct was stunning: A 13-year-old girl was found intoxicated in a house with Asian men after a neighbor reported hearing her scream; the police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but didn’t interrogate the men.
Following Norfolk’s exposés, Alexis Jay was commissioned to conduct an independent inquiry, and the “Jay Report” was released in 2014. The bombshell review concluded that roughly 1,400 children — a conservative estimate — were sexually exploited in Rotherham from 1997 to 2013. It found cases of girls as young as eleven being gang-raped, as well as an instance where a child was doused with petrol and threatened with being set on fire. In two cases, the fathers tried to remove their daughters from the houses where the abuse was occurring, yet the dads were arrested. Victims and their families often remained silent because of the perpetrators leading intimidation campaigns, complete with stalking and threats. While the review identified many factors that contributed to Rotherham’s failed response, one aspect was the aversion to facing racism allegations: “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so,” reads the report.
After the Jay Report, the National Crime Agency launched “Operation Stovewood” to investigate the abuse that occurred in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. The project has since identified over 1,000 victims and led to the conviction of more than 35 individuals. According to a BBC story from August 2024, Operation Stovewood had roughly 50 ongoing investigations and does not plan to open new cases. But the gangs are not confined to the town of Rotherham; they’ve been found all over the country, including in Rochdale, Bristol, Telford, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, and so on. It seems that, if you randomly pick a city in England and spend a bit of time on Google, you’ll find news stories about the gangs wreaking havoc.
So why the renewed interest on social media regarding Britain’s child-abuse gangs? There are a few reasons. The first is that some court transcripts revealing details about the gangs were recently released to the public. Second, judicial sentencing for the harrowing Sara Sharif case occurred in December. Although the Sharif case wasn’t exactly about “grooming gangs,” it did expose flaws in the immigration system, child services, and cultural assimilation; the judge’s sentencing remarks state that Sara had over 70 fresh injuries and 25 separate bone fractures when she died at age ten in 2023 at the hands of her father, stepmother, and uncle, who all fled to Pakistan after murdering her. Third, Jess Phillips (the U.K. safeguarding minister) recently denied an investigative inquiry into the gangs and suggested that such matters can be pursued by the local authorities — a big task for a local authority and insufficient to address the nationwide problems. Fourth, the town of Rotherham was declared the “Children’s Capital of Culture” for 2025; such a title is like a giant middle finger to the city’s long roster of child victims. And fifth, the abuse is still ongoing, not some historic tragedy that we can claim was squashed.
Of course, other circumstances also contribute to the renewed public interest: The online debates about H-1B visas led to general discussion about the values held in non-Western countries, there’s heightened sensitivity to gang rape since the Pelicot trials in France, and the right-wing news organization GBNews (particularly the reporter Charlie Peters) has done great work exposing the gangs; that news group’s channel launched only in 2021. In my assessment, these converging factors facilitated widespread interest in the United Kingdom and motivated discussion on social media; quickly, the disturbing stories were seen by individuals across the West, including Elon Musk and other high-profile figures, who further amplified the issue.
Given the recent outrage on social media about the expansive network of exploitative gangs, government action might be pursued. Some admirable efforts have made progress, such as the “Grooming Gangs Taskforce,” which has arrested over 500 suspects and identified thousands of victims. But more work is necessary. The Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch just called for a national inquiry into the gangs, stating that “trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots.” The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has published nearly 20 reports on 15 investigations, and perhaps now there is enough public pressure for the government to enact some of the inquiry’s recommendations.
