Britain’s government on Thursday bowed to pressure and announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, used his social media platform X to highlight the issue in a series of vitriolic posts.
Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said she had commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” that would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.
She also said that the government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called grooming gangs — groups of men who were found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, some as young as 11, in the 2000s and early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.
The scandal, which was widely covered in the British media in the 2010s and has already been the subject of local and national inquiries, spanned a number of towns and cities in which mostly white girls were exploited, assaulted and raped by groups of men.
According to a number of investigations, victims and parents who asked for help were often failed by the police and social services. Some police officers had referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice,” while other officials feared they would be labeled racist if they highlighted the ethnicity of the perpetrators.
Grooming gangs represent a fraction of the total number of recorded cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. Of 115,489 child sexual abuse crimes recorded in 2023, 4,228 cases — or 3.7 percent — involved groups of two or more perpetrators, according to official data published in November. And of those cases, 1,125 were perpetrated by relatives or family members at home.
But the issue is deeply emotive and was stoked by Mr. Musk who, this month, falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labour Party lawmakers of enabling grooming gangs. His social posts included many inaccuracies and smears, including accusing Mr. Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, of being complicit in “the rape of Britain.” However his intervention reignited a debate on sensitive issues including race, sexual abuse and the cultural values of some immigrant communities.
The government had previously rejected calls to set up a new national investigation from the anti-immigration Reform U.K. party and the main opposition Conservative Party, whose leader, Kemi Badenoch, said that no one had “joined the dots” about the series of grooming cases, including the involvement of men of Pakistani heritage.
The government had said it would instead focus on implementing the recommendations of a previous national investigation by Professor Alexis Jay into child sexual abuse, which took seven years, processed more than two million pages of evidence and featured the voices of some 6,000 victims. That inquiry concluded in 2022 and made a series of recommendations that the previous Conservative-led government failed to implement.
Ms. Jay, who also oversaw a 2014 inquiry into grooming gangs in Rotherham, a northern England town where 1,400 minors were raped and trafficked by mainly Pakistani heritage men between 1997 and 2013, had argued against a new national inquiry, instead urging the Labour government to act on her previous recommendations.
On Thursday, Ms. Cooper said she had asked Louise Casey, who conducted a 2015 investigation into the authorities’ response to child sexual abuse in Rotherham, to undertake an audit of the scale of gang exploitation and to look at more evidence that was not previously available.
“It will properly examine ethnicity data and the demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, and will look at the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending, including among different ethnic groups,” Ms. Cooper said of the new audit.
Ms. Cooper also announced plans to help the northern town of Oldham and up to four other municipalities undertake inquiries “to get truth and justice for victims and survivors.” Police chiefs have also been asked to revisit past gang exploitation cases where no charges were brought and reopen investigations where appropriate.
The government’s announcement on Thursday followed calls for action from a handful of Labour lawmakers, including Sarah Champion, who represents Rotherham. She had proposed a five-point plan that called for ministers “to mandate local inquiries around the country to hold authorities to account — which then report back to the government,” and for a “national audit” to investigate whether grooming gangs were still in operation or whether cases had been missed.
On Thursday Chris Philp, who speaks for the Conservative Party on home affairs, dismissed the initiative as insufficient. “The Government’s announcement of just five local rape gang inquiries is totally inadequate,” he wrote on social media, saying that many more towns were affected. “What about the rest — don’t they matter?”
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