THE UK government on Monday introduced new laws to tackle grooming gangs and apologised to the thousands of victims believed to have been sexually exploited across the country.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament that any adult who engages in penetrative sex with a child under 16 will now face the most serious charge of rape. The move is part of a nationwide crackdown on grooming gangs.
The announcement coincided with the release of a report by parliamentarian Louise Casey, which examined the decades-long grooming scandal that has affected multiple towns and cities across Britain.
The report highlighted institutional failures, noting that young girls and women were often blamed for their own abuse.
On Friday, seven men were convicted in the latest grooming trial in the UK. Jurors heard that two victims were made to have sex “with multiple men on the same day, in filthy flats and on rancid mattresses”.
One victim said social workers had considered her “a prostitute” from the age of 10.
In a separate case, three other men appeared at Sheffield Crown Court on Monday. They denied charges of raping a teenage girl in Rotherham between 2008 and 2010.
Although the age of consent in the UK is 16, Casey’s report said too many grooming cases involving 13 to 15-year-olds had been dropped or downgraded when the children were wrongly viewed as having been “in love with” or having “consented to” sex with adults.
The report pointed to a “grey area” in the law for 13 to 15-year-olds, where charging decisions were “left more open to interpretation”. While this was meant to avoid criminalising teenage relationships, it had in practice helped “much older men who had groomed underage children for sex”.
National inquiry launched
Prime minister Keir Starmer said on Sunday that a national inquiry would be launched, one of the 12 recommendations made by Casey.
The inquiry will be led by a national commission with statutory powers to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath and will oversee all local investigations.
“It will go wherever it needs to go,” Starmer said on Monday.
Victims have long demanded a national inquiry. Jayne Senior, an early whistleblower, told AFP on Monday that the outcome “will depend on who leads it” and what powers they are given.
Senior, who is mentioned in the Casey report, said the government had still not protected whistleblowers. She also asked what action would be taken against police officers who had obstructed her efforts to bring perpetrators to justice in Rotherham.
The Casey report said ethnicity was often ignored, with two-thirds of perpetrators’ ethnicity not recorded, making national assessments unreliable.
“We found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems,” the report stated.
However, local data from West Yorkshire collected between 2020 and 2024 showed that 429 out of 1222 suspects, or 35 per cent, self-defined as Asian.
Cooper said Asian men, particularly those of Pakistani background, were “overrepresented”. She added that ethnicity and nationality will now be recorded mandatorily.
Casey noted that “it does no community any good to ignore” evidence of disproportionality “in any form of offending, be that amongst perpetrators or victims”.
Long-term abuse
The issue received global attention in January after tech billionaire Elon Musk criticised the UK government on his X platform for not agreeing to a national inquiry.
Casey wrote that gangs targeted vulnerable adolescents, including those in care or with learning or physical disabilities. In many cases, a man would present himself as a boyfriend and offer gifts and affection.
“Subsequently, they pass them to other men for sex, using drugs and alcohol to make children compliant, often turning to violence and coercion to control them,” she wrote.
According to the report, this pattern of abuse has changed little over time. Grooming often now begins online, with locations shifting from parks to vape shops and hotels that allow anonymous check-ins.
Gangs have operated in towns and cities across England, including Rotherham and Rochdale in the north, and Oxford and Bristol in the south, for nearly four decades.
“On behalf of this, and past governments, and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering that you have suffered, and the failure of our country's institutions through decades, to prevent that harm and keep you safe,” Cooper told parliament.
(With inputs from agencies)
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