British MP Rupert Lowe’s recent speech has reignited discussion around the horrific “grooming gangs” in the United Kingdom that have indulged in “gang-based child sexual exploitation” across several states in the country. The UK government’s investigation into these gangs has found that perpetrators of organised child sex abuse are mostly “taxi drivers and market traders of Pakistani heritage”.
Lowe, in his recent speech in the UK Parliament, read graphic testimonies of survivors, describing accounts of extreme sexual abuse, child pregnancies, intimidation, alleged police misconduct, and institutional failures. The testimonies, according to Loew, were collected during his independent inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation.
“I sincerely urge this Parliament to listen to the testimonies from these brave survivors and to act, to finally act,” the British MP said, reading out statements from survivors who said they were targeted as children by organised grooming gangs.
The Testimonies
Among the testimonies cited by Lowe were accounts of extreme violence and sexual abuse. According to the independent MP, one survivor said a perpetrator “forced” a liquor bottle “up inside me”.
“He broke the glass while he was there. At that point, I was about 12, nearly 13,” she said.
One woman said that, over the course of the abuse, she was allegedly raped by multiple police officers in different parts of the country. Another recalled that her abuse started when she was 13 years old. “I was raped by probably about 600 or 700 different men over three years,” she said.
“I was bleeding from both my vagina and my back passage and was so swollen I could not sit down. I told hospital staff my drink had been spiked, and I did not know what had happened because I was too afraid to tell the truth. They did not ask any questions. They gave me tablets and discharged me. I was 15 years old,” said another survivor.
Some survivors said the abuse escalated to bestiality, with victims themselves being treated like animals.
“I remember a man opening the back of a van, and I saw 15 to 20 girls locked in dog cages,” one woman said.
Another recalled that dogs were brought in and she “had nowhere to move.”
“I think that was the scariest thing was not having any concept of it. There were men around me, not horrified, not disgusted, not helping, but filming and laughing, making bets on whether the dog could actually rape me or not. Yes, I was raped by a dog,” she said.
“The man just held my face, stared me down straight in the eyes, and he wanted to see me break, and he did,” she added.
Another survivor recalled, “I was held down by the men as they each took turns to orally and vaginally rape me, taking it in turns to pin down my arms and my legs. When the assault ended, the men hit me repeatedly, threatened to find me, kill me and harm my loved ones if I ever told anybody what had happened.”
A third survivor recalled that their perpetrators constantly made remarks “suggesting the white girls, the Christian girls, were viewed as having fewer morals or lower values, whereas Muslim girls were described by some of the men as having dignity and higher moral standing.”
“Race did play a part and motivated the selection or demographic of the victims. Throughout my exploitation, the other girls I encountered or who were abused alongside me were almost exclusively white,” recalled another woman.
According to testimonies, gang members used racial comparisons to justify the way they “treated and controlled” women. A survivor recalled that she was impregnated by one of the men whose father was an ‘Imam’– a Muslim cleric.
“His dad knew, and he got his son married and said that he wasn’t allowed to see the child. They look after their own community,” she said.
A woman recalled that the gang members “would toot the horn of the car and then a child would be taken to the front door by a staff member of the children’s home.”
“Things would escalate around Eid and holidays. Parties got bigger, got worse, got more violent. People, more people involved, more girls involved. The parties were just bigger,” said another woman.
The Investigation
Last year, Lowe led a private investigation that identified “gang-based child sexual exploitation” in at least 85 areas across the UK. According to a statement issued by Lowe in August last year, the probe found that “rape gangs”, predominantly comprising men of Pakistani heritage, have been active for decades and “far more widespread than thought”.
“Patterns of predominantly Pakistani males, combined with gross negligence from public bodies, are identifiable,” the statement said. It also accused authorities of failing to act on the targeted abuse.
History Of Grooming Gangs In UK
The scandal came to public attention more than a decade ago in Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city, where authorities were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse of young white girls around 2001, according to the American publication The Free Press.
However, the convictions in the case came almost a decade later in 2010, when five men of Pakistani origin were jailed for multiple offences against girls as young as 12 years of age. This pattern was found to be repeated in as many as 50 cities across the UK, including Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and Bristol.
According to a 2014 report by Professor Alexis Jay, in Rotherham alone, more than 1,400 children were sexually abused over 16 years between 1997 and 2013. Many of the victims were abducted, raped, trafficked, and subjected to unimaginable violence, often with little to no intervention from authorities due to fears of being labelled racist.
In its last report, the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce found that over 1.15 lakh cases of sexual offences against children were reported in the UK in 2023. Of them, 4,228 (3.7 per cent) were found to be group-based crimes. The task force was set up in April 2023 by then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to address grooming gangs. It arrested over 550 suspects in its first year of operation.
The report showed that 26 per cent of these crimes took place within families, while in 17 per cent of cases, groups including grooming gangs were involved. As many as nine per cent of the group-based crimes were reported to have taken place in schools, religious places, community centres, and other such institutions.
In 2024, an independent review commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham found widespread organised sexual exploitation of children within Rochdale from 2004 to 2012. It highlighted that people who were at Rochdale Council during the period 2004 to 2013 did not recognise or acknowledge the very serious failures that affected the lives of children. Following Operation Span in 2012, nine perpetrators were convicted, of whom eight were British-Pakistani men. Since then, there have been hundreds more arrests, charges, and convictions.