And at Westfield there are boys lying in wait. Teens are there, in small groups, sent to target girls of around 13 who are hanging out with no adults in tow. This is “first-stage seduction” — a tried-and-tested technique — and I’ve seen it first hand, as a group of three boys bought ice creams for a couple of girls who they had obviously just met. The girls were giggling and coy and lapping up the attention, clearly in awe of the boys. Then the lawyer I was with discreetly pointed out the older Asian men hanging around the peripheries, watching the interactions.

Stratford’s shopping center has been a notorious grooming hotspot for years. It’s easy to be anonymous in the cavernous mall, and security guards have spoken about how hard it is to keep an eye on suspicious individuals as they disappear into the front and out of the back of many of the large department stores. “It’s not illegal for teenagers to have coffee together, or to flirt, go into the cinema, or try on sneakers,” one police officer told me. “What are we supposed to do?”

By now, everyone is familiar with the grooming gang scandal. But few people realize how serious the problem is in London — and those who do are very reluctant to call it out. As we are only now discovering, the capital’s politicians, police and social workers are just as guilty as those pilloried Up North for conspiring to keep this growing threat out of the public eye. Rather than exposing and stopping the trafficking of girls, they have dodged the issue by saying this isn’t sexual exploitation: instead they say the girls are criminals too. They’re being recruited for “county lines”, to move and supply drugs.

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, produced exactly this deflection at the beginning of the year. Asked directly, by Susan Hall, leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly: “Just how many grooming gangs have we got in London?”, Khan replied with an unhelpful: “The situation in London in relation to young people being groomed is different to other parts of the country.”

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There followed a lengthy and revelatory exchange, during which Khan managed to dodge the same question nine times. Eventually, he did manage a response — of sorts. “What we have in London,” he said, “is young people being groomed, your words not mine, to be using county lines.”

Khan’s response is scarcely credible on many levels, especially since the grooming of girls in London has been going on for decades and if one whistle-blower is to be believed, it is at “catastrophic” levels. Jon Wedger is a former Metropolitan Police officer with more than 25 years experience investigating child sexual exploitation. Back in 2006, Wedger submitted a list of 50 youngsters who had been groomed and sexually abused in the capital, providing details such as the car-registration numbers of the perpetrators. But he was told to back off by social services, and even a large children’s charity, because he was generating “extra work”.

Wedger tells me that nothing has changed. The gangs are still operating; the authorities are in denial. And the methods of procurement are just as we’ve seen countrywide. “The idea that they aren’t prevalent with the similar MO in London is just staggering to me,” he says. While the city is target-rich, Wedger’s focus has been on care homes. “Girls are being collected by men outside children’s homes in fancy cars, and being taken to a brothel. In the meantime, the police are looking for kids cycling around London dealing drugs for the big players, and the girls are ignored.”

The authorities are, quite literally, turning a blind eye to the problem. As late as 2018, Metropolitan Police officials claimed they were unable to address concerns about grooming gangs because “the terms ‘rape gangs’ and ‘grooming gangs’ are not legally recognized and do not appear in MPS policy”.

And yet, we know for a fact that Arshid Hussain, central to the infamous Rotherham grooming cases, took one of his victims to London, where she was sexually assaulted by three men as repayment for Hussain’s debts. And Mohammed Karrar, convicted in 2019 in the Oxford grooming scandal, trafficked his victim repeatedly to Paddington Station, selling her to other men. We also know from Professor Alexis Jay’s 2021 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that grooming gangs in London exist and operate along the classic “boyfriend model” of procurement, just as they do in the North. But at every mention of the situation in London, Sadiq Khan insists on using “county lines” terminology, instead of acknowledging the existence of rape gangs.

Michaela Addison has worked closely with victims and survivors of grooming gangs in London, and she is appalled at the use of what she describes as “sanitized language” to describe these crimes. It’s perfectly understandable why the mayor might do this, she explains: “if you can’t name it, the problem doesn’t exist”.

But the problem does exist. Just ask Katie. She was victimized twice: once by the grooming gangs, and then by the police. “I fell in love with Dan, big style,” she tells me, describing her Afghan boyfriend. “And by the time I realized he was a psycho, I was trapped, I was living partly with him, and partly with my foster carers, and his friends would come round and take me to flats where dirty old men would queue up to abuse me.” Katie was 15 years old at the time, and only called the police when it became clear she was in real danger. “I saw Dan with another bloke and he had what I thought was a gun. I knew they were dealing drugs, they used to give me some when I’d seen enough men, but it was the gun that really scared me, so I went into the police station and told them everything.”

However, the police totally ignored her claims of sexual violence and pimping, honing in only on the allegations about weapons and drugs. “As soon as I mentioned the gun, I could tell by the questions they were asking me that all they wanted to know was, ‘Where is this gang, who were the main drug dealers, where do they stash the gear?’”

Katie, now in her 20s, knows she will never see justice for what happened to her. “It’s all about county lines,” she tells me. “The girls are worth less than the gear.”

When I approached Sadiq Khan’s office for comment last month, this dismissive response found its echo: “The Mayor and the Met remain vigilant and will continue to do everything they can to protect children in the capital from violence and exploitation in all its forms, such as offending by grooming gangs,” but that in London, “in particular, we are dealing with “county lines”… These gangs exploit children and often use coercion, intimidation and violence, including sexual violence.”

The trouble is, to use such language implies that the girls are complicit in criminal activity, rather than being the victims of abuse and coercion. It also avoids the fact that the term “grooming gangs” is heavily racialized.

Susan Hall has also been deeply troubled by Khan’s insistence over many months that grooming gangs only exist in London in the context of county lines. “Given how widespread this appalling criminality has been in other towns and cities across the country,” she says, “it is impossible to think that grooming gangs like those uncovered in Rochdale and many other areas have not also operated in a city as big as London.”

The evidence backs this up: Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is on the record denying that London has a grooming gang problem; but when presented with the evidence, admitted that there is a “steady flow” of live multi-offender child sexual exploitation investigations, and a “very significant” number of cases that would need to be reinvestigated as a result of the current review.

“This is exactly what Sadiq Khan has done,” Maggie Oliver, a former police officer and anti-grooming gangs campaigner, tells me. “He denied the problem for as long as he can, and then being forced to at least partially admit that it’s going on but by using different language to describe it.”

None of this is to dismiss the importance of the county lines angle. It is serious, widespread and warrants significant police attention. But the reluctance of the Met and the Mayor’s Office to discuss grooming gangs — to even use the term, let alone investigate — means that rape victims are, as usual, the ones paying the price.

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All the while, carers and whistleblowers are having to go back to basics in order to convince people that these girls are actually victims of grooming gangs. One sexual health worker I spoke to told me that in many cases, the police simply weren’t interested. There is, she told me, one notorious McDonald’s in South West London where gang members like to go to pick up girls. She and her colleague had reported, no fewer than half a dozen times, “information that the girls have told us about themselves being directly abused, and, in one case, two very young sisters being targeted and raped by the men”. But each time she followed up her call, she discovered that none of the previous reports had been logged. “We had given them as much information as we had, including in one case a car registration of one of the perpetrators, but they have mysteriously ‘lost’ all of this information.”

As Wedger told me: “What you don’t look for, doesn’t exist.”

But for how long can the authorities keep looking the other way? Already, news is starting to break. Only this week, a national newspaper confirmed what our investigation suspected. Sadiq Khan had access to and is known to have read several separate reports by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, from 2016-2025, which identified six victims of these gangs. These documents also outlined the dreadful details of the abuse endured by these girls — some as young as 13. Some of the girls were raped by multiple men in London hotel rooms after being plied with drugs and alcohol. Chris Wild, an author and care-home consultant, has described the problem as “more catastrophic in the capital than anywhere else in the country”. We now know that Khan knew about it, and still he could only obfuscate and point to “county lines”.

The really shocking thing, though, is that we have been here before. While Khan keeps his own counsel, Keir Starmer’s grooming gang inquiry, which was resisted for so long, is already falling apart. Members of the initial panel have claimed that the terms of the investigation are already being watered down, and cite “a disturbing conflict of interest” regarding the identities of two possible chairs. Fiona Goddard, a member of the panel and a grooming gang victim, sent a searing note of resignation, in which she echoed a refrain which is now too all familiar: “I’m further concerned by the condescending and controlling language used towards survivors throughout this process who have had to fight every day just to be believed.”

As the scandal in London grows, the process for bringing institutions to account is in complete disarray. And last night, a third member of the Starmer inquiry resigned: all three women are victims; all three are sick of the continued cover-up. The question for the rest of us is: how can there ever be justice for the abused girls, and retribution for the perpetrators, if public servants such as Khan remain in denial?

This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

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Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

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Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

The grooming gang story is often framed as something that happened far away, in the North, in the bad old Nineties and 2000s. But this is a story about what is happening right now.

Ellie’s abuse began in 1996 and carried on for another four years. And as we know now, this wasn’t an isolated incident. The systematic abuse of literally thousands of children was taking place in Rotherham, Bradford, Derbyshire, Huddersfield, Oxford, Rochdale, and Bristol, among others. We only know about this because of brave victims, dogged whistleblowers and the resulting prosecutions. But while many resilient women have come forward, so many others remained silent — ashamed, disbelieved, ignored.

In January, Elon Musk targeted our country’s failings when he posted on X that: “[Keir] Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years (2008-2013)”, demanding that he “face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. It was in response to Jess Phillips’ remarkable decision, as minister for the safeguarding of women, to reject a national public inquiry into the grooming of children in Oldham.

Whatever his motivation, Musk was right in his analysis. This is a scandal that has been swept under the carpet for years. I’ve been following grooming cases for almost my whole career. Over the decades, a succession of inquiries and reports has indicated the nature and scale of the catastrophe, yet nothing has been done to address the underlying problem, let alone fix it.

In 2014, we had the Jay Report and Operation Bullfinch. There have been independent reviews into the failings of Greater Manchester, Bristol and Derby, among other cities. And it has been three years since the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which concluded that the current system is fundamentally flawed and incapable of protecting vulnerable children.

Yet despite the money, effort and desperate testimonials poured into each of these investigations, little has changed. The Conservative government was tasked with implementing the 20 recommendations of the final IICSA report. It did nothing, save passing the burden of responsibility on to Labour after last July’s election.

At the start of this year, it looked like something might be done. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a £10 million plan for a series of local inquiries into grooming gangs, as well as a rapid review of the current scale of exploitation across the UK. To lead the review, Cooper appointed Tom Crowther KC, who chaired the inquiry into child sex abuse in Telford. Published in 2022, Crowther found that more than 1,000 girls had been abused in the Shropshire town over a period of 30 years, amid “shocking” failures by the police and local council. Hopes rose that, finally, the Government was taking the problem seriously.

And yet, barely three months in, the wheels are already coming off. Crowther has expressed frustration with the little progress that has been made: the Government isn’t collaborating, the process is being watered down, and the political will simply isn’t there. That matters, and not just historically. Without asking why justice has come so slowly, and without attempting to understand why the grooming happened — and still happens — nothing will change. Communities will continue to be demonized, gangs will continue to operate with impunity, and a steady stream of offenders will continue to be released back into the community, many back into the very areas where their victims still live.

***

Almost 30 years ago, in 1996, I visited a tiny charity in the center of Leeds. There I met Angela*, a hard-working single mother, who described how she had discovered her daughter Jane*, 14, was being picked up in taxis by Asian men, who then used her for sex.

Her mother was desperate, on the edge of tears. “She stays out late and she’s been seen with older lads in the town center,” Angela told me. “I’ve given [the] police a load of car number plates and names but they say she’s choosing this lifestyle and there’s nothing they can do.”

Angela and her daughter lived in Keighley, a market town in West Yorkshire small enough for everyone to know your business, and a place infamous as the so-called ground zero of the grooming gangs. It was here, back in 2002, that Ann Cryer, the town’s then Labour MP, first exposed how groups of predominantly Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

I had long been aware of organized gangs targeting vulnerable girls. But it was only through meeting mothers of victims that I realized how little the authorities cared about these girls.

Even in those early days, the pattern was clear. The victims were generally vulnerable children from impoverished towns with high unemployment and racial disharmony — and society tended to see them as worthless. Even the police described them as “troublesome” and “slags”. Their families, if they had any, were seen as disreputable. All the while, social workers talked blithely about “personal choice” and “consent”.

There was another factor too: race. Throughout the 2000s, I was one of a handful of civilians invited to attend the annual Police Vice Conference, where experts in child sexual abuse and exploitation shared intelligence. It was at the 2004 conference that I heard, from one of the most senior police officers in attendance, that fears of “race riots” were growing — as more and more information came in about the predominance of Pakistani Muslims in child abuse and pimping gangs across the north of England.

This added another complication to the toxic mix: politics. In the absence of mainstream political support, other political agents would run to “rescue” — or weaponize — victims. This was certainly the case when Charlene Downes went missing from her Blackpool home in November 2003. Blackpool has always been a hotspot for child abuse, and a growing immigrant community back then was the source of much local suspicion.

Early on in their investigation, police became aware that Charlene, then 14, had along with various other girls been targeted by abusers active in the town, swapping sex for food, cigarettes and affection. It was a modus operandi that was becoming familiar to those who were following the escalation of these cases. “I found out,” her mother told me back then, “that Charlene was getting chips for a blow job. How can those bastards do that to kids?”

During the hunt for Charlene, police uncovered Blackpool’s open secret: Muslim men, from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, had latched on to the opportunities afforded them by the nighttime economy. Taxi drivers and takeaway workers would prey on girls, passing them around to each other, inviting friends and business associates to come to the back rooms of kebab shops, and the offices of mini cab firms, to have sex with them. This was organized, a business, run for money, with the perk of on-tap sex with terrified victims.

While it was by no means certain that Charlene was being solely abused by immigrants, far-Right political parties saw an opportunity. The BNP, with the support of Charlene’s family, latched onto her case as an example of the problem caused by Pakistani Muslim men “invading” Britain. Once they got hold of her, the narrative was set.

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The pernicious effect of the BNP could be seen months after Charlene’s disappearance. In 2004, Edge of the City, a documentary about gang grooming in Bradford, was due to be released. Abuse cases had been surfacing at an alarming rate, and the filmmaker Anna Hall was the first to expose the pattern we now know as gang grooming. But the BNP gleefully leapt on the film, describing it as “a party political broadcast” for its local election campaign. West Yorkshire Police, fearing a racist backlash, advised Channel 4 to withdraw the film from transmission at the last minute. Community cohesion took precedence over the rape of kids.

It’s something we’re still seeing. Since most of the worst cases we know about involve gangs of Asian, Muslim men pimping out white women, a reluctance to act is supercharged by fears of being accused of racism. In the past, authorities would rather have turned a blind eye. Today, despite everything we know, the same thing is happening. Only last week, Sir Trevor Phillips claimed that the Home Secretary was failing to push ahead with local reviews “because of the demographic of people involved… largely Pakistani Muslim background, and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it”.

Meanwhile, back in the early 2000s, Charlene remained missing. I kept an eye on her story, wondering if she’d ever turn up. By 2006, when the evidence of her being horrifically abused by multiple men had been exposed, I pitched the story to my then editor at The Guardian, Katherine Viner. She acted much as the authorities did. She called me and said: “We would be called racist if we publish this.” So I wrote it for The Sunday Times magazine. The day after it was published, I was added to the Islamophobia Watch website.

All the while, the politicization of the grooming gangs continues. Over the years, EDL poster boy Tommy Robinson has used the issue to further his own political agenda against “radical Islam”. Neither an expert in abuse, nor a particular champion of children or women, he has if anything made things worse for victims. In 2019, Robinson was imprisoned for contempt of court after breaching reporting restrictions on one rape trial and jeopardizing due process. Notwithstanding his motivation, he has been trumpeted as a hero by Musk and many others for his propagandizing of the issue. In the justice vacuum, bad actors spy an opportunity.

In the end, Charlene’s body was never found. The hunt for her has been one of Lancashire Police’s longest-running missing person inquiries. But, many years after her disappearance, rumors began circulating around Blackpool that her body had been chopped up and used as kebab meat, sold from the very takeaways where she and other girls were abused.

***

Court 1 at Preston Crown Court is the biggest in the building: the press bench is full, and the public gallery is packed with survivors and supporters, including Ellie Reynolds and myself. It is January 2025, and we are here to see the sentencing of three monstrous brothers who raped, sold, abused and tortured a succession of vulnerable young girls between 1996 and 2010. It has been 30 years since these men started committing their crimes.

Amran Miah, 49, Alman Miah, 47, and Shah Joman Miah (known as “Sarj”), 38, were violent predators who targeted girls in abusive family homes or care and foster placements. Some of their victims were as young as seven. The girls were lured in by promises of romance, rides in fast cars, vodka, cigarettes, cannabis and the freedom to hang out at the men’s apartments: they leapt at what they thought was a chance to escape. A life where someone cared. The promises couldn’t have been further from the truth, as they were prostituted from cars, on streets and in apartments across Britain. Often locked in rooms with nothing but a filthy mattress, they were forced into violent sexual acts, sometimes with several men at once.

Refusal to comply would mean being beaten with dog chains, forced to drink their own urine and tortured. One of the Miah victims showed me cigarette burns on her legs, stomach and arms. “[The pimp] used me as an ashtray,” she tells me, “and a few times when I was asleep he’d piss all over me, not bothering to go to the toilet, then make me get up and wash the sheets while he went back to sleep.”

Another girl, who was not in court but followed the proceedings by video link, was abused over a period of five years, from the age of seven. “He ejaculated into her mouth,” the judge tells the court. “She said that when [he] ejaculated she began to cry and make a noise and [he] replied, ‘Stop it or we’ll get found out’.” She was raped, filmed and photographed.

Elizabeth*, another girl, is in court that day too. During the lunch break, she tells me that she knew of at least one of the victims in the trial considering withdrawing their evidence because they were convinced they wouldn’t be believed. Elizabeth was a witness to the grooming gang activities, including seeing girls being taken to the room above a takeaway to be raped, some still in their school uniforms. She was a key witness for the prosecution, but after she reported what she had seen, word soon got around. “They smashed my windows,” she says of the threats she received. “I feel scared despite the police promising I am protected.”

In court, defense barristers make valiant attempts to introduce mitigation: one defendant suffered with depression, another has an autistic child, and each of the brothers has a work ethic and is “loyal” to the others. But the judge reminds the court of their depravity: “You threatened to tell [a witness] that if she said anything to the police you would set her house on fire. She spoke of attending hospital due to anxiety. I am satisfied that each of you acted in a predatory and pedophilic manner… You saw your victims as vehicles to be used and abused at your will and when you wanted to. You treated them with utter contempt.” The robust sentencing reflected the seriousness of the crimes: all three men were sentenced to at least a decade in prison. Facing the stiffest sentence, Shah Joman Miah was sent down for a minimum of 21 years and 232 days.

These children were treated as disposable rubbish by the men who raped and pimped them. But a similarly appalling punishment was meted out by the authorities tasked with protecting them.

***

For years, Sara Rowbotham was a sexual health worker in Rochdale. As the coordinator of the Crisis Intervention Team, a body linked to the NHS, from 2003 to 2014, it was her job to identify young people who were vulnerable to child sex exploitation.

Rowbotham repeatedly tried to alert police and social services, from as early as 2004, to the fact that girls were being systematically abused by gangs of older Asian men. She made over 100 referrals, none of which was actioned. During her time as a sexual health worker, she made something she called the “Boyfriend Book” — in which she kept records of all of the perpetrators, and their details as given by their victims. The book was eventually used in court as evidence. It is still being used today, at the ongoing trials at which she is called as a witness, some 20 years after the abuse first happened.

Rowbotham went on to provide key evidence that ended in the conviction of nine men in 2012, and 10 more in a separate investigation in 2015. “It was my job to keep those girls safe,” she tells me. “I tried to do that, I kept referring cases to police, to social workers, and they did nothing. They ignored me. They turned against me and shut me out.”

This reluctance among authorities to believe the young victims is borne out by research by Sarah Hall, who has been involved in child protection for 20 years. The social workers understood sexually exploited girls as being able to make choices, supposedly unlike girls abused in the home. Hall says she often heard the phrasing “putting themselves in risky situations”.

Because these girls were widely viewed as “sluts”, they were often ignored. “They were all Pakistani, except one who was Algerian,” Fiona tells me, recounting her abuse at the hands of a gang in 2008, back when she was just 13. “But the police denied they existed.” Fiona was in care, and staff knew from very early on what was happening. “They would have multiagency meetings but no one would turn up. They said, ‘Well she goes missing all the time so she must enjoy it’.”

Vulnerable, confused and angry, Fiona could only lash out. “Because I wasn’t getting listened to and my mental health was deteriorating quickly, I ended up getting done for assault on the staff and criminal damage on the care home… So my criminal record is all to do with criminal damage and assault of care home staff and police officers.” Think of it: this girl asked for help to escape her rapists, and ended up with a criminal record herself.

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Damningly, the serious case review conducted by the local authority, when it happened, found 18 instances of sexual assault or rape that the care home had failed to report to the police. Fiona has been fighting for “justice and accountability” for the past decade. Amber* was similarly criminalized. Barely 14 when she was first targeted in 2007, she was already on the child protection register in Rochester in Kent. The men lured her in, groomed her and then subjected her to repeated and violent sexual abuse.

That nightmare should have ended with the arrest and trial of the perpetrators. But instead, the police, CPS and even social services treated Amber as a criminal. In 2009, when she was 16, uniformed officers came to her mother’s house, arrested her and took her to the police station.

Because, like all the other girls, Amber had been told she had to bring her friends along to meet some of the gang members, she was portrayed as an assistant pimp. When nine of the men were eventually put on trial for crimes relating to Amber and other girls, she was part of the case — but not as a victim. The prosecutors had put her name on the indictment as one of the offenders.

Though she was neither tried nor convicted, the media described her in court as a “honey monster”. Nor did her ordeal end when the men were sent down. Social services pursued her with a view to removing both her very young child and her unborn second baby. The case dragged on for 18 months before the judge dismissed it. Five years passed before an apology and compensation came from social services. “It’s absolutely outrageous that none of them have still been charged for me, none of them have even been prosecuted,” Amber tells me. “I still can’t get my head around that after all these years.”

Two decades on, Sarah Hall insists little has changed. “There’s still lots of victim blaming,” she tells me, “blaming of parents, stereotyping, and young people are deemed to be making a choice and the systems back that up. Depending on where and by whom you are raped and sexually assaulted in this country as a kid, you will either be safeguarded or you won’t be.”

***

It is raining in Manchester when I arrive at the Crown Court, where eight Asian men from Rochdale stand accused of treating two girls as “sex slaves”. They are charged with 56 sexual offenses, include grooming, sexually exploiting and raping two 13-year olds between 2001 and 2006. It is February 2025.

There are police outside, sent from Rochdale to make sure “there are no security issues, due to the sensitivity of the case”. But the case is 25 years old, I say. “It is old,” replies one of the officers, “but unfortunately it’s still happening today.”

There are eight men in the dock, all Pakistani Muslim, ranging in age from 39 to 66. They are accused of rape and other sexual offenses against two girls between 2001 and 2006. Girl A and Girl B, both abused from the age of 13, were in court, surrounded by family and friends. The women are in their 30s now, but wear the look of deep trauma. Giving evidence, Girl A said that she had been abused by at least 100 men, but when she then mentioned the figure of 200, she was challenged by one of the defense barristers, implying she was lying. “There could’ve been more to be fair,” she replied. “There [were] that many it was hard to keep count.”

The abuse began when the girls, in local authority care, started hanging around the market, where Mohammed Zahid, one of the men on trial, had a lingerie stall. Both girls were casual workers on the stall, paid in clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. They were also expected to have degradingly sadistic sex with Zahid (known as “Boss” or the “Knickerman”) and his associates.

Though Girl A told local children’s services about “hanging around” with older men in 2004 — as well as drinking and using drugs, and having sex with men introduced to her by “Boss” — neither her school nor social services made any reports to the police. Instead, one of the girls was labeled a “prostitute” at the age of 10. Rowbotham was ignored when she reported it to police and social services. As she puts it: “I can only imagine how many other girls they went on to harm.”

Rowbotham tells me about one of the mothers of Girl A, back in 2005, before police were even acknowledging there was a problem. “Girl A’s mum was out of her mind trying to get the cops to do something — she phoned them constantly and I encouraged her to keep doing it even if they didn’t respond,” she says. “And she was not the only one desperate to get them to act.”

This particular case only came to trial after one of the girls tracked an abuser down on Facebook and spotted a second “selling fruit and veg out of a van near a school”. So many of these men are still prowling the streets. There are dozens known to have been active gang members who have never been arrested, or spent a day in prison. And those hundreds of men who paid to rape the girls remain invisible.

***

The number of abused girls we know about is easily in the tens of thousands. This dwarfs the number of convictions. Between 2005 and 2017, only 264 men were found guilty. Every historic review includes evidence that social services teams and police officers were reluctant to pursue groups of Asian men for fear of being accused of racism. It also seems likely that police feared civil unrest among the white population, not least given the rise of the BNP and the race-baiting of Tommy Robinson. Once again, these fears are surely relevant today too, especially given the disorder last summer.

Yet whatever the grim political logic, this attitude is hard to justify, especially when you consider the words of perpetrators themselves. One example is Shabir Ahmed, the leader of one of the Rochdale grooming gangs, who was convicted in 2013. During his trial, Ahmed made his feelings clear. “We are the supreme race, not these white bastards… You destroyed my community and our children. None of us did that. White people trained those girls to be so much [more] advanced in sex.”

As that statement implies, race is yet again a factor here, something also clear from the statistics. Of the few hundred men convicted between 2005-17, 84% of them were Asian. In the Rochdale abuse scandal of 2012, the men involved were primarily British Pakistani men. In Telford, according to the independent 2022 inquiry there, the abusers were also men of “southern Asian heritage”.

While white men are certainly involved in child exploitation, then, the continued predominance of South Asian men in grooming gangs is undeniable. Data released in January 2025 has found that Pakistanis are up to four times more likely to be involved than the general population. And figures from all 43 forces in England and Wales show that 13.7% of child sexual exploitation in the first nine months of 2024 involved Pakistani men, a rise from under 7% in 2023.

But it’s a mistake to think that these rapists restrict themselves to white victims. Zlakha Ahmed, a survivor of gang abuse in Telford, is testament to this. Now 62, her abuse happened when she was just seven. “It was two men who were close family members,” she tells me. “I was taken to a park one day and I was raped by a gang of men.”

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Farida*, for her part, was the victim of a gang of largely Pakistani men operating in Oxfordshire, 21 of whom have since been convicted. Between 2010 and 2020, 18 victims gave evidence in six trials about abuse spanning from the late Nineties to the late 2000s.

Zlakha Ahmed told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA): “It feels as though BME women and girls are shrugged off by statutory services, which are staffed by predominantly white individuals. When it comes to Asian children in particular, a lot of white workers bury their heads in the sand and then we are blamed as a community for not coming forward.”

It was the same for Farida. When she reported being raped and kidnapped by grooming gang members to police in Oxford, they did not believe her. “Because I am Asian and with a Pakistani name,” she says, “I didn’t fit the stereotype for this officer.”

The stark reality, then, is that police and prosecutors have a dismal record when it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of girls, whatever the class or ethnicities of the victims and perpetrators. Data from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse shows that during 2023-4, only 12% of reports were subject to any criminal justice intervention, and around two thirds of investigations were closed because of “evidential difficulties.”

***

Kevin Hyland is a former Metropolitan Police Officer, the UK’s first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, and an expert in human trafficking and sexual exploitation. He understands organized gang abuse and how to get the best results during investigations. More than that, he is keen to explore how law enforcement can stop gangs getting access to girls in the first place.

“If entire groups believe they can operate with impunity and start to target young girls but then feel the weight against them, it will deter some from offending,” he says. “That weight should be societal, it should be legal, it should be from their own backgrounds and culture.”

Maggie Oliver makes a similar point. Credited with exposing the Rochdale grooming gang scandal, in 2012 she left Greater Manchester Police in protest at its handling of the town’s grooming trial. She tells me that gangs are still active in Manchester, Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Blackpool and Leeds. More to the point, Oliver insists that the grooming gang phenomenon is linked to a belief system of people who don’t share the same values as the British public generally — “that this will just continue to explode unless we get a grip of it as the root cause of this sort of abuse.”

For Hyland, though, pushing the line that any type of crime is committed exclusively or even predominantly by one particular group allows those outside the demographic to hide in plain sight, and for law enforcers and social workers to fail to follow leads. As he says: “One of the big challenges we’ve got is that policing has become so complex, so politically correct, so influenced by outside measures, that the focus on the bigger picture is compromised.”

Not that there seems much appetite to address the problem. Amber, the victim from Rochester, tells me that men arrested in Rochdale are “still there, still delivering takeaways, still driving taxis.” She’s even given some names to police “but [they] don’t go and arrest them. I think it’s too much effort for them.”

All the while, how grooming happens is changing. Smartphones and the internet now mean that men no longer have to sit and wait outside a victim’s home. Instead, they can make initial contact through an online platform, which means less risk of being caught.

As Oliver explains, men will increasingly befriend girls online, pretending to be a younger boy, before coercing the child into sending explicit photographs — which will then be used as blackmail. The targets, anyway, are the same: vulnerable girls who feel as though they’re being treated like grown-ups, even as they’re forced to engage in terrible sexual activity.

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Oliver is well aware, through work at her eponymous foundation, that state complacency means grooming gangs are as entrenched as ever. No wonder, then, that this week she’s launching #TheyKnew, a new campaign aiming to bring legal action against officials who failed to act in the face of terrible abuse. Alongside Oliver are two survivors of grooming gang abuse, Elizabeth* and Samantha, both of whom I’ve met, a heartening reminder that some victims are managing to turn round their lives.

Unfortunately, good news is hard to come by, with Robbie Moore, the current Conservative MP for Keighley, worrying that the problem is actually worsening. “[W]hat we’ve unfortunately got here in Bradford is the local authority not willing to trigger that process of having an inquiry,” he says. “But Bradford, from the evidence I have seen, has a far bigger problem even than the likes of Rochdale.”

I know from bitter experience that where crime flourishes, so too does exploitation of women and girls. And child sexual exploitation has followed the growth of county drug lines. One policeman I know in southeast England says he constantly hears how the gangs are now dominated by pimps running girls. “I have taken statements from half a dozen girls, from age 14 to 18, in the past six months who want to bring charges against men who are, effectively, grooming gang leaders. The perpetrators are usually from immigrant groupings, and operate taxis and takeaways, but they also supply some of the drugs to the runners, and keep the girls for themselves to share around and sell to business associates.”

Resources aren’t usually made available to deal with the sexual exploitation element of these crimes, with officers encouraged to focus on drugs and weapons. One senior officer very recently told me that the victims are part of the problem and know exactly what they are doing — it’s the same old harmful narrative being trotted out again.

One recommendation from the 2022 IICSA report is that data should be collected on exploitation networks. Shockingly, it’s yet to happen. Another suggestion is the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse at school or the GP. Both of these recommendations, if properly implemented, would make a difference. But to date, nothing has happened.

While all the victims would welcome further scrutiny of the scandal, meanwhile, most of all they want to see broad improvements to the criminal justice system. What’s in no doubt is that it’s currently unfit for purpose: neither detecting perpetrators nor keeping victims safe.

Meanwhile, our politicians seem determined to keep looking the other way. Though Cooper announced those new local inquiries at the start of the year, Jess Phillips — allegedly the minister responsible for safeguarding women and girls — is already backtracking. At the start of April, she said there would be a more “flexible approach to support both full independent local inquiries and more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”. Translation: the $5 million set aside for the inquiries was no longer being allocated. It also meant that politicians, rather than independent agents like Tom Crowther, would drive the investigations.

This announcement was met by horror from many. That includes Trevor Phillips, who described the response as “shameful” because, he said, it was so obviously politically motivated. Robbie Moore, for his part, is “completely infuriated” by the Government’s update, arguing it’s an admission that pretty much no progress has been made. Let’s not forget: these inquiries were supposed to have been launched by Easter. Trevor Philips is right. It’s shameful that Jess Phillips, a self-styled advocate for abused women and girls, appears to have suddenly lost enthusiasm for dealing with one of the biggest child sexual abuse scandals in modern British history — likely for fear of being branded a racist. What hope is there for girls being abused right now, if our politicians still refuse to even admit the problem exists?

***

John’s* daughter Evie* was 14 when she was targeted by a gang of taxi drivers. He is now helping support another 14-year-old girl who remains under the control of some of the same men. Evie reported her abusers to the police, after eight months of rape, sexual assault and degradation. “She was made to strip naked and then dance for the abusers,” John tells me. “And she says money changed hands. They would have sex with her. She was just a kid.”

Sophie*, another girl, one day turned up on John’s doorstep in the northwest of England, having heard that one of Evie’s abusers had been convicted of rape, and realizing that the same gang was targeting her.

“I have told the police, repeatedly, that this gang is in operation right now, that that some of the same men that raped my daughter are now doing it to others,” John tells me. But despite going to the police in December last year, he says nothing has happened so far.

Sophie, for her part, is desperate, and has asked for help from the local domestic violence service to offer support along with a safety plan. But she is “shit scared to leave, and to report them,” John says, “because if the police don’t lift them, but they find out she’s dobbed them in, she’s dead.”

Twenty three years after Ann Cryer first spoke out about the widespread gang-related abuse of children in her constituency, little has changed — except that countless more girls have had their lives destroyed.

***

*Names have been changed.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

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There are two main reasons why race remains such a potent factor in police decision-making, The first is the politicisation of policing, and its role in supporting the state-mandated policy of multiculturalism. Ever since the late Eighties, successive governments have baked antiracism into law. The reasoning here was essentially benign: nobody would deny racism has long dogged British policing, from the bungled investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder to concerns over stop and search.

Yet given the scale of the rape gang scandal, is it now unreasonable to ask if any babies were chucked out with the bathwater? I think they were. I describe it as “Tsunami Policing” — where the solution to a policing problem is, initially, like a gentle offshore wave. Then, as it rushes towards the landmass of reality, urged on by opinion formers and politicians and grasping police managers, it becomes a monstrosity. This describes the post-Macpherson Met’s obsession with race, whereby Scotland Yard played “trendy vicar” one minute, Torquemada the next. By the mid-2000s, any ambitious officer unwilling to play nice still was unlikely to make National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) rank, the policing equivalent to army brigadiers and above. This quickly shaped decision-making at senior levels across the country: what happens in London soon spreads to provincial forces.

With so many incentives to toe the line, no wonder more free-thinking coppers stayed away, with the remainder grimly susceptible to groupthink. We used to call it “having the CD Rom inserted” — whereby a reasonably competent copper would morph into a pound-shop commissar to achieve the next rank. The next time you watch a press conference with a senior officer, play “bullshit bingo” with the language they use, usually involving words like community, proportionality and diversity. Meanwhile, away from the TV cameras, thousands of young girls were raped, abused and treated like chattel in their own hometowns.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

Given the Government’s unwillingness to launch a full public inquiry, we’re sadly unlikely to see a candid account of the informal “corridor conferences” held at force HQs, let alone the “Gold Group” decision-making meetings held by senior officers. Instead, under-trained and under-resourced constables, working in child protection, will be used as scapegoats. Far better, instead, to boost transparency at the highest levels: wouldn’t it be glorious if officers at Gold Group meetings were forced to wear body-worn video cameras?

Of course, a lack of accountability infects every corner of the British state: see the public inquiries into Royal Mail or Covid. Yet, to my mind, this gives the police even less of an excuse. We expect the police to be better, to be held to a higher standard. There’s an old saying in the job: the public get the police they deserve. Except they don’t. The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.

A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees: the panacea of multi-agency working, with police units moving into town halls and going native with their social worker colleagues. Suspects became “clients” and cases were viewed through the prism of equity rather than justice. Beard-stroking and hand-wringing became the order of the day, freeing officers to attend development courses and conferences while they planned their next promotion.

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Of course, race wasn’t the only issue. Investigations into the rape gangs disaster have discovered the usual witches brew of public sector failure, from parlous resourcing to recruitment, training and retention. Yet all this surely raises one more question: what can be done? If nothing else, we need the same enthusiasm for reform as we saw in the Nineties, when a laddish “canteen culture” was rightly expunged, even as their technocratic replacements just made the same mistakes in reverse. As for more specific changes, there are currently far too many forces, leading to inconsistencies in operational practices and decision-making. Another problem involves a lack of proper oversight; far better to replace the disastrous Police and Crime Commissioner experiment with non-partisan local police boards. The post-Blair mass of ill-considered law needs to go too. On that last point, the police should find some courage, finally calling bullshit on time-wasters like Non-Crime Hate Incidents.

In the meanwhile? The centre cannot hold. The rape gangs scandal is the quintessence of two-tier policing, which is probably why the Government is more comfortable with public inquiries into ancient history like the Miners’ Strike. Whatever the answer, it requires moral courage. I hope, somewhere inside the policing machine, a new generation of coppers is prepared to show some minerals, to shake the tree, to remember why they joined in the first place. To police, in short, without fear or favour — because who wants to live in a society that stands by while children are raped?