Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has plunged into British politics in recent weeks, using his social media platform X to attack and spread misinformation about Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other members of the Labor government.
In a series of scathing posts to his 211 million followers in recent days, Mr. Musk falsely accused Mr. Starmer and other Labor lawmakers for enabling Britain’s so-called grooming gangs. The phrase refers to a decades-long scandal involving a series of child sexual abuse cases in which girls were attacked and raped by gangs of men in several towns and cities. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.
The posts of Mr. Masks included multiple inaccuracies and treated a topic that was widely covered as if it had never been mentioned. But the posts have put the spotlight back on a harrowing child sex abuse scandal that has roiled Britain and long sparked heated debates about race, immigration and abuse.
What was the grooming gang scandal?
In 2011, The Times of London published a series of investigative articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in the north of England and the Midlands from 1997 onwards. A detective at the time, Chief Inspector Alan Edwards, told the paper: “Everyone is too scared to deal with the ethnicity factor.” The cases became known as the “grooming gang” scandal.
In 2014, the findings of a multi-year official inquiry into such abuses in the northern English town of Rotherham sparked a national reckoning. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, while local authorities looked the other way for years. Similar gangs were also found operating in other towns and cities in England.
Grooming in Rotherham, population 257,000, tended to follow a similar pattern: flirting with girls by young men in public places such as town centers and shopping centres. the gradual introduction of alcohol and other drugs; then a sexual relationship with a man, who demanded that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends.
The local government report found that victims and parents who sought help were mostly let down by the police and social services. Some police officers were found to refer to the victims as “tarts” and the abuse of the girls as a “lifestyle choice”.
The case was particularly inflammable because of the racial antagonism between the victims, who in Rotherham’s case were predominantly white, and the perpetrators. Prosecutions in Oxford and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012 for the abuse of dozens of girls included men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan heritage who were given lengthy prison terms.
What do we know about ethnicity and sexual abuse?
Experts say data on child sexual abuse should be treated with caution because many victims never come forward or do so years later. However, data on the nationality of victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse was released by the Labor government in November – the first of its kind to be published by any UK government – showing that 83% of perpetrators convicted in 2023 were white and 7 % were Asian. broadly aligned with the country’s overall demographics. (In UK official statistics, the term “Asian” is a very broad term that can refer to people of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese heritage, or from other parts of South Asia.)
Nazir Afzal, the attorney general for the North West of England from 2011-2015, himself of Pakistani heritage, said in 2015: “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”
He went on to say that South Asians are “disproportionately” involved in certain types of street grooming highlighted by the cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, although more common types of child sexual abuse nationally are mainly carried out by white British men.
The racial element of these high-profile cases became a common talking point on the right, even as experts noted that ethnicity is not a predictor of propensity for child abuse, and widespread child abuse has long been covered in other communities and institutions, including Roman Catholic Church. The trope has also been weaponized by the far right, including terrorists. The white supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 carried a gun marked “For Rotherham”.
When did Mr. Musk start talking about it?
In October, Jess Phillips, Labor MP and Minister for Protection, rejected a request by the local government in Oldham, a town near Manchester, for a national public inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in the area in the 2000s and 2010s. A 2022 report commissioned by the Labor mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, found that police and local authorities in Oldham had failed children from 2011 to 2014.
Ms Phillips, who has spent much of her career fighting for women and victims of sexual violence, said the local council, the city’s governing body, should instead commission a local inquiry, as many other cities had done .
Her response was picked up last week by GB News, a far-right network, which ran an online story headlined: “Labour REJECTS Oldham’s call for government inquiry into grooming gang scandal.”
Some time later, Mr. Musk stood his ground, calling Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch” who “deserved to be in jail” and accusing Mr. Starmer as complicit in the scandal.
Oldham council leader Arooj Shah said in a statement that the council began conducting its investigation in October. “We are working closely with survivors and survivors’ families to ensure that they not only have a voice, but a central role in the development of this research,” he said. “We expect the terms of reference to be agreed in the coming months.”
What role did Keir Starmer play?
Mr. Musk said that Mr. Starmer, whose Labor Party won a landslide election victory in July, “must go” and falsely claimed that Mr. Starmer was “deeply complicit in mass rape for votes”.
Before entering politics in 2015, Mr. Starmer was Britain’s attorney general from 2008 to 2013, when the issue of grooming gangs burst into the national spotlight.
While in this role, Mr. Starmer oversaw the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale, made up mainly of men of South Asian heritage. At a press conference on Monday, Mr. Starmer called the sexual exploitation of children “absolutely sick” and said too many victims were let down by “perverted ideas about community relations or the idea that institutions should be protected above all else”.
He added: “When I was chief prosecutor for five years, I faced this issue head on because I could see what was going on. When I left office, we had the largest number of child sexual abuse cases ever prosecuted.”
Mr. Starmer and his colleague at the Crown Prosecution Service, Mr. Afzal, they praised in a 2013 parliamentary report published under a previous Conservative-led government. “Mr. Starmer has sought to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault in the criminal justice system throughout his tenure,” the report said, adding that “his response should provide a model for other agencies involved in dealing with local treatment”.
What has happened since the abuse cases first surfaced?
The issue of grooming gangs has been the subject of numerous local and national investigations and reports in Britain since the early 2010s.
Starting in 2015, a government-sponsored national public inquiry held more than 300 days of hearings. Ultimately, he conducted 15 investigations, including networks of abusers and abuse in school and church settings.
A February 2022 report found that the sexual exploitation of children by organized networks remained a significant issue nationally. The final inquiry report in October 2022 contained 20 recommendations to protect children, but the then Conservative government acted on very few of them. In a statement this week, the Home Office said it was “working at pace” to implement them.
Professor Alexis Jay, who led both the national review and the 2014 Rotherham inquiry, told the BBC on Tuesday that “people need to get on” with implementing its recommendations. “We’ve had quite a few inquiries, consultations and discussions,” he said, “especially for the victims and survivors who had the courage to come forward.”
