Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom
[2] From the second half of the twentieth century, cases involving religious institutions,[3] schools,[4] popular entertainers,[5][6] politicians,[7] military personnel, and other officials have been widely publicised.
Since the start of the 21st century, media coverage and political discourse has also increasingly covered child abuse rings or grooming gangs operating in towns and cities across the UK.
[22] A 2020 report on child sexual exploitation published by the Home Office warns of a "potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected" with the possibility of "greater attention being paid to certain types of offenders".
[23] In the 11th century, surviving ordinances of Canterbury Cathedral revealed that a process was in place to minimise opportunities for clergy guilty of past abuses to engage in further illicit sexual activities with minors.
Nazir Afzal (formerly the Crown Prosecution Service lead on child sexual abuse and violence against women and girls) said, "Austerity has come at the wrong time.
The review said that there were "significant and long-standing issues" in reporting child sexual abuse within families, with children affected "frequently not being identified by practitioners" and not "receiving the response needed for their ongoing safety and recovery".
[33] A 2013 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee describes a group first making contact with the child in a public place.
[34][32] In August 2003, a television documentary reported details of an 18-month police and social services investigation into allegations that young British Asian men were targeting under-age girls for sex, drugs and prostitution in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley.
[38] Following further child sex abuse rings in Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Huddersfield, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, Telford, and others, several investigations considered how prevalent British Asian backgrounds were in localised grooming.
[40] This report was criticised by child sexual exploitation experts Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, who said it was unscientific and had poor methodology, in a paper published in January 2020.
[41][42] A further investigation was carried out by the British government in December 2020, which concluded most offenders were white and that there was insufficient data in this area to suggest South Asians, or any other ethnic group, were disproportionately represented among perpetrators.
"[43] Reviews of the Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford cases identified several common factors, with offenders often working in night-time industries like takeaways and taxis, providing access to vulnerable children.
[46][47] Several Conservative and Reform UK politicians have alleged that race was a factor in "grooming gangs" (a term which has been described by academics and child protection professionals as racially charged)[41][48] and that concerns were not dealt with because of political correctness.
[49][50][51] After a 2017 case in Newcastle, former Conservative policing and justice minister Mike Penning urged Attorney General Jeremy Wright to consider the offences as racially motivated.
[55][49][56] In 2023, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman said in an opinion piece that "grooming gang" members in the United Kingdom were "groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values".
In response, the Independent Press Standards Organisation issued a correction stating that Braverman's article was "misleading", since it did not make it explicit that she was talking about the Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford child sexual abuse scandals in particular.
[57][55][58] The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said that by focusing primarily on South Asian men, Braverman was fuelling "misinformation, racism and division".
[48][57] In 2025, former Home Office minister Robert Jenrick said group-based child sexual exploitation was "perhaps the greatest racially motivated crime in modern Britain",[59] and said it was covered up by the British state to protect community relations.
[61] Professor Alexis Jay, a retired social worker who led the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (or Jay Report),[62] had previously said in 2015 that such cases were not overlooked because of a conspiracy or political correctness, instead attributing the authorities' inaction to "their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away".
[64] Sabah Kaiser, ethnic minority ambassador for the Jay Report, said it was "very, very dangerous for the government to turn child sexual abuse into a matter of colour".
[65] British media has been criticised by academics,[66][67][68] journalists,[69] politicians,[70][71] the police,[71][72] and community groups[58][48][58] for its coverage of group-based child sexual abuse, including that it is sensationalist, misleading, and perpetuates Islamophobia.
[69] A number of academics – including Shamim Miah,[67] Muzammil Quraishi,[75] Ella Cockbain,[76] Aisha K. Gill, Karen Harrison,[77] Vasil Karastanchev,[78] Aviah Sarah Day, and others – have described the controversy as a moral panic.
[77] Cockbain, a scholar of crime science at University College London,[55] suggests that "sweeping, ill-founded generalisations" in the discourse around group-based child sexual exploitation serves to "further a political agendum and legitimise thinly veiled racism, ultimately doing victims a disservice".
[76] The Muslim Council of Britain has called on investigations to "adhere to the facts of the matter, rather than deploying deeply divisive, racially charged rhetoric that amplifies far-right narratives and demonises an entire community".
The 121 diagnoses were made by two paediatricians at a Middlesbrough hospital, Marietta Higgs and Geoffrey Wyatt, using reflex anal dilation for diagnosis (later discredited).
Controversy increased when Mr Justice Hollis ruled that 19 of 20 children who had been made wards of the court should be returned to their parents due to the weakness of the medical evidence.
[96] BBC News reported that Jon McCourt from Survivors North West said "If what happened today was the best that the church could offer by way of an apology they failed miserably.
On 4 February 2015, May announced that the inquiry would be chaired by Dame Lowell Goddard, a New Zealand High Court judge who had no ties to the UK bodies and persons likely to be investigated, and the existing panel was disbanded.
[120] On 2 September 2021, the inquiry published Child protection in religious organisations and settings - Investigation Report, after examining evidence from 38 groups, including sects from Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and Islam.
[121] The report said there were "shocking failings" and "blatant hypocrisy" in the way major UK religious groups handled child sex abuse allegationsd.
