Thames Valley Police launched Operation Bullfinch in May 2011 to investigate allegations of historical sexual abuse, leading to ten men being convicted.
[4] A Home Office report published in December 2020 concluded that existing evidence did not prove a link between ethnicity and grooming gangs.
[13] Those found guilty include:[14][15][16] From 2004 to 2012, the men groomed children from 11-15 years-old from dysfunctional backgrounds who were unlikely to be believed by others living in care homes.
[28] Some girls were groomed to be prostitutes and taken to guest houses in Bradford, Leeds, London, Slough, and Bournemouth where men[29] paid to have sex with them.
[39]Hargey blames the agencies of the state, including the police, social services and the care system, who ″seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.
In the same newspaper, journalist Allison Pearson claimed that "fear of racism" had allowed sex crimes against white girls by Pakistani Muslims to become a serious problem not only in Oxford but throughout the country.
She described the Pakistani Muslim community as "essentially a Victorian society that has landed like Doctor Who's Tardis on a liberal, permissive planet it despises".
While expressing relief that some action was now being taken against the problem, she concluded that trouble was still in store: "what remains is a political class still far too timid to challenge growing and alarming separatism in Muslim education and law."
In The Independent, commentator Paul Vallely pointed out that there was a danger of the media, fuelled on a toxic mixture of "combination of depravity and self-righteous indignation", peddling vicious stereotypes about Pakistani Muslim culture.
[43] A serious case review of the Oxford sex gang commissioned by Maggie Blyth, independent chair of the Oxfordshire safeguarding children board, was released in March 2015.
[45] Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking at a summit to address the issue after similar scandals in Rotherham and Oxfordshire, made a number of proposals, including up to five years in jail for teachers, councillors, and social workers in England and Wales who failed to protect children, unlimited fines for individuals and organisations shown to have let children down, and a national helpline to enable professionals to report bad practice.
[46] In December 2017, Quilliam released a report entitled "Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation – Dissecting Grooming Gangs", concluding that 84% of offenders were of South Asian heritage.
[47] This review was criticised for its poor methodology by Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, in their paper "Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the 'Muslim grooming gangs' narrative" which was published in January 2020.