Overview of Crimes - Rape Gang Inquiry

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Overview of Crimes

Rape gangs have exploited children systematically across every region of the United Kingdom for decades.

The independent chair of the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection Alexis Jay has identified the 1970s as the decade when immigrant rape gangs first began tormenting the girls of Britain. However, the British Newspaper Archive reveals that the first recorded case of specifically Pakistani rape gangs dates back to 1955, when four Bradford-based Pakistanis were charged with raping a 1-year-old girl from Middlesbrough. This was soon after former colonial subjects, from the subcontinent as much as the Caribbean, became eligible to enter the United Kingdom in non-trivial numbers under the British Nationality Act 1948. What began as singular and small-scale instances became systematic and industrial over time.

These horrific crimes have only escalated in recent decades, especially following Tony Blair’s 1997 victory and the start of orchestrated mass immigration. With greater numbers came greater opportunities for abuse. Perpetrators built organised networks that transported victims between towns and cities and passed girls between multiple adult men.

In each of these areas the same tactics were used. Girls as young as 11 were targeted with gifts, alcohol and drugs, collected in taxis from school gates, care homes and streets and taken to houses, flats, restaurants and hotels and then raped repeatedly by groups of men, passed between perpetrators, trafficked across county lines, and in many cases impregnated or forced into abortions. Most victims endured violence, were filmed for blackmail, or told they were “white trash” or “kuffar” who deserved punishment.

The authorities at every level – including the police, social services, health services, schools, licensing bodies, and politicians – knew the patterns, possessed the intelligence, and still failed to protect the country’s children. The evidence establishes that a national scandal of repeated rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma enabled by institutional denial, political calculation, and fear of the accusation of racism took place over decades.

The incidents of criminal activities listed in this report are drawn from court records, official and unofficial inquiries across the country, and witness testimony provided to the Inquiry. They confirm that this was never a series of isolated local failures. It was a coordinated, nationwide pattern of organised child sexual exploitation that repeated in town after town, city after city, from the far north to the south coast. The same ethnic and religious profile of the perpetrators was documented throughout almost all of the witnesses who contacted the Inquiry.

The scale of the rape gang phenomenon is endemic across the entirety of Britain. The 250,000 figure originates directly from a statement in the House of Lords by Lord Pearson of Rannoch on 1 May, 2019:

“Do the Government accept that if we extrapolate nationally the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford, there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years?”

He added that this number “is probably an underestimate.”7

This extrapolation now has greater support due to further data that has been collected, derived from scaling the patterns documented in major inquiries:

• Rotherham (Jay Report, 2014): At least 1,400 girls abused between 1997

and 2013, with some updated estimates exceeding this. Perpetrators were overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men.

• Telford Inquiry (2022): More than 1,000 children (predominantly girls)

over decades, again with the same perpetrator profile.

• National footprint: The grooming gang model has been confirmed in

dozens of towns and cities. Our independent Inquiry, led by Rupert Lowe MP, has heard evidence demonstrating coordinated operations extending to all corners of the country, in at least 149 local authority districts (see page 1 for the full map).

When the Rotherham/Telford scale is applied across the documented national distribution, and multiplied by the extreme under-reporting factor accepted by official reviews, the total reaches the 250,000 threshold as a bare minimum.

We are far from grasping the full extent of grooming gang criminality in modern Britain. It is reasonable to assume that, since sexual abuse of all kinds tends to be under-reported, this is also true of grooming gangs. The Independent has reported that almost 1,000 children were identified as sexual exploitation victims in England in one year alone, despite the reluctance of state actors to name or tackle the problem of the rape gangs. After decades of abuse, victims must number in the hundreds of thousands. The full scale is not yet known.

Every major review has emphasised that recorded statistics severely understate reality:

• Baroness Casey National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual

Exploitation and Abuse (June 2025): The audit explicitly states that the scale, nature, and characteristics of group-based child sexual exploitation remain impossible to quantify precisely due to inconsistent data collection and historical suppression.

• Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and multiple

local inquiries (2022–2025): “It is simply not possible to know the scale” because ethnicity, group offending, and historical cases were routinely unrecorded or shelved to protect “community cohesion.”

Overleaf is a heat map that portrays the various locations in which the Inquiry can be sure the rape gangs operated. It is likely that the true extent is far worse.

The scale, the tactics, the perpetrator profile, and the systemic inaction were almost always identical everywhere. Britain did not face dozens of separate local scandals. It faced one national scandal that the state allowed to grow for decades.

London

London stands exposed as the epicentre of institutional denial in the grooming gang scandal. While northern towns faced public inquiries after the truth emerged, the capital maintained a wall of silence for years. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has repeatedly insisted there were no grooming gangs operating in the city. As our inquiry heard from Susan Hall, Leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly, the rape gang phenomenon is in fact endemic within the capital. After challenging Khan about the presence of such gangs in London, Hall was inundated with calls from women and girls purporting to be victims of their predation. Khan describes evidence from whistleblowers as malicious and politically motivated. He told the London Assembly that the problem was far more complex than in other parts of the country and that young people were being exploited through county lines rather than organised group-based child sexual exploitation.

These statements were made despite the Metropolitan Police holding reports of young girls being plied with alcohol and drugs then raped by groups of men in hotels and other locations across the capital. A Daily Express investigation revealed that Khan had direct access to HM Inspectorate of Constabulary documents detailing exactly these patterns of offending. He read the files yet continued to deny the existence of grooming gangs in public.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp MP has accused Khan of facilitating a cover-up and other politicians stated that both the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police had been denying grooming gangs in London. Campaigners, including whistleblower Maggie Oliver and Chris Wild, described the capital as the last bastion of denial and warned that the scale of abuse there was more catastrophic than anywhere else in the country.

The evidence now emerging confirms their warnings. In October 2025, the Metropolitan Police announced a review of 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases. The National Crime Agency launched Operation Beaconport to examine thousands more files nationwide after initial assessments found human errors, missed lines of inquiry, and cases wrongly dropped. London forms a significant part of this backlog. A former Metropolitan Police detective has described industrial-scale child prostitution and grooming in the capital, with authorities aware but opting for inaction due to a mixture of “incompetence, laziness, and corruption.”12

London has the largest Muslim population in Britain. Khan relies on significant electoral support from those communities, as well as having an ethno-religious motive to protect the public reputation of Pakistani Muslims in particular. Widespread acknowledgment of organised networks of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men targeting vulnerable white girls would have shattered the narrative of community cohesion that successive London administrations – none more than Khan’s – have promoted. As for others in authority, fear of being labelled ‘racist’ paralysed the Metropolitan Police and City Hall in the same way it did in Rotherham and Rochdale before them. One anonymous whistleblower told us that boys as well as girls are an especially vulnerable target for criminal gangs – typically Albanian, Somali, or Turkish – operating in the capital. Yet the relevant bodies still refuse to collect data on ethnicity, wilfully rendering themselves blind to the very behavioural patterns that are supposed to aid law enforcement in its pursuit of justice.

The Metropolitan Police review, the National Crime Agency operation, and the witness accounts pouring in prove that group-based child sexual exploitation has thrived in our capital city.

This Inquiry records the failure without reservation. Khan and the senior leadership of the Metropolitan Police must answer for their role in this scandal. Until the capital confronts the truth with the same rigour now demanded elsewhere, the children of London remain at risk and the state remains complicit.