The UK grooming scandal has been thrust back into the spotlight in recent days.
The beginnings of the scandal are centred on the town of Rotherham, where an inquiry found 1,400 girls were sexually exploited by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013. Such gangs are believed to have operated in as many as 50 towns and cities.
It found its way back into the public eye after safeguarding minister Jess Phillips declined to commission an inquiry into sexual exploitation in Oldham, insisting it should be locally-led.
Already intensely critical of UK authorities over the jailing of far-right rioters and activist Tommy Robinson, X founder and billionaire Elon Musk has seized on the news, falsely describing Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and calling for prime minister Sir Keir Starmer to be jailed over his handling of the scandal while leading the CPS.
The comments have been widely condemned in many quarters as inflammatory, dangerous and misleading. However, they have also been seized upon by senior figures in the Conservative Party, who have called for a national inquiry and claimed Pakistani men are over-represented in those who are involved in the grooming gangs.
On Monday, Starmer defended his record as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, accusing Musk of “spreading lies and misinformation” and saying opposition MPs were “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” to gain attention.
Significantly, Professor Alexis Jay, the respected figure who led a wide-ranging report into the issue in 2022, has also rejected calls for a new national inquiry, saying they would hinder the implementation of her ‘urgent’ existing recommendations to tackle an ‘endemic’ issue. She has condemned the “politicisation” of the issue.
Here are the key players involved in this dispute and what they’ve said.
Alexis Jay
Professor Alexis Jay is the former head of a national child abuse inquiry which ran from 2015-2022.
Her Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) report made three key recommendations for the government, including a mandatory requirement for relevant professions to report child abuse, and the creation of a national compensation scheme for victims and a Child Protection Authority.
Rather than launching a new national inquiry, Professor Jay has said that “people should just get on with” implementing the recommendations made in previous inquiries”.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think that the time has passed for more inquiries. We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions and especially for those victims and survivors who’ve had the courage to come forward, and they clearly want action.”
Prof Jay, who also led the Rotherham inquiry which concluded in 2014, defended the scope of her subsequent national report, saying it was spread across six broad areas because “we saw no point in looking only at those areas where there had already been significant reviews… We wanted to get a picture across the piece across England and Wales.”
Keir Starmer
After days of being on the receiving end of relentless attacks by Elon Musk on social media, Sir Keir Starmer hit back at a press conference on Monday.
The prime minister accused him, and others, of “spreading lies and misinformation” about him, Jess Phillips and others over their handling of the scandal.
He hit back at suggestions he failed to take action against grooming gang members while serving as Director of Public Prosecutions, saying: “When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record.”
Former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal backed Starmer on this, tweeting that since the Labour leader left the post, hundreds more abusers are being brought to justice and thousands more victims are being heard.
Some commenting on child sexual abuse following some “intervention” from the USA
They might want to consider that Starmer left office with the highest number of convictions for child sexual abuse since records began
100s more abusers brought to justice
1000s more victims heard pic.twitter.com/txniZSnmmp— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) January 5, 2025
Addressing concerns that authorities were cautious to take action out of fear of being accused of racism, Starmer said he had helped address that issue by re-opening cases that had been closed.
“I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang… I changed the whole prosecution approach,” he said.
Elon Musk
In recent days Elon Musk has been posting a barrage of inflammatory remarks about UK politicians, accusing Starmer of being “complicit in the rape of Britain”.
On Monday, he described the prime minister as being “utterly despicable” and said he was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes”.
He also described Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” who should be jailed as he shared a post claiming the minister “refused an inquiry into Muslim grooming gangs” – although this doesn’t mention her support of a locally-led Oldham inquiry.
Musk has been amplifying calls by the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK for a new national inquiry, and has also called for the King to dissolve parliament and order a general election.
Describing Musk’s rhetoric as potentially dangerous, Neil Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism policing Neil Basu told the Guardian: “The people claiming there is a cover-up of mass rape may not be designing their language to create a race war or a riot, but it can – we know it can.”
Referring to the far-right 2017 attack near Finsbury Park Mosque, he said: “There are people out there who will take their message to commit violence … there will be another Darren Osborne out there.”
Kemi Badenoch
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a new national inquiry into the grooming scandal, claiming one is “long overdue”.
She said the Conservatives will attempt to amend the Children’s Wellbeing Bill to require a full national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Badenoch also hit back at Starmer for suggesting she and other Tories were “jumping on the bandwagon” and amplifying calls of the far-right.
“Starmer is applying Labour smear tactics from 20 years ago and thinks they will work today,” she said.
The problem facing Badenoch is that she served in the previous Conservative government that failed to launch any national inquiry and now stands accused of political opportunism.
Jess Phillips
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips is yet to speak out publicly since Elon Musk’s remarks about her, but a number of ministers, and a survivors group have rallied behind her to defend her record.
In a letter shared with the Guardian, seven survivors of the Telford sexual abuse scandal said there was “no one in public life who has done more to support victims and survivors and to advocate for their interests”.
“What connects us all beyond our shared trauma is the support and kindness we have received from Jess Phillips over many years, personally and as activists fighting for change,” the group said, adding that those who “weaponise our pain for their own ends or political gain” should “hang their heads in shame”.
Yesterday Starmer said “a line has been crossed” when the “poison of the far-right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others”.
Robert Jenrick
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick (who lost out to Badenoch to be the next Tory leader last year) has acknowledged that the Tories could have “done more” to tackle grooming gangs while in power.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “Could we have done more, should we do more now? Yes, absolutely — we have to root this out.”
He has perhaps been even more outspoken than Badenoch, and suggested on Tuesday that mass migration from countries with “alien cultures” and “medieval attitudes to women” was to blame for child sexual exploitation.
He told the BBC: “I think that we have to be very careful about who is coming into this country, the scale and pace of that immigration so that we can have a much more successful integration policy than we have today… I have always said, and it is a point made by Kemi Badenoch that not all cultures are equal. We should be very careful about who is coming into this country and the scale of immigration.”
Jenrick also claimed that Pakistani men are “over-represented in those who are involved in the grooming gangs” and said he will not “tiptoe” around the issue.
While it is true that perpetrators of child grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford were predominantly of Pakistani and South Asian descent, a Home Office study in 2020 found that “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”.
“Some studies suggest an overrepresentation of black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations. However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending,” the report said, citing issues with the way ethnicity data is collected.