Journal De Bruxelles - UK apologises to thousands of grooming victims as it toughens law

Any adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 will now face the most serious charge of rape, interior minister Yvette Cooper told parliament, as authorities launched a nationwide crackdown on the gangs.

The announcement came as a damning report, written by parliamentarian Louise Casey, was published into the decades-long scandal, which has affected towns and cities across Britain.

In it she writes about how institutions failed the victims, and how the young girls and women were often blamed for their own abuse.

Seven men were convicted on Friday in the UK's latest grooming trial, after jurors heard that two girl victims were forced to have sex "with multiple men on the same day, in filthy flats and on rancid mattresses".

One of the victims said social workers had regarded her as "a prostitute" from the age of 10.

On Monday, three other men appeared at Sheffield Cown Court in a separate case and denied raping a teenage girl in Rotherham between 2008 and 2010.

Despite the age of consent being 16, Casey's report said there were "too many examples" of grooming cases being dropped or downgraded where a 13-15 year-old had been deemed to be "in love with" or "had consented to" sex with the perpetrator.

This was attributed to a "grey area" in the law for 13-15-year-olds, where charging decisions had been "left more open to interpretation".

While the intention had been to avoid criminalising relationships between teenagers, in practice it had benefited "much older men who had groomed underage children for sex".

- National inquiry -

Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday announced a new national inquiry would be launched into the scandal, one of Casey's 12 recommendations.

Local investigations will now be directed and overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath.

"It will go wherever it needs to go," Starmer said Monday.

The Casey report found that ethnicity was "shied away from" and was not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, making accurate national assessment impossible.

"We found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems," she wrote.

However, local data from West Yorkshire in northern England, collected between 2020 and 2024, showed that 429 out of 1222 suspects, or 35 percent, were self-defined as Asian.

Cooper said that Asian men, particularly from a Pakistani background, were "overrepresented" and that ethnicity and nationality will now be recorded on a mandatory basis.

"It does no community any good to ignore disproportionately in any form of offending, be that amongst perpetrators or victims," wrote Casey.

- 'Unimaginable pain' -

The issue of UK grooming gangs was thrust into the international spotlight in January when tech billionaire Elon Musk launched incendiary attacks on his X platform against the UK government for resisting calls for a national inquiry.

The gangs would frequently target vulnerable adolescents, often those in care or with learning or physical disabilities, with one man presenting himself as a boyfriend "showering them with love and gifts", wrote Casey.

"Subsequently, they pass them to other men for sex, using drugs and alcohol to make children compliant, often turning to violence and coercion to control them."

This model "has not changed significantly over time, although the grooming process is now as likely to start online, and hotspots might have moved from parks to vape shops and the use of hotels with anonymous check-in facilities," she added.

The gangs operated in several English towns and cities including Rotherham and Rochdale in the north, but also in Oxford and Bristol, for almost four decades.

"On behalf of this, and past governments, and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering that you have suffered, and the failure of our country's institutions through decades, to prevent that harm and keep you safe," Cooper said in parliament.

A.Thys--JdB