What Is the U.K. ‘Grooming Gang’ Scandal Seized On by Elon Musk?

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has flung himself into British politics in recent weeks, using his social media platform X to attack and spread misinformation about Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other members of the Labour government.

In a series of vitriolic posts to his 211 million followers in recent days, Mr. Musk has falsely accused Mr. Starmer and other Labour Party lawmakers of enabling Britain’s so-called grooming gangs. The phrase refers to a decade-old scandal involving a series of child sex abuse cases in which girls were assaulted and raped by gangs of men in several towns and cities. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.

Mr. Musk’s posts included multiple inaccuracies and treated a widely covered issue as if it had never been mentioned. But the posts nevertheless cast the spotlight back onto a painful child sexual exploitation scandal that troubled Britain and has long provoked heated debate on issues of race, immigration and abuse.

What was the grooming gangs scandal?

In 2011, The Times of London published a series of investigative articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in England’s north and Midlands from 1997 onward. One detective at the time, chief inspector Alan Edwards, told the paper: “Everyone’s been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.” The cases came to be known as the “grooming gangs” scandal.

In 2014, the findings of a yearslong official investigation into such abuse in the northern English town of Rotherham set off a national reckoning. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, while the local authorities looked the other way for years. Similar gangs were also found to be operating in other towns and cities in England.

The grooming in Rotherham, population 257,000, tended to follow a similar pattern: the courting of the girls by young men in public places like town centers and shopping malls; the gradual introduction of alcohol and other drugs; then a sexual relationship with one man, who demanded that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends.

The local government report found that victims and parents who asked for help were mostly let down by the police and social services. Some police officers were found to have referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”

The case was highly combustible because of the racial contrast between the victims, who in the Rotherham case were mostly white, and the perpetrators. Prosecutions in Oxford and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012 for the abuse of dozens of girls included men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan heritage who received long prison terms.

What do we know about ethnicity and sexual abuse?

Experts say data on child sexual abuse should be treated with caution because many victims never come forward, or do so years afterward. Still, data on the ethnicity of child sexual abuse victims and perpetrators was released by the Labour government in November — the first of its kind published by any British government — showing that 83 percent of perpetrators convicted in 2023 were white and 7 percent were Asian, broadly in line with the country’s overall demographics. (In official U.K. statistics, “Asian” is a very broad term that can refer to people with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese heritage, or from other parts of South Asia.)

Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor for the North West England region from 2011-2015, himself of Pakistani heritage, said in 2015: “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”

He went on to say that South Asians were “disproportionately involved” in specific types of street grooming that were highlighted by the cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, even though more common types of child sexual abuse nationally are predominantly carried out by white British men.

The racial element of these high-profile cases became a common right-wing talking point, even as experts noted that ethnicity is not a predictor of a propensity to abuse children, and widespread child abuse was long covered up in other communities and institutions including the Roman Catholic Church. The trope has also been weaponized by the far right, including by terrorists. The white supremacist who killed 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 carried a gun marked with the words “For Rotherham.”

When did Mr. Musk begin talking about this?

In October, Jess Phillips, a Labour lawmaker and minister for safeguarding, rejected a request from the local government in Oldham, a town near Manchester, for a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the area in the 2000s and 2010s. A 2022 report commissioned by the Labour mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, found that children were failed by the police and local authorities in Oldham between 2011 and 2014.

Ms. Phillips, who has spent much of her career fighting for women and victims of sexual violence, said the local council, the governing body for the town, should instead commission a local inquiry, as a number of other towns had done.

Her response was seized on last week by GB News, a hard-right network, which ran an online story headlined: “Labour REJECTS Oldham’s call for Government inquiry into grooming gangs scandal.”

A short time later, Mr. Musk weighed in, calling Ms. Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch” who “deserves to be in prison,” and smearing Mr. Starmer as being complicit in the scandal.

The leader of Oldham Council, Arooj Shah, said in a statement that the council began setting up its inquiry in October. “We’re working closely with survivors and survivors’ families to ensure they don’t just have a voice, but will have a central role in developing this inquiry,” she said. “We expect terms of reference to be agreed in the coming months.”

What role did Keir Starmer play?

Mr. Musk has said that Mr. Starmer, who won a landslide election victory in July, “must go” and falsely claimed that Mr. Starmer was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”

Before entering politics in 2015, Mr. Starmer served as Britain’s chief prosecutor from 2008 to 2013, when the issue of grooming gangs erupted into the national spotlight.

While in that role, Mr. Starmer oversaw the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale, made up of mostly men of South Asian heritage. At a news conference on Monday, Mr. Starmer called child sexual exploitation “utterly sick” and said that too many victims had been let down “by perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else.”

He added: “When I was chief prosecutor for five years, I tackled this head on because I could see what was happening. When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record.”

Mr. Starmer and his colleague at the Crown Prosecution Service, Mr. Afzal, were praised in a 2013 parliamentary report published under a previous Conservative-led government. “Mr. Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term,” the report said, adding that his “response should provide a model to the other agencies involved in tackling localized grooming.”

What has happened since the abuse cases first emerged?

The issue of grooming gangs has been the subject of numerous local and national investigations and reports in Britain since the early 2010s.

Beginning in 2015, a widespread public inquiry funded by the government held more than 300 days of hearings. Ultimately, it carried out 15 investigations, including into networks of abusers and abuse in schools and church settings.

A February 2022 report found that child sexual exploitation by organized networks remained a major issue nationally. The final report in October 2022 set out 20 recommendations for protecting children but the then-Conservative government did not act on them. In a statement this week, the Home Office said it was “working at pace” to implement them.

Prof. Alexis Jay, who led both this national review and the 2014 Rotherham inquiry, said, “We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions — especially for the victims and survivors who’ve had the courage to come forward.”