What the facts actually say about the far-right’s ‘grooming gangs’ obsession
As new inquiries look set to take place we debunk some of the most outrageous claims made by Elon Musk and Nigel Farage.
Unfortunately for those living in the UK, our country has become Elon Musk’s latest fixation.
Having already weighed in on last summer's riots by saying shortly after that “civil war” in the UK was “inevitable”, the world’s richest man now seems to be dedicating most of his waking hours to the idea that, and I quote: “a quarter-million little girls were – still are – being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain” and that we should have a new national inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale – singling out cases in which the perpetrators have largely been South Asian men. The Home Secretary is outlining plans to implement new local inquiries into grooming gangs.
While it’s dangerous enough that Musk’s untruthful accusations are within the confines of his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), we have seen this inflammatory discourse already seep into mainstream media debate – and Westminster. And given that Musk has discussed his plan to get rid of Starmer ahead of the next General Election, we should take this moment seriously.
So, is there any truth to the claims made, or is it just more divisive fearmongering from Musk? How did politicians latch on to this narrative – and what does the broader ‘grooming gangs’ discourse tell us about the far-right?
Debunking the most outrageous claims
“A quarter-million little girls are being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain” — Elon Musk.
This 250,000 figure has circulated among far-right groups for years, notably echoed in 2018 by UKIP peer Lord Malcolm Pearson, who claimed there were “upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century.” His estimate was derived by crudely extrapolating the number of victims in Telford, Oxford, and Rotherham across the entire country - something fact-checking organisation FullFact has dug into.
Though there is no denying that child sexual abuse is a problem that must be tackled, especially given that 1 in 20 will experience child sexual abuse in the UK, no credible evidence suggests that migrants or people from certain minority ethnic or religious backgrounds are disproportionately to blame.
“The Labour Party opposes a national inquiry on the mass rape of little girls in Britain for one reason only: It will show that they were complicit.” – Elon Musk
As well as hitting out at Starmer, Musk criticised Jess Phillips, calling her a “rape genocide apologist” for rejecting a request for the government to lead a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation from Oldham council in October. The request was supported by Oldham local, who was abused at the age of 12, following "significant missed opportunities" by authorities to protect her. Phillips argued that a local inquiry commissioned by the council would be more effective in driving change. This was reported by GB News, and then picked up by Musk, who has called for a national inquiry on X.
Politicians on opposition benches, including the Conservative leadership and Reform UK MPs, have since echoed calls for a national inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’. The Labour government has rejected this, citing the fact that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), set up by Theresa May's government, had taken evidence from thousands of victims and addressed the issues raised in cases of group-based child sexual abuse.
The IICSA, which was authored by Professor Alexis Jay and published its final report in 2022, had set out 20 recommendations to protect children from sexual abuse. These were not implemented by the Conservatives, who now, all of a sudden, seem to be concerned about child sexual abuse as a way of political point-scoring. Most importantly, though, child sexual abuse survivors and victims have spoken out against another inquiry and instead want to see the IICSA recommendations implemented.
“To what extent were gangs of Pakistani men raping white girls? There seems to be, to have been a deep racist element in what had happened” – Nigel Farage
The danger of the far-right’s analysis of group-based child sexual abuse is the added dimension of racism, as exemplified by Nigel Farage’s speech in Parliament last week. The narrative often centres on “white girls” as victims, overlooking the fact that children from all ethnicities and social backgrounds can be affected by such abuse. Similarly, the focus on racialised men as perpetrators ignores the reality that abusers, too, can come from any ethnicity or social background.
Though the Jay report did not focus on ethnicity, and its authors reflect on the fact that the investigation “demonstrated a widespread failure in the case study areas to record the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims of child sexual exploitation”, which has now led to “a one-sided and often uninformed public debate where links have been made between ethnicity and a number of high-profile cases involving South Asian men,” other data shows that nationally, the majority of ‘grooming gang’ offences’ are carried out by white men. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) data shows that in the first three-quarters of 2024, 85% of the offenders were white. The same data for the whole of 2023 showed 83% of offenders were white. This is roughly in line with the UK’s demographics, where white people make up 82% of the population in England and Wales, which is 82%.
“Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.” – Elon Musk.
This is untrue. As the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Starmer was responsible for bringing charges for alleged crimes in England and Wales and oversaw 35 significant child grooming-related prosecutions. The CPS is an independent body which prosecutes criminal cases in England and Wales. After the police investigate crimes and present their findings, the CPS decides whether to prosecute based on evidence and public interest.
In 2009, just nine months after Starmer took up the role, the CPS initially decided not to prosecute alleged perpetrators in Rochdale, arguing that the victim would not come across as reliable or credible. However, in 2011, this decision was overturned by Nazir Afzal, the then-new chief prosecutor for north-west England. After this, nine men were convicted and jailed for the sexual exploitation of 47 girls.
In 2013, the year he left, Starmer revised CPS procedures on how prosecutors should deal with child grooming cases in an effort to ensure that victims would not be dismissed in the future. He did not become a politician until 2015 and became the leader of the Labour Party in 2020. However, it’s clear that mistakes around child grooming prosecutions were not motivated by “votes”, but rather were symptomatic of institutional failures, not just from the CPS but the police too.
Is the focus on the ethnicities of individuals in ‘grooming gangs’ driven by far-right conspiracy theories?
It should not go unnoticed that the world’s richest man and incoming US official may effectively be pedalling the Great Replacement Theory – the white-supremacist premise, frequently adopted by the far-right, that white Americans and Europeans are being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants.
“Once you understand that the far right is obsessed with “saving the children” to prevent a so-called white genocide, you can start to understand why its focus is on the South Asian rape gangs scandal, not rape and sexual abuse more broadly,” writes author, senior investigative reporter and Lead contributor, Sian Norris. “There is little comment from the far right on a Cornish rape gang led by white men, or the West Midlands child sex abuse inquiry where the majority of the perpetrators were white.” Norris suggests that terms such as the “rape of the UK” evoke an attempt to seize or take away (the archaic meaning of 'rape') the UK from white people.
It’s also hard to ignore the fact that much of the group-based child sexual abuse discourse has been dominated by anti-Muslim sentiment. “When you consider Musk’s track record of peddling far-right, anti-migrant and Islamophobic narratives, like false reports claiming that the Southport attacker was Muslim last summer – which fuelled riots and widespread violence including hotels housing refugees being torched and mosques being attacked (as well as his ongoing support for the likes of Tommy Robinson who is known for his own anti-Muslim views) – it seems that this is less about securing justice for the victims of grooming and more about finding yet another way to demonise Muslims, Nadeine Asbali writes in The Independent.
About the author: Diyora is a multimedia journalist, writer, and editor based in London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, The Independent, DAZED, Huck Magazine, THE FACE, and more. She was previously the climate editor and, before that, the opinion editor at gal-dem magazine. She is the co-founder of hothouse book club, a digital and IRL book club that champions a climate justice perspective.
The Lead digs into what’s happening with the far-right in the UK in The Drift - our series which tracks the rise of the extreme right, whether that’s exposing the vile posts which escalated in the wake of the tragedy in Southport, speaking to documentary makers who have been embedded with new far-right groups, digging into the causes of the unrest we saw in places like Blackpool last summer, looking at the places where the far-right’s untruths are breeding or looking into what we can learn from when the far-right rose in East Lancashire and the warning signs for today.