UK to establish task-force to tackle child abuse by “British-Pakistani grooming gangs”

UK to establish task-force to tackle child abuse by “British-Pakistani grooming gangs”


The case of the Rotherham Grooming Gang, which created national outrage, involved child sexual abuse in South Yorkshire from the late 1980s until the 2010s. Local authorities and police failed to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period.

The earliest reports of the activities of grooming gangs in Rotherham date to the early 1990s, when staff of local children’s homes began to investigate reports that taxis driven by Pakistani men were arriving at care homes to take the children away. The police apparently declined to act.

Andrew Norfolk of The Times reported in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread and that the police and council had known about it for over a decade.

Five men were convicted of the Rotherham offences.

However, soon it emerged that similar gangs had been active in other parts of the country.

  • In Rochdale the trial of nine Asian men for grooming young white girls for sex attracted widespread public outrage and sparked a national debate when they were convicted in 2012. The gang were to receive jail sentences of between four and 19 years for offences committed against five girls – aged between 13 and 15 – in and around Rochdale between 2008 and 2010.
  • In Oxford in 2013, five members of a sadistic paedophile ring were handed life sentences, while two others were each jailed for seven years at the Old Bailey. The court heard how six girls, aged between 11 and 15, were plied with alcohol and drugs before being forced to perform sex acts. Three of the men were of Pakistani origin, two were from North Africa.
  • In Bristol 13 Somali men were jailed for more than a total of more than 100 years after they were convicted in 2014 of running an inner city sex ring. Victims as young as 13 were preyed upon, sexually abused and trafficked across Bristol to be passed around the men’s friends for money.
  • In Aylesbury six Asian men were jailed in 2015 for grooming vulnerable under-age white girls between 2006 and 2012. The Old Bailey heard victims would be plied with alcohol and forced to perform sex acts for as little as “the price of a McDonalds”.
  • In Peterborough – A total of 10 men were convicted of child sex crimes in the town, including “predatory” restaurant boss Mohammed Khubaib, who was originally from Pakistan. He was jailed for 13 years at the Old Bailey in 2015, after he was found guilty of forcing a 14-year-old girl to perform a sex act on him and nine counts of trafficking for sexual exploitation, involving girls aged from 12 to 15, between 2010 and 2013.

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