Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
17-06-2025
LONDON: The British government has announced it will hold a national inquiry into organized child sexual abuse after months of resisting the call from opposition groups.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday that he had read “every single word” of an independent report into the sexual assault scandal, also known as the “grooming gangs” case, by Baroness Louise Casey and would accept her recommendation for the investigation.
“That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she [Casey] has put in her audit. I asked her to do that job to double check on this; she has done that job for me and having read her report … I shall now implement her recommendations.” Starmer told reporters travelling with him during a visit to Canada.
Earlier this year, the government dismissed calls for a public inquiry, stating that it was focusing on recommendations already made in a seven-year national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay.
In 2022, Jay found that there had been institutional failings across the country, affecting tens of thousands of victims in England and Wales but the opposition Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, said Starmer only backs the report because “a report told him to” but increased interest into the “grooming gangs” case, as the British press termed it, was pushed by far-right groups, including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and further stoked by tech billionaire and Tesla owner Elon Musk, after the perpetrators of one of the most high-profile cases in the country were men of Pakistani heritage.
Their push was branded by critics as a racist dog whistle. The vast majority of “grooming gang” offences, however, are carried out by white men, the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said earlier this year.
Musk used his X platform to criticise the British prime minister over not backing a national inquiry after the local authority in Oldham, a town in northern England, found that girls under the age of 18 were sexually exploited by groups of men in the 2000s and 2010s.
Musk also alleged that Starmer did not bring the perpetrators to justice when he was the country’s chief prosecutor between 2008 and 2013, a charge that Starmer had denied repeatedly. Due to the similarity of the Oldham case to others in several towns, including mainly white girls being abused by men largely from a Pakistani background, the issue has been linked to immigration.
Government has also announced it will back new local inquiries into child sexual abuse and undertake a “rapid” review of the extent of child sexual exploitation in the country, following criticism over historic grooming scandals from the US technology billionaire Elon Musk.
The scandals involved organized groups sexually exploiting vulnerable girls from the 1980s until at least the 2010s. A 2014 inquiry found at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
The issue was at the centre of a political firestorm last week when a war of words broke out between Musk and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions in England when the scandals came to light.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on Thursday said the government would set out a timetable to implement the 20 recommendations of a national inquiry published in 2022 but would also go further and back new local investigations.
“Despite all those national inquiries, reports and hundreds of recommendations, far too little action has been taken, and shamefully little progress has been made,” Cooper told Parliament. (Int’l News Desk)
