As the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs swings into action, what will we find out about the extent of sexual abuse in the UK?

Where?

The Grooming Gangs Inquiry has identified three towns and cities which will be focussed on in particular.  These are: Bradford and Keighley, Oldham, and London.  The extent and scale of the problem though is certainly more far reaching than that and the Inquiry is going to have to grapple with and determine what was happening across the UK and how the abusers evaded justice for so long.

What about other areas? 

There are other parts of the country where there have been highly publicised trials and convictions of large groups of men.  Take for example the the Tendersea, Dalesway and Tourway investigations undertaken by West Yorkshire Police which have led to the prosecution and conviction of scores of men who were operating in Bradford and Huddersfield and Dewsbury and Batley. 

Perhaps on of the most notorious scandals is the Rotherham sex abuse scandal in South Yorkshire.  Rotherham had its own Independent Inquiry after the matter was highlighted in the Times newspaper.  The resulting Jay Report estimated that 1,4000 girls and young people had been affected.  But this offending was not limited to Rotherham and abuse was, to our knowledge, also going on in the nearby towns of Doncaster and the city of Sheffield.

In Rotherham all reports of sexual abuse by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013 were transferred to the Nation Crime Agency (NCA) after Operation Stovewood was set up.  The NCA operated separately from the local police force which had, for extremely understandable reasons, lost the trust of many of the women, and sometimes men, who had been abused as children in the town. Perhaps this is a model which could be copied elsewhere.  Sex offences have notoriously low rates of conviction and anything which can be done to encourage people who were abused as children to come forward has surely got to be a good thing.

The Greater Manchester investigation, Operation Span in Rochdale belatedly saw convictions of dozens of men.  The scandal in Rochdale came to light after a sexual health worker and a police officer blew the whistle on what was happening in the town and the unwillingness of the professionals to identify and deal with the problem.  The police officer, Maggie Oliver, has since set up the Maggie Oliver Foundation which works tirelessly to highlight the ongoing issues and support survivors.  The events in Rochdale were widely covered in the media and portrayed in the BBC television drama, Three Girls, in 2017.

More recently Oldham, also in the Greater Manchester area, has received much publicity recently and has been a major driving force behind the commission of the Grooming Gangs Inquiry.  Greater Manchester Police have launched Operation Sherwood which continues to investigate the many sexual crimes which took place in the town.  It has taken huge effort and persistence by survivors and their families though to get this far.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation was certainly not just taking place in the North of England – take for example the Operation Bullfinch convictions in Oxfordshire or Operation Chalice trials in Telford. 

The Grooming Gangs Inquiry areas: Bradford and Oldham and London are metropolitan boroughs; some of them, at least in part, characterised by poverty.  But grooming as we see above also took place in affluent, towns like Oxford and Cambridge, better known for their prestigious universities than sexual abuse.  It is true that some children are abused in the back of cars or in seedy flats above take-aways, but this is not the whole story and we regularly hear stories of girls and boys being be taken to remote beauty spots where perpetrators can abuse them without fear of discovery.

As well as the Oldhams and Rotherhams, there are other grooming gangs which you might not necessarily have heard of:

In Leeds ten men were convicted in June 2026 for multiple rapes of one 13 year-old girl. 

In Newcastle in a number of police investigations, Operation Sanctuary and Operation Shelter led to an number of convictions with it being reported in 2018 that a total of 17 men and one woman had been convicted of offences including rape, sexual abuse, supplying drugs and trafficking for sexual exploitation in a series of trials.  Northumbria Police confirmed that had identified over 700 victims.  More recently, in December 2025, five men were convicted of exploiting and abusing 6 girls over a period of 4 years in Newcastle.

The list goes on and on: there were other gangs found to be operating in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire where 5 men were convicted in 2015 of sexual offences against multiple children.  In Derby a gang of men (see below) were convicted of multiple offences.  Banbury in Oxfordshire saw convictions, as did Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, as well as Cambridge itself.  In 2023 Twenty-one people were convicted for their parts in the largest ever child sex abuse case investigated by West Midlands Police for abuse which took place in Walsall and Wolverhampton.  Similar abuse was taking place in Birmingham.

Race of offenders

One of the issues likely to receive significant attention during the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs is the role, if any, that race, ethnicity, culture and religion played in patterns of offending, victim targeting, and institutional responses. This is a sensitive but important area. The Inquiry has indicated that it will examine evidence about the ethnic backgrounds of perpetrators where relevant, consider whether particular groups of victims were targeted because of their race or vulnerability, and investigate whether concerns about accusations of racism or community tensions influenced decisions made by police, local authorities or other agencies. At the same time, the Inquiry is expected to take an evidence-based approach, recognising that child sexual exploitation is committed by offenders from a range of backgrounds and that conclusions must be driven by reliable evidence rather than assumptions. More broadly, the Inquiry will focus on institutional failures, accountability, safeguarding responses, the treatment of victims and survivors, and what lessons can be learned to better prevent and respond to group-based child sexual exploitation in the future.

Trafficking

Another issue which must be considered by the Inquiry will be the trafficking which took between different areas.  In the cases which we deal with here at Switalskis Abuse Department we are frequently told that children were not only abused in their own town or city, but were trafficked to other areas where they were abused by other groups of men.  Young people from Bradford were being taken to Manchester or Leeds or Rotherham and vice versa.  The Inquiry must get to the bottom of why and how this was happening and how police forces and Local Authorities should be working together to identify and disrupt this practice.

We can say with certainty that the number of convictions represent just a tiny proportion of the children and young people who were abused.  Many people simply do not wish to report their abuse to the police for a variety of reasons: they have moved on and don’t want to think about their abuse; they fear they will not be abused, they do not trust the police; they fear that their own children will be removed by social services, or simply do not want their families, children or others to know what happened.  The terrible rate of convictions for sexual offences is also likely to be a factor, as will the time which it often takes to investigate and try perpetrators.

Sometimes the abusers come forward but, and whilst the police believe the complainants accounts, the evidence is just not available after many years and therefore charges are not brought.

The Grooming Gangs inquiry needs to look at what can be done to address all of these issues.

When?

Sexual abuse has always happened, and this particular type of grooming and exploitation was certainly known about by professionals and survivors and their families from the mid-nineties onwards, and probably before.

These offences came into sharper focus from the 2010s onwards: the Leeds based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping  (Crop) sought to bring this behaviour to national attention from at least 2010.  Press interest was sparked the publicity around the Jay Report into CSE in Rotherham, but by then there had already been multiple convictions in Rochdale and Oxford, to name just a few.

In Derby a gang of men who sexually abused up to a hundred girls were convicted in 2010 after an undercover investigation by Derbyshire police.  Members of the ring were charged with 75 offences relating to 26 girls and nine of the 13 men were convicted of grooming and raping girls between 12 and 18 years old.

Regrettably, the exploitation of children and young people is still happening.  There have been improvements: sexually abused children are no longer referred to a “child prostitutes” or, hopefully, characterised as simply as out of control teenagers who are authors of their own misfortune.  Councils and police forces across the country have apologised and promised that “lessons have been learnt”, but this is not a view shared by many of our clients who say that they see abuse still happening in their towns  and cities in plain sight. This too is an issue which is very important to our clients: not only should survivors obtain justice and receive compensation, but steps should be taken to take these gangs off our streets and make sure this despicable abuse doesn’t happen to other children ever again.

How?

The stories which we hear from our clients are often strikingly similar in terms of how vulnerable children are targeted.  Many of them were ‘Looked After Children’ who were living in children’s homes or foster placements.  This was not always the case though and many survivors were living at home and were either hiding the abuse from their parents, but more commonly their parents knew and begged for support from professionals with seemingly no, or inadequate, responses.

In our experience a common thread is that the children were vulnerable through no fault of their own, often with chaotic or neglectful homelives.  This is where the grooming gangs would step and exploit children who were flattered that someone was giving them gifts of cigarettes or alcohol or clothes or simply grateful for a hot meal or even just a warm car to sit in.  These inexperienced young people misinterpreted these acts, not as grooming, but as care or attention or even love. 

Frequently the teenagers believed that one of the men was their boyfriend, but were slowly introduced to other men and the “relationship” deteriorated over time into open abuse violence and threats, sometimes being drugged and sexual abused by one or more men.  This ‘boyfriend model’ is what stops many women coming forward to report their abuse: sometimes they don’t even realise that what they endured was abuse, or they know that they were abused but feel that it is their own fault or that they won’t be believed.   

In summary the inquiry into Grooming Gangs will not discover the whole picture if it just concentrates on certain areas, or certain types of survivors, or models of abuse.  All survivors should have access and be able to tell their story, and the Inquiry must listen to everyone who wants to come forward.

How can we help?

Our specialist team has decades of experience dealing with child sexual abuse and grooming gang cases.  If you would like an informal, confidential chat about your experiences and the options available to you, whether that be in relation to a police investigation or civil claims for compensation, please get in touch with us on 01924 882000 or by emailing sally.smith@switalskis.com and we’ll be happy to speak to you.