The ringleader of a group of men who raped and abused two teenage girls in the northern English town of Rochdale was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday, in the latest criminal case in Britain seeking accountability for decades of offending by so-called “grooming gangs.”
...
Rochdale was among the first British towns to be revealed as a hub of sexual grooming gangs by investigative journalists in the early 2010s, prompting a nationwide scandal and years of prosecutions and inquiries into why the perpetrators were not stopped sooner.
...
Mr. Zahid and his co-defendants were investigated by a child sexual exploitation investigations unit within the Greater Manchester Police that was formed in 2021, the police said in a statement. The force said it was one of two major investigations that have so far resulted in 32 offenders being jailed for a combined total of 474 years for grooming gang activity in Rochdale. Twenty more men are awaiting trial.
...
In January, the grooming gangs issue returned to international headlines after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, used his social media platform to post a series of vitriolic posts about it that included many inaccuracies and smears. In response to growing public pressure, the government announced a full national inquiry into the issue in June.
...
A report on grooming gangs released as part of the wider Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales in 2022 found that “extensive failures” by local councils and the police had left victims being treated as “child prostitutes,” while perpetrators were not investigated or prosecuted.
Many high-profile grooming gang prosecutions have involved men of Pakistani or Muslim origin, but the report said that a lack of formal data recording by the police made it “impossible to know” whether certain ethnic groups were overrepresented among abusers nationally. The government announced in June that it was implementing the inquiry’s recommendation that the police should record the ethnicity and nationality of all suspects in child sexual abuse and exploitation cases.
An official audit of previous cases also published in June described “many examples of organizations” avoiding the question of whether ethnicity or cultural factors were at play, “for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.”
https://archive.is/7hpeP
From the article:
...
...
...
...