The U.K.’s Horrific Rape Gangs

National Review Online

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

Not long ago, mentioning England’s grooming gangs — more accurately described as “child rape gangs” — was considered a reprehensible racist “dog whistle.” In fact, simply noticing the demographics of most of the perpetrators and most of the victims risked running afoul of hate speech laws: Derek Heggie was sent behind bars for “grossly offensive” comments on YouTube, such as stating that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad.” But after Elon Musk amplified the discussion on X in 2025 and resurfaced uncomfortable statistics, the frustrated British public began demanding the truth.

 

Finally, the survivors and whistleblowers have been provided the platform and appropriate privacy protections to describe their experiences. And you can be forgiven for being too horrified by the details to listen for more than just a few minutes.

 

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, published on Tuesday and exceeding 200 pages, was supported by crowdsourced funding; it lacked certain statutory powers because it was not a government inquiry, although it was led by Member of Parliament and Restore Britain party leader Rupert Lowe. The investigators had limited powers, such as the inability to compel witnesses or require the sort of document production that could corroborate some of the most heinous claims. Viewed with those limitations in mind, the independent report is a damning collection of victim testimonies that vividly portray the sexual terrorism that occurred nationwide for decades.

 

The girls, sometimes as young as eleven, told of being raped daily, drugged, beaten, burned, racially abused, trafficked throughout the country, forced to convert to Islam, and coerced into Islamic marriages. In some cases, the sexual abuse was filmed and distributed, then used as blackmail against the children (and, occasionally, their families too). The girls contracted a range of sexually transmitted diseases, while some experienced multiple pregnancies that ended by miscarriage, abortion, or live birth. But hospital visits were necessary for more than pregnancy appointments: A twelve-year-old was raped and then penetrated with a whiskey bottle that shattered inside her, but she was discharged after treatment without ever being asked how she had incurred the injury.

 

The girls were also subjected to harassment, stalking, and intimidation. One victim was apparently made an accessory to homicide when she was instructed to clean the knives from a scene where two fatal stabbings had occurred. Several girls and young women attempted to escape a gang’s territory by relocating in the country — but they were found and forced back into what is essentially sexual slavery, although they first watched the gangsters destroy their new homes. The abused children and women recounted lengthy struggles with substance misuse and self-harm, while some attempted suicide.

 

These atrocities become more alarming and enraging upon realizing that the British government was not clueless. Virtually every British institution — the police, the judiciary, the social-care services, the health-care system, the schools, and taxi-licensing bodies — had been made aware of the gangs, yet failed to appropriately intervene. The victims recall instances where the authorities entirely ignored their credible claims and corroborating evidence or responded by perfunctorily issuing mild warnings to perpetrators. In some cases, the police allegedly found the girls in compromising situations with pimps in homes or cars but did not even bother to question the men.

 

Even worse, it appears that some government employees actively facilitated or encouraged the abuse. A victim recalled an occasion when a police officer returned her to the children’s home where she resided, and he told the loitering gangsters to “have fun with her.” When a social worker finally initiated a discussion with a 14-year-old about her ongoing sexual exploitation, that person raised the possibility that she audition for a television show that was looking for an actress to play a child victim of sexual abuse. The report offers a succinct and scathing assessment: “The rape gangs did not operate in the shadows, but with the active or passive consent of the British state. The betrayal was total.”

 

But why were the exploited children ignored, disbelieved, and abandoned by the sprawling surveillance state that is so quick to punish benign conduct like carrying a teeny toy replica sword? The answer is that Britain has succumbed to a dangerous ideology that — in the words of the report — emphasizes “diversity, inclusion, and non-judgementalism as supreme virtues.” Pursuing justice for the girls would have revealed uncomfortable demographic trends that challenge the state-sponsored proclamations that celebrate diversity, equity, anti-racism, and large-scale immigration as intrinsic goods. In particular, a thorough law-enforcement response would have made plain the devastating figures showing vast overrepresentation of Pakistanis and Muslims as perpetrators, while further illustrating that white girls tended to be their targets. Despite the efforts to sanitize the data, South Asian men are significantly overrepresented; 62 percent of convicted offenders in group-based child sexual exploitation in Rotherham were recorded as having a Pakistani background, despite amounting to just about 4 percent of the local population.

 

The report recites a previous estimate that there have been 250,000 victims of the rape gangs in Britain, but it underscores that this figure is a “bare minimum.” However, this number was calculated by extrapolating from previous reports focused on particular localities and therefore could be either much too high or low. Still, it is worth acknowledging that this estimate attempts to capture the number of victims — not the number of perpetrators or the number of offenses committed. Several survivors told the inquiry team that they believe they were raped by “hundreds” of South Asian men, while the abuse occurred several times a week or even daily.

 

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we will ever uncover the exact number of victims and identify every offender, yet a great evil has occurred if even one single girl endured just an hour under the control of the gangsters. The physical, emotional, and psychological damage can never be undone, but hopefully the responsible parties — including government actors who failed to intervene — can be appropriately called out and punished. But first, we must first accept the report’s sober conclusion: “Until the country rejects the fear of being called ‘racist’ and restores the courage to name uncomfortable truths, the conditions that allowed these networks to thrive will remain.”