THE recent conviction of seven men in the Rochdale grooming gang case is a hard-won moment of justice. The men, found guilty of over four dozen horrific offences committed between 2001 and 2006, exploited vulnerable girls — some as young as 13. The verdict is a testament to the courage of the survivors, who had to relive their trauma in the courtroom to ensure their abusers were held accountable. This latest chapter in the UK’s child sexual exploitation crisis reopens deep wounds. As part of Operation Lytton, Greater Manchester Police’s painstaking work has corrected past failures, especially those that led to the initial betrayal of survivors by law enforcement and social services. Their delayed response is a matter of shame. However, in the wake of these convictions, political and media narratives once again veered into dangerous territory. Inflammatory rhetoric from senior Conservative party members has racialised the issue, casting collective suspicion on British Pakistanis. This not only stigmatises entire communities but also distracts from the systemic failures that enabled the abuse to continue.

While the Rochdale and Rotherham cases involved mainly South Asian perpetrators, the 2020 UK Home Office report stated that most group-based offenders are white. Ignoring this broader context distorts the truth. What is needed is not scapegoating but action: an independent national inquiry into grooming gangs to investigate abuse, regardless of ethnicity, and confront the underreported exploitation of South Asian girls, an issue often overlooked in the binary framing of victims and perpetrators. In January, Jayne Senior, a whistleblower in this case, said: “Of course, it’s still going on — I think it’s going on across every town, every city in the UK.” Until the authorities stop seeing child abuse through a racial lens and start viewing it as an institutional failure, the cycle of betrayal will continue.

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2025