What you need to know about the Pakistani rape gangs Musk is tweeting about
US billionaire Elon Musk has single-handedly brought back into the spotlight one of the darkest unresolved scandals of child exploitation in the UK.
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X posted a series of tweets about grooming gangs, and shamed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer into explaining what was he doing while serving as chief prosecutor at the time the scandal broke.
Musk described the case as “the worst mass crime against the people of Britain ever.”
Men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, were found to have raped and tortured a large number of vulnerable young girls over a 25-year period in numerous English towns and cities. The victims, mainly white girls aged between 11 and 18 from troubled homes, were tortured, drugged and pimped out.
At the epicenter were post-industrial towns in northern England and the Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh established communities in the 1960s.
Years of inquiries and investigations found systemic failures, and concluded that local politicians and police covered the crimes for fear of being seen as racist.
However, no officer or government employee has been convicted for their misconduct.
A warning to readers: the following contains explicit descriptions.
It started with a tweet on January 1, in which the billionaire called for the release of Tommy Robinson, a controversial British right-wing activist jailed in October for libelous claims about a Syrian refugee. The Tesla CEO erroneously claimed he was jailed for “telling the truth” about the rape scandal.
Soon afterwards, GB News revealed that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had rejected Oldham Council’s request for a government-led public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town.
It drew Musk’s attention, and he called the decision “disgraceful” and suggested she “deserves to be in prison.”
He continues to share content about the scandal almost daily, including tweets and retweets, with consistent attacks on Starmer. One court transcript that he posted provides horrific details of a case involving Oxford grooming gang member Mohammed Karrar raping a girl under the age of 13.
The initial reports of child sexual exploitation in the northern town of Rotherham emerged in the early 1990s, when care home managers observed young girls being picked up late at night by taxi drivers. In 2001, the names of taxi drivers involved in picking up girls from care homes in Rotherham to exploit and abuse them were reported to the police and council.
Despite this, the authorities did not respond. It was not until 2010 that the first convictions occurred, with five British-Pakistani men found guilty of sexually abusing girls aged 12 to 16.
Then in 2012, The Times’ journalist Andrew Norfolk published a horrific exposé revealing that groups of mostly Pakistani older men were using young girls for sex in Rotherham “on an unprecedented scale,” a matter that was well known to the authorities.
He started receiving tip-offs in 2011 and went to investigate. He noticed recurring court cases involving groups of predominantly Pakistani men grooming young, vulnerable white girls for sexual abuse in northern towns. A “culture of silence” facilitated the abuse, he found. A similar pattern of crimes was found in other towns and cities.
Norfolk’s investigation led the Rotherham local council to commission a report.
Three years later, Professor Alexis Jay’s investigation uncovered a shocking “conservative” estimate of 1,400 children exploited between 1997 and 2013. Rotherham has a population of 260,000. The majority of the perpetrators were described as being of Asian descent, targeting victims that were primarily young white girls.
“There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”
The report revealed that concerns about racism were a significant factor in the lack of action. Some staff members claimed they were directed by their superiors to avoid mentioning race altogether.
From 1997 to 2013 only five men were sent to jail in one prosecution case, involving three teenage girls.
The same thing happened in Telford, later labeled the “child sex capital of Britain”. First a media report found the scale of the abuse was downplayed. In 2018 a Sunday Mirror investigation found that grooming gangs had abused over 1,000 girls since the 1980s.
Four years later a local inquiry confirmed the Sun report. Following the same pattern, the evidence had been ignored for decades, and agencies blamed victims instead of perpetrators and hesitated to act due to “nervousness about race.”
The review also found many perpetrators were described as “Asian” or “Pakistani,” and the authorities feared the allegations could incite a “race riot.” This reluctance to act allowed abuse to persist unchecked for decades.
Only seven men were jailed, for a total of 49 years. The abuse was linked to five deaths, including three murders.
Similar patterns were found in a 2015 inquiry for Oxfordshire, 2019 for Huddersfield, 2020 for Manchester, 2022 for Oldham, a lengthy nationwide 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and a 2024 report for Rochdale.
The offenders often operated within the nighttime economy, with many working as taxi drivers or in takeout restaurants. The grooming typically began with younger men targeting children in public places such as shopping malls, bus stations, or arcades, where they were lured with attention, free rides, and small gifts. Once trust was established, older men were introduced. The “boyfriend” figure manipulated the girls into sexual exploitation, involving other men. Drugs, alcohol, and psychological control were used to trap victims in cycles of abuse, with threats and violence ensuring their silence.
Authorities, including police and social services, often dismissed the victims as “troubled” or “rebellious teenagers” who had willingly engaged in risky behavior.
“There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls,” Nazir Afzal, a prominent prosecutor of Pakistani heritage, acknowledged in 2015.
Many perpetrators have been identified as coming from Mirpur, a city in the Kashmir region of Pakistan, with some noting cultural attitudes toward women and outsiders as contributing factors.
Judge Gerald Clifton, who sentenced eight men of Pakistani origin in Rochdale, said the offenders viewed victims as “worthless and beyond respect”. He added that one of the motivating factors was that the victims “were not part of… community or religion”.
The prevalence of certain group was acknowledged in 2018 by then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid. He comes from a Pakistani background and was born in one of the worst-affected towns, Rochdale.
After 20 men in Huddersfield were convicted for the rape and sexual abuse of girls, he tweeted, “These sick Asian paedophiles are finally facing justice. For too long, they were ignored. Not on my watch.”
He then promised an inquiry into the cultural drivers that led to a high number of Pakistani men being involved.
His comments led to anticipation of a report that would provide a thorough analysis of cultural factors. Despite that, released in 2020, the report said that offenders came from various backgrounds and did not single out any particular group. It acknowledged limitations due to poor-quality data.
Javid was moved from Home Secretary in 2019 before the release of the whitewashed report. He would never have accepted that report, which, I suspect, is why Boris Johnson moved him.
Later, the 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse would find widespread failures by police to record the ethnicity of offenders.
Norfolk, a journalist instrumental in exposing grooming gangs, argued recently to The Times that the issue cannot be eradicated without thorough research into the intersection of religion, culture, and social cohesion that allows criminals to exploit vulnerabilities.
There are two reports of child sexual abuse by grooming gangs made to police every day, The Sun revealed on January 10. Earlier this month, GB News identified at least 50 affected cities across the UK.
Back in 2019 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children identified 19,000 victims of gang abuse in the UK and admitted that the true number is probably far higher.
Given the scale of the abuse, the number of convictions has been minimal, and most perpetrators remain at large. Last year, the Telegraph reported that even though he has been stripped of British citizenship, the leader of a Rochdale grooming gang still lives among his victims, although he was supposed to be deported after his release from prison.
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