After years in inaction, the British government has announced a full independent statutory inquiry into grooming gangs after Louise Casey completed an audit of what she called "one of the most horrendous crimes in our society".
Reports of young girls being groomed by gangs of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, first began to emerge in 2002, when the then-Labour MP Ann Cryer warned that it was happening in her West Yorkshire constituency of Keighley.
Child sexual abuse is mostly carried out by relatives and other trusted figures. But in these cases, gangs used grooming techniques to find their victims in public: girls aged 11 to 16, mostly white, often from troubled backgrounds, would be flooded with attention from men a few years older, who often worked as taxi drivers or in takeaways; many were involved in the illegal drug trade. The girls would be given alcohol or drugs and then deceived or forced into sex with one man, who would then pass them on to be raped, often violently, by his friends or relatives.
Very large numbers. In Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls were estimated to have been abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013; in Telford, it is estimated that over 1,000 children were abused over three decades. In Rochdale, an inquiry identified 74 probable victims and evidence of a much wider problem. But the statistics are incomplete and highly contested.
A series of local inquiries have exposed an official response that was unforgivably inadequate. In her report on Rotherham, Jay said that South Yorkshire Police had treated child victims with "contempt", and that social workers had "underplayed" the problem.
The crossbench peer was asked in January to produce a rapid audit of child sexual abuse carried out by gangs in England and Wales, taking into account the issue of the ethnicity of offenders.
There will also be a nationwide police operation to find new perpetrators and re-open historic cases that had not been properly investigated, and a compulsory collection of ethnicity data for all grooming suspects.
How did the UK grooming gangs scandal emerge?
Reports of young girls being groomed by gangs of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, first began to emerge in 2002, when the then-Labour MP Ann Cryer warned that it was happening in her West Yorkshire constituency of Keighley.
In 2010, a group of five men who had committed sexual offences against girls aged 12 to 16 were convicted in Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The Times then launched a long investigation, exposing not only the shocking extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, but also a wider pattern of horrendous abuses of young girls by organised networks of predominantly British-Pakistani men.
The story began to gain wider traction. In recent years, child-grooming gangs have been jailed in more than a dozen other English towns, mostly in the north of England and the Midlands: notably Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, but also Bristol, Oxford, Huddersfield, Halifax and Banbury, among others.
Why are they called grooming gangs?
Child sexual abuse is mostly carried out by relatives and other trusted figures. But in these cases, gangs used grooming techniques to find their victims in public: girls aged 11 to 16, mostly white, often from troubled backgrounds, would be flooded with attention from men a few years older, who often worked as taxi drivers or in takeaways; many were involved in the illegal drug trade. The girls would be given alcohol or drugs and then deceived or forced into sex with one man, who would then pass them on to be raped, often violently, by his friends or relatives.
"It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered," noted Alexis Jay's 2014 inquiry report into abuse in Rotherham. "They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated."
Children were "doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened [that] they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators." Some victims were murdered: in Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 with her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She was pregnant, for a second time, by him when she died.
How many children were abused?
Very large numbers. In Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls were estimated to have been abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013; in Telford, it is estimated that over 1,000 children were abused over three decades. In Rochdale, an inquiry identified 74 probable victims and evidence of a much wider problem. But the statistics are incomplete and highly contested.
How did the authorities respond?
A series of local inquiries have exposed an official response that was unforgivably inadequate. In her report on Rotherham, Jay said that South Yorkshire Police had treated child victims with "contempt", and that social workers had "underplayed" the problem.
In at least two cases, police arrested the fathers of abused girls when they attempted to remove their daughters from the houses where they were being abused. On another occasion, police attended a derelict house and found an intoxicated girl with several male abusers; they arrested the child for being "drunk and disorderly", but detained none of the men.
Inquiries in both Telford and Rotherham also found that child sexual exploitation was dismissed as "child prostitution"; teachers and social workers were discouraged from reporting abuse. Witnesses were not protected. Other inquiries and reviews in Rochdale and Oldham identified similar issues.