Tackling Grooming Gangs: Ensuring Justice and Support for Victims and Preventing Future Institutional Failures

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Date of Event: Tuesday, October 7th 2025
Time of Event: 9:30 AM — 1:00 PM BST
Place of Event: Webinar

The UK is finally beginning to come to terms with the scale of child grooming and sexual exploitation gangs that have been in operation for decades across the UK, although the full picture is still far from complete. In Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls are estimated to have been abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013. In Telford, over 1,000 children are estimated to have been abused over three decades. In Rochdale, an inquiry identified 74 probable victims and evidence that the scale of abuse was much larger. A series of local inquiries carried out into grooming gangs have exposed significant failures in the official response to the abuse. In her report on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, Professor Alexis Jay said that South Yorkshire Police had treated child victims with “contempt”, and that social workers had “underplayed” the problem.

A Grooming Gangs Taskforce, set up by the UK government in April 2023, has enabled over 550 arrests of grooming gang perpetrators and supported over 4,000 victims in its first year. The government belatedly asked Baroness Casey to carry out an audit examining existing data and evidence on the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse, in January 2025. Following the publication in June 2025 of Baroness Louise Casey’s report, the government accepted all 12 recommendations, including that there should be: a full statutory national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in England and Wales; a national police operation to review cases of child exploitation not acted on; mandatory ethnicity data collection; a reclassification of offences so that adults who have sex with a child under 16 are always charged with rape; and a review of criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation, “so that those convicted for child prostitution offences while their rapists got off scot-free will have their convictions disregarded and their criminal records expunged”.

The Casey report highlighted flaws in data collection, which it says meant it is not possible to assess the scale of the problem and noted that the crime is under-reported and suffers from confusing and inconsistently applied definitions. One key data gap identified in the report is that of ethnicity, which it describes as “appalling” and a “major failing”, arguing that the ethnicity of perpetrators is “shied away from” and still not recorded in two-thirds of cases, despite evidence of “disproportionate numbers” of perpetrators coming from particular communities, thus preventing the drawing of conclusions at a national level.

This timely symposium aims to provides policymakers, local authorities, law enforcement and legal professionals education professionals and other key stakeholders with an opportunity to understand the institutional and policy failures that allowed the proliferation of grooming gangs in the UK, advance improvements in support for victims, and learn about the institutional and policy changes needed to ensure that such abuse can never happen again.

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