LONDON: British authorities said Sunday a nationwide police operation is being launched against “grooming gangs” suspected of sexually exploiting thousands of girls and young women over decades.
The announcement came hours after Prime Minister Keir Starmer said a national inquiry was being started into the scandal, which has attracted the attention of billionaire Elon Musk.
“The National Crime Agency, the UK’s most senior investigating agency, will carry out a nationwide operation to target predators who have sexually exploited children as part of a gang and put them behind bars,“ the Home Office said in a statement.
“More than 800 grooming gang cases have already been identified by police,“ said Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
The crackdown aims to bring “long-awaited justice and prevent more children from being hurt by these vile criminals”, her ministry’s statement said.
Starmer earlier on Sunday said he had dropped his initial resistance to a national inquiry over a series of local probes, and was now backing one, to be led by a member of the upper house of the UK parliament, Louise Casey.
The issue became a scandal as details emerged in official reports about the exploitation across England.
Gangs of men, often of Pakistani origin, targeted mostly white girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, some of whom lived in children’s homes.
The gangs operated in several English towns and cities, notably in Rotherham and Rochdale in the north, but also in Oxford and Bristol, for almost four decades.
The issue of UK grooming gangs was thrust into the international spotlight in January when Musk launched incendiary attacks on his X platform against the UK government for resisting the calls for a national inquiry.
The Home Office announcement of the police operation said “cases that were not previously progressed will be investigated”.
It would “look specifically at how young girls were failed so badly by different agencies on a local level”, the statement said.
The Home Office said the operation would also seek to improve how local police forces investigate such allegations, “and help to put an end to the culture of denial in local services and authorities about the prevalence of this crime”.
