United Kingdom: Government announces launch of major police operation against child sex gangs

The British Home Office announced on Sunday, June 15, the launch of a national police operation aimed at tracking down members of child sex gangs responsible for the sexual exploitation of young girls in several English cities between the late 1990s and the early 2010s.

The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has been tasked with carrying out the operation, which will be carried out in collaboration with the police force, the ministry said in a statement.

This new operation will also allow the reopening of investigations which had previously been closed without further action.

This announcement comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed support for a national inquiry into the matter. He had previously preferred local investigations.

According to the Home Office, "more survivors of atrocities committed by child sex gangs will obtain justice" thanks to this new operation, the main objective of which is to bring members of these networks to justice.

"Vulnerable young girls who were exploited in unimaginable ways (...) are now courageous women who are rightly demanding justice," said Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, quoted in the statement.

"Too few people listened to them at the time. It was a serious and unforgivable mistake. We are putting an end to it now," she continued, adding that "more than 800 cases (...) have already been identified by the police after I asked them to reopen files that were closed too early."

For decades, in several English cities, gangs of men, mostly of Pakistani origin, have targeted girls and young women, most of whom are white and from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The "grooming gang" scandal returned to the news in early January when billionaire Elon Musk accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of allowing "gangs of rapists to exploit young girls without facing justice."

The most high-profile case is that of Rotherham, a town where nearly 1,500 minors were drugged, raped and sexually exploited by one of these gangs over a sixteen-year period, between 1997 and 2013.

More than a hundred men have been convicted, and the victims are estimated at several thousand.

The failings of the police and local authorities have been severely criticized, and this case, which traumatized England, is regularly used by the British far right to denounce the laxity of public authorities and a two-tier justice system.