Elon Musk has once again drawn global focus to the scandal of grooming gangs in Britain by highlighting a report funded by citizens that accuses the UK government of inadequately protecting children and teenagers from systematic sexual exploitation.
“The politicians who ignored the Rape of Britain must face prison,” Musk remarked on X on June 16. This comment came after Rupert Lowe, an MP from Great Yarmouth and the leader of the Restore Britain movement, unveiled an extensive independent report exceeding 200 pages on the issue.
The report, which is available online, was penned by barrister Graham Smith and released through Rupert Lowe’s independent inquiry into grooming gangs. It gained financial backing from public donations, amassing approximately $1.1 million from over 23,000 contributors as of Wednesday.
Lowe’s findings contend that many people in Britain have lost faith in the government’s ability to scrutinize its own shortcomings. This distrust stems from years of public outrage over grooming gang scandals in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, and Oldham. In these areas, girls were groomed, raped, trafficked, and abused by groups of men, often of Pakistani descent, while authorities like the police, social services, and local councils repeatedly failed to take action.
Rupert Lowe, representing Great Yarmouth for Restore Britain, has released this independent report addressing the grooming gang scandal in the UK.
The Lowe report claims that grooming gangs “operated with either the active or passive consent of public authorities” and describes the scandal as a “rotting stain” on Britain’s history. Its recommendations include a sweeping overhaul of sentencing guidelines, life imprisonment starting points for organized child rape, deportation of foreign nationals convicted of group-based child sexual exploitation, a dedicated Crown Prosecution Service unit, stronger protections for child witnesses and possible private prosecutions against officials accused of failing victims.
“If they fail to take the necessary steps, we will deploy private prosecutions to obtain justice at last,” Lowe wrote in the report.
The report also makes claims about the ethnicity and religion of offenders, arguing that Muslim men, particularly men of Pakistani heritage, were overrepresented in organized grooming gang cases. It claims the number of victims could reach at least 250,000 when known local patterns are extrapolated nationally.
A woman poses at her home in England, Britain, January 8, 2025. She was 14 when she was sexually abused by a grooming gang in Rochdale. (Hollie Adams/Reuters)
That figure has not been verified by the British government. Baroness Louise Casey’s government-commissioned 2025 audit found serious institutional failures and said authorities had often avoided difficult questions about ethnicity out of fear of racism accusations.Â
She wrote, “We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.”
However, her report also stated that “Despite the lack of a full picture in the national data sets, there is enough evidence available in local police data in three police force areas which we examined which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination.”
Her audit also identified other perpetrators, including White British, European, African or Middle Eastern individuals.
A supporter wearing a plastic policeman’s helmet and holding fake money criticizes the way the police dealt with the grooming gang scandal on January 29, 2022, in Telford, England. (Martin Pope/Getty Images)
Emma Schubart, a research fellow at the U.K.-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society, told News Media: “The government should take this report seriously. While some of its headline figures rely on extrapolation and parts of its methodology will rightly be challenged, it raises questions about grooming gangs, institutional failures and offender demographics that cannot simply be ignored.”
The British government has already launched a statutory national inquiry into grooming gangs across England and Wales. The inquiry was formally established in April 2026 and is expected to examine institutional failures, local and national responses, possible cover-ups and the role of ethnicity, religion and culture in group-based child sexual exploitation.
Elon Musk arrives for U.S. President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 4, 2025. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
A Home Office spokesperson told News Media: “The grooming gangs scandal is one of the darkest moments and most shameful failures in our nation’s history, and we pay tribute to the immense bravery of those who have shared their experiences in the fight for justice.”
“We are determined to get victims and survivors the answers they deserve. That is why we have launched the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs with legal powers to hold institutions to account for past failures, and backed the police with record funding to track down and put perpetrators behind bars,” the spokesperson said. “There will be no hiding place for those responsible.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Parliament last year that more than 800 previously closed grooming and child sexual exploitation cases had been identified for formal review, with the figure expected to rise above 1,000. She also said the government would introduce mandatory reporting, aggravated offenses for grooming offenders and new ethnicity and nationality data collection.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends a press conference at Downing Street in London to announce government action to protect children online on June 15, 2026. (Carlos Jasso/Pool Photo via AP)
Prime Minister Keir Starmer previously rejected attacks over his handling of the scandal, accusing critics of spreading “lies and misinformation” and saying some were more interested in politics than victims. Starmer has defended his record as former director of public prosecutions, saying he reopened closed cases and changed the prosecution approach to child sexual exploitation.
A central counterpoint to Lowe’s report is that Britain has already held multiple inquiries into child sexual abuse and grooming gangs, including the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and that the urgent priority should be implementing recommendations and prosecuting offenders rather than launching parallel investigations.
But others say the very existence of a privately funded inquiry shows a deeper collapse of public trust. They argue that previous investigations exposed failures but did not deliver enough accountability for victims or consequences for officials who ignored warnings.
“Perhaps the most striking finding is not in the report itself but in how it was funded,” Schubart told News Media. “The fact that more than 20,000 people contributed to a citizen-funded inquiry reflects a growing lack of confidence that public institutions are willing to confront the issue fully. Whether you agree with every conclusion or not, that loss of trust should concern policymakers just as much as the report’s findings.”
A protestor holds a placard accusing the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, of ignoring the Grooming Gang scandal during a rally. Millwall fans joined with supporters of other London football teams in a demonstration called “Football Lads Against Grooming” on a march to Downing Street. (Lab Ky Mo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The issue has also drawn public criticism from the Trump administration. The State Department previously warned the U.K. over its handling of the grooming gangs scandal, saying thousands of girls had suffered “unspeakable abuse” before authorities acted.
Lowe said that the government’s statutory inquiry risks becoming another long process that delays accountability, comparing it to other British scandals where official reckoning came only years later.
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