Britain’s government on Thursday bowed to pressure and announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, used his social media platform X to highlight the issue in a series of vitriolic posts. Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said she had commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” that would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators. She also said that the government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called grooming gangs — groups of men who were found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, some as young as 11, in the 2000s and early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage. The scandal, which was widely covered in the British media in the 2010s and has already been the subject of local and national inquiries, spanned a number of towns and cities in which mostly white girls were exploited, assaulted and raped by groups of men.

Source: The Times January 16, 2025 21:31 UTC