The UK grooming gang scandal involved groups of mostly Pakistani men who raped and abused teenage girls in and around various northern cities. One of the best known cases took place in Rotherham, a suburb of Sheffield. An estimated 1,400 girls were abused over several decades in Rotherham. Despite the fact that public knowledge of this behavior goes back more than 20 years now with major reports on the case more than a decade old, new allegations continue to arise.
For much of that time, the conclusion has been that police sat on their hands while the abuse was taking place, in part because so many of the perpetrators were “Asian men” and making an issue of the abuse would have opened the police to charges of racism. That’s still true but this week we’re learning there may have been another aspect to it. Some of the victims from the case allege they were sexually abused by police officers too, giving cops another reason to ignore what was happening.
Five women who were exploited by grooming gangs in Rotherham as children say they were also abused by police officers in the town at the time…
We have seen written accounts from these women, plus testimony from 25 other victims of grooming gangs, with some of those women saying that corrupt police officers worked alongside the gangs or failed to act on child sexual exploitation.
The report highlights the reports of a few of the victims using false names.
One of the women, Willow – not her real name – says she was sexually abused by hundreds of men over five years after first being targeted, as an 11-year-old in 1997, by a grooming gang.
Two police officers also sexually abused her, she says. Over three years, one of the SYP officers would repeatedly track her down and pick her up in a police car in Rotherham town centre, she says.
“He knew where we used to hang out, he would request either oral sex or rape us in the back of the police car,” she tells the BBC.
If she tried to refuse his requests, says Willow, he would even contact the grooming gang directly to threaten her.
“I would rather be raped once, or give one man oral sex, than to be taken somewhere where I know it’d be 15… 20 guys one after another. That was just easier,” she says.
After she was pressured into an illegal abortion by the grooming gang, she says a youth worker contacted social services and the police. But she was left “destroyed”, she says, when one of the officers who had been abusing her turned up to interview her.
A few days later, the same officer ripped her statement up in front of her and threw it in the bin, she says, and no further action was taken.
Other victims had similar allegations.
A second woman, given the pseudonym Emma, said she was raped by a police officer in a squat after she ran away from children’s homes. “He knew we wouldn’t be missed, he knew we wouldn’t be reported. He knew we wouldn’t be able to say anything. He knew that he had the upper hand,” she said.
Another woman said that, as a child, she witnessed a police officer supplying class A drugs to a grooming gang. A fourth woman said she remembered hearing a police officer abusing girls he had given drugs and money.
A law firm offered to represent these women in cases against the police, but when the firm named specific police officers the victims claimed were involved, the initial response was to sidetrack the investigation.
In January 2023, the firm wrote to SYP about one particular officer, but the case was passed to the professional standards department, rather than being allocated to a criminal investigations team, she said. It was only in October 2024 that the major crime unit took over.
“For years, SYP resisted our requests for an investigation into the alleged criminality of police officers, despite us providing them with the accounts of survivors,” Amy Clowrey, a director at Switalskis, told The Times. “It’s beyond belief, the accounts we have heard. Those who have suffered abuse in Rotherham have no faith that SYP will do a thorough job of investigating alleged abuse by their own officers.
The BBC reported that Willow named PC Hassan Ali, who died from a car crash in 2015, as having raped her. “The first time, he literally said: ‘You do it for the other officer. So you’re gonna do it for me,’” she said.
PM Keir Starmer refused a push for a national inquiry on the topic of grooming gangs for months (something that Beege wrote about repeatedly this year). Starmer not only claimed this was just a far-right bandwagon issue, his Labour party also voted overwhelmingly against a national inquiry. And then in June he did a complete about face on the issue. Even when the turnabout was being announced, Starmer’s ministers were still downplaying the fact that nearly all the men involved were Pakistani.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, announcing the national inquiry into grooming gangs, uses her address to yet again minimise the overrepresentation of Pakistani Muslim men in the rape gangs.
She mentions there are “all ethnicities and communities are involved in appalling child… pic.twitter.com/VxUFX7SpGQ
— Connor Tomlinson (@Con_Tomlinson) June 16, 2025
It looks, to this outsider, like the same fears of being called racist that helped protect the grooming gangs for decades have also slow-walked a national inquiry and for the same reason. PM Starmer doesn’t want to find himself reading a report which concludes that 90% of the people involved in abusing British teens were immigrants from one small part of the world. That would be very hard to square with his past statements and his party’s broader stance on immigration.
