LONDON (Diya TV) — A growing number of British lawmakers and media critics are demanding a national inquiry into the decades-long failure of UK institutions to act against grooming gangs, particularly those predominantly involving men of Pakistani Muslim origin. The calls have intensified following a recent BBC Newsnight segment that critics say misrepresented key facts about the ethnic composition of group-based sexual exploitation cases.
Conservative MP Chris Philp reignited the debate, citing a 20-year study indicating that 83% of perpetrators in grooming gang prosecutions were of Pakistani origin. “The cover-up has to end,” Philp said, calling for a full national inquiry into the failures of police, social services, and government departments to protect vulnerable victims, often white, working-class girls.
The backlash intensified after Newsnight aired a segment that highlighted police data from just one year, showing 55% of grooming gang suspects were White British and only 12.9% were Pakistani. Critics pointed out that 69% of suspects in that same dataset had no recorded ethnicity, meaning the figures were incomplete and potentially misleading.
Former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, who stated that grooming gangs are “predominantly Pakistani,” was branded “misleading” by a police officer during the broadcast. But viewers and analysts noted the officer’s department had previously come under fire for asking victims to delete posts about child sexual abuse, raising serious questions about institutional accountability.
The debate also highlights flaws in data collection. UK police crime data, as the UK Statistics Authority noted in 2014, fails to meet national statistical standards due to inconsistent and unreliable reporting. There’s also no official crime category for “grooming gangs,” which allows data to be diluted by lumping in lone offenders or unrelated abuse cases, thereby masking the distinct pattern of group-based exploitation.
In towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Keighley, and Oxford, independent investigations have uncovered years of abuse by predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs. The Rotherham Inquiry alone found that 1,400 girls had been abused over 16 years, while local authorities ignored repeated warnings to avoid being labeled racist.
Critics argue that the BBC and other institutions have prioritized social cohesion over child protection. “To believe the BBC narrative,” one commentator wrote in OpIndia, “you’d have to assume every grooming suspect is arrested, reports ethnicity accurately, and is recorded honestly by departments that have already failed these victims.”
The BBC’s decision to present a narrow slice of recent data has been seen as an effort to downplay a disturbing long-term trend. The broadcaster’s focus on optics over outcomes, say critics, shows a media class more concerned with controlling the narrative than confronting a national scandal.
While the BBC and several police departments defend their reporting, claiming they aim to avoid generalization and community backlash, survivors and campaigners argue that this restraint has come at the expense of justice.
“The British public is not served by obfuscation,” said a survivor from the Rotherham scandal, who watched the Newsnight program. “We deserve the truth, not spin.”
As pressure mounts on the Home Office, lawmakers like Philp are pushing for a comprehensive national inquiry to expose what many are calling “institutional betrayal”—a system where political correctness and fear of offense have, for too long, enabled serial abuse to continue unchecked.
