"[That Bradford is to be included was a] weight off my shoulders."

"Bradford has evaded inquiries for many, many years and it's time that the full truth about what happened comes out."

"We need accountability. There's one thing prosecuting the persecutors of these crimes - that should have been a given - but the people who chose to go into safeguarding roles that made these decisions - that weren't just turning a blind eye to the children's abuse, but added and facilitated it."

Abuse survivor Fiona Goddard

 

"[I hope the inquiry will mean] no further inquiries into grooming gangs will ever be needed."

"These hearings will help us to establish what national institutions and services should have been doing to implement these findings and to protect children from abuse and harm - and what, if any, progress has been made in areas where investigations have taken place."

Baroness Anne Longfield CBE to head the Statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs 

A case study in institutional failure    Photograph: Reuters

 

"The question for this inquiry will be why so many [recommendations from the reviews, reports and inquiries since the late 1990s] have not been implemented. And most importantly what will be different this time?"

"The inquiry has promised to put the voices of those who were abused and exploited at is heart. Many survivors speak of their deep distrust of those in authority, not just because of what happened at the time of their abuse, but also because of the lack of action over the longer term."

"Past reviews have found in some organisations and in some parts of the country an attitude that the exploitation of children by grooming gangs does not happen here."

"The challenge for the inquiry will be to ensure everyone remains alert to the possibility that this sort of abuse can and does happen anywhere."

BBC Social Affairs editor Alison Holt 

Reports focusing on U.K. rape gang victims chronicled acts of debased gang violence transcending rape alone. Rape including torture and mutilation with broken bottles pushed into vaginas, dousings with gasoline, stabbings, threats to family members seeking help, forced abortions. Nightmare scenarios of horrible abuse, targeting mostly British white girls. The situation of gang rape and no repercussions has been known for years. Known, but nothing done to stop the atrocities; no government figure, no police interventions.

 

As though these were mere rumours, not witnessed reports and documented events of assaults insulting of the most basic human rights. Appeals to government went to deaf, disinterested ears. Victims left to their own devices. Abusers assured that there would be no societal reprisals, no cost associated with the dread actions taken by gangs impervious to social decency, for the abusers. The victims left to live amongst their attackers, and vulnerable to ongoing atrocities.

 

They were left by an uncaring government to remain hostage to groomers and their legions of hangers-on. There was no lack of descriptive horrors experienced by helpless girls. Accounts by rape gang survivors that they were abandoned by police, social services, teachers, politicians at every level, and media. No one wanted to risk being labelled a racist. That this fear of appearing racist would dominate the emotional reaction normally expected to come to the rescue of vulnerable girls manipulated, violated, beaten, and left to recover until the next hellish episode is beyond belief.  

 

AP Photo/Jon Super

 

Rupert Lower, U.K. Parliamentarian of the Restore Britain political party released a 219-page Rape Gang Inquiry Report June 16 -- for the most part detailing witness testimony of survivors from working-class Muslim-majority jurisdictions. The long-term sex victimization by organized criminals, mature male adults as well as those in their teen years for whom preying on vulnerable white girls whose families lived among them in the areas became easy pickings.

 

The Lowe report pointed out among other issues that courts themselves bypassed justice for the victims. Defence arguments like that of one Somali defendant attesting that forced sex represented his "culture and tradition" and therefore justified a "cultural sensitivity" discount in sentencing to avoid "empowering the far right" or damaging "community cohesion" seemed to find favour with some judges sitting on rape crime trials. 

 

Under the leadership of now-outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer the Crown Prosecution Service, despite a case against a rape gang with copious evidence, dropped the case, leading the Greater Manchester Police to drop a wider investigation into regional rape gangs, thus extending freedom for a continuation of their odious operations preying on girls with no defense. 

 

According to an article by Dominic Adler, 25-year veteran of the Met's anticorruption command tasked with "sensitive investigation into police wrongdoing", the Independent Office for Police Conduct "tiptoed  around the heritage and religion of offenders. Two root problems for police inaction were cited in Adler's 2025 article on "Operation Linden"; "austerity-ravaged services ill equipped to deal with large-scale disorder", and "the politicisation of policing and its role in supporting state-mandated policy of multiculturalism". The scandal, he stated, is "the quintessence of two-tier policing". 

"There is a systematic pattern of behaviour not even from just one country, but from sub-communities within those countries."

"People with a particular background, particular class background, work background ... very, very poor sort of peasant background, very very rural, almost cut off from even the home origin countries that they might have been in, they're not necessarily first generation."

"[What struck was the apparent sense of impunity with which they operated, as opposed to the punishments they would supposedly face in their home countries]."

"There are some places where, when people behave in that way, a mob turns up and burns their homes down, and then they know that they can’t do that sort of thing."

Conservative  opposition leader Kemi Badenoch

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch. Kin Cheung/The AP