What Is the U.K. ‘Grooming Gang’ Scandal Seized On by Elon Musk?

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has flung himself into British politics in recent weeks, using his social media platform X to attack and spread misinformation about Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other members of the Labour government.

In a series of vitriolic posts to his 211 million followers in recent days, Mr. Musk has falsely accused Mr. Starmer and other Labour Party lawmakers of enabling Britain’s so-called grooming gangs. The phrase refers to a decade-old scandal involving a series of child sex abuse cases in which girls were assaulted and raped by gangs of men in several towns and cities. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.

Mr. Musk’s posts included multiple inaccuracies and treated a widely covered issue as if it had never been mentioned. But the posts nevertheless cast the spotlight back onto a painful child sexual exploitation scandal that troubled Britain and has long provoked heated debate on issues of race, immigration and abuse.

What was the grooming gangs scandal?

In 2011, The Times of London published a series of investigative articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in England’s north and Midlands from 1997 onward. One detective at the time, chief inspector Alan Edwards, told the paper: “Everyone’s been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.” The cases came to be known as the “grooming gangs” scandal.

In 2014, the findings of a yearslong official investigation into such abuse in the northern English town of Rotherham set off a national reckoning. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, while the local authorities looked the other way for years. Similar gangs were also found to be operating in other towns and cities in England.