Episode Details

In January 2025, Elon Musk started posting on X about a long-festering blot on the copybook of British justice, the decades-long organised mass rape of children across the cities of northern England by ‘grooming gangs’.

In places like Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and Oldham, years of horrific abuse had gone barely acknowledged by authorities, with intermittent, insufficient, and inconsistent prosecution. The majority of the victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 16.

After Musk’s social media posts, the scandal became international news, with the media often seeming more upset that Musk was criticising the British government than about the years of mass rape, human trafficking, torture, and murder that the alliterative sanitised phrase “grooming gangs” glosses over.

An inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, commissioned in 2013 by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and published the following year, gave a “conservative estimate…that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013,” and that “[t]his abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day.” The report was, in a word, damning:

Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.

Jay subsequently oversaw a full report, published in 2022, that called rampant child abuse an “epidemic that left thousands of victims in its poisonous wake,” in which institutions “prioritised their reputations above the welfare of those they were duty bound to protect.”

In the report’s foreword, Jay wrote: “I urge the UK government, the Welsh Government and all other relevant institutions to implement promptly the Inquiry’s recommendations which are designed to protect children from sexual abuse in the future.” The report made detailed recommendations to the Home Office and called for swift action to prevent the failures of the past from continuing into the future.

In January 2025, when Musk’s social media activity drew fresh attention to the issue, it was twenty-seven months after the 2022 report and Professor Jay had been “frustrated” by the lack of action from government.

Whistleblowers, community activists, and citizen journalists like Raja Miah had been working to get the story proper scrutiny for years, but Musk’s involvement, while bringing attention, drove the characterisation of ‘grooming gangs’ as a far-right talking point, summed up as follows by Sky News in their coverage at