The threat of UK’s grooming gangs that abuse children and Rishi Sunak’s planned crackdown

An inquiry has found that since the 1970s more than 1,000 children have been abused by grooming gangs in Shropshire’s Telford by perpetrators often identified as Asian or Pakistani and that authorities did not act out of fear of being labelled racist. The inquiry stated that crimes such as rape, sexual abuse, brainwashing, and drugging had “thrived unchecked” and that sexual exploitation of children “still exists today, and is prevalent across the country as a whole”. The inquiry chairman Tom Crowther said that “obvious signs” of abuse were disregarded and children were branded prostitutes and shamed for their “lifestyles.” “Exploitation was not investigated because of nervousness about race” because the abusers were mainly reported to be Asian men, Crowther added. As per Sky News, Downing Street said ethnicity data would be deployed “to make sure suspects cannot hide behind cultural sensitivities to evade justice”. “What’s clear is that what we’ve seen is a practice whereby vulnerable white English girls, sometimes in care, sometimes who are in challenging circumstances, being pursued and raped and drugged and harmed by gangs of British Pakistani men who’ve worked in child abuse rings or networks,” Braverman told Sky News.