On Thursday, the British government caved in under pressure and announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, used his social media platform X to highlight the issue in a series of scathing posts.

Speaking in parliament, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said she had commissioned a swift three-month review of “the current scale and nature of gang exploitation across the country” which would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.

She also said the government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called groom gangs — groups of men found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, some as young as 11. 2000s and early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani origin.

The scandal, which was widely covered by the British media in the 2010s, was already the subject of local and national investigations covered a number of places and cities where mostly white girls were exploited, assaulted and raped by groups of men.

According to a series of investigations, victims and parents who sought help were often let down by the police and social services. Some police officers referred to the victims as “thieves” and the abuse of the girls as a “lifestyle choice”, while other officers feared being labeled racist if they pointed out the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Grooming groups represent a fraction of the total number of recorded cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. Out of 115,489 crimes of sexual abuse of children recorded in 2023. 4,228 cases or 3.7 percent — these were groups of two or more perpetrators, according to official data published in November. And of those cases, 1,125 were committed by relatives or family members at home.

But the issue is deeply emotive and has been fueled by Mr Musk who this month falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labor MPs of enabling groom gangs. His social media posts included many inaccuracies and stainsincluding accusing Mr. Starmer, the former chief prosecutor, of being an accomplice in the “rape of Britain”. However, his intervention reignited the debate over sensitive issues including race, sexual abuse and the cultural values ​​of some immigrant communities.

The government has previously rejected calls for a new national inquiry from the anti-immigration party Reform UK and the main opposition Conservative Party, whose leader Kemi Badenoch said no one had “connected the dots” over the spate of grooming cases. , including the participation of men of Pakistani origin.

The government said it would instead focus on implementing the recommendations of Professor Alexis Jay’s previous national inquiry into child sexual abuse, which ran seven yearsprocessed more than two million pages of evidence and presented the voices of around 6,000 victims. That inquiry concluded in 2022 and made a number of recommendations that the previous Conservative-led government failed to implement.

Mrs. Jay, who also supervised the investigation in 2014 into groom gangs in Rotherham, a town in northern England where 1,400 minors were raped and trafficked by men of mostly Pakistani origin between 1997 and 2013, opposed a new national inquiry, instead calling on the Labor government act to her previous recommendations.

On Thursday, Ms Cooper said she asked Louise Casey, who was in charge Investigation from 2015 into the authorities’ response to child sexual abuse in Rotherham, to review the extent of gang exploitation and look at more evidence not previously available.

“It will scrutinize the ethnicity and demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, and will look at the cultural and social drivers of this type of offending, including across different ethnic groups,” Ms Cooper said of the new review.

Ms Cooper also announced plans to help the northern town of Oldham and up to four other boroughs to undertake investigations “to get the truth and justice for victims and survivors”. Police chiefs have also been asked to review past cases of gang exploitation where charges have not been brought and to reopen investigations as necessary.

The Government’s announcement on Thursday followed calls for action from several Labor MPs, including Sarah Champion, who represents Rotherham. She proposed a five-point plan that called for ministers “to authorize local investigations across the country to hold authorities to account – who then report to the government”, and for a “national review” to investigate whether groom gang operations are still present or are whether cases were missed.

On Thursday, Chris Philp, the Conservative Home Affairs MP, dismissed the initiative as insufficient. “The government’s announcement of only five local gang-rape investigations is completely inadequate,” he wrote on social media, saying many more cities were affected. “What about the others – aren’t they important?”