There have been various investigations and reports into cases of child grooming in recent years.
Here, the PA news agency takes a look at the timeline of events.
– 2010
Five men are given lengthy jail terms after they are found guilty of grooming teenage girls in Rotherham for sex.
The same year, police finally act on sexual grooming in Rochdale – going back years – with a series of arrests.
– 2012
Reports in The Times newspaper claim that details from 200 restricted-access documents showed police and child protection agencies in Rotherham had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted.
The same year, nine men are convicted over a grooming scandal in Rochdale.
– 2014
Professor Alexis Jay publishes her devastating report on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
The report describes how more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian males in the South Yorkshire town over that period.
It is scathing about a culture among police and council officials which ignored the industrial scale of abuse, instead treating the victims as troublesome teenagers.
That same year, then-home secretary Theresa May announces a public inquiry into child abuse – the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
– 2015
IICSA is reconstituted as a statutory inquiry, meaning it can compel witnesses and request any material necessary to investigate failures.
In the same year, a separate report finds hundreds of girls may have been sexually exploited after authorities repeatedly failed to tackle grooming gangs responsible for “indescribably awful” abuse in Oxfordshire over 16 years.
The report concludes that “the association, not of all CSE (child sexual exploitation) but group-based CSE, with mainly Pakistan heritage is undeniable”.
However, the report says there was “no evidence … of any agency not acting when they should have done because of racial sensitivities”.
– 2018
Following a series of trials at Leeds Crown Court, it is reported that a gang of men who embarked on a “campaign of rape and other sexual abuse” against vulnerable teenage girls in Huddersfield have been given lengthy jail sentences.
The pattern of large-scale exploitation of mainly white girls by groups of men of mainly Pakistani heritage uncovered by West Yorkshire Police in Huddersfield mirrors what has happened in a number of other towns including Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford.
– 2020
Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Ian Hopkins apologises to the children abused “in plain sight” by the grooming gangs his officers failed to bring to justice.
It comes after a damning report reveals that senior Greater Manchester Police (GMP) officers and officials at Manchester City Council, looking after many of the victims in care, were aware but did nothing to act.
It says a police drive called Operation Augusta to tackle street grooming by gangs of Asian males preying on vulnerable teenage girls in Manchester was launched but then abruptly closed down by senior officers in 2004.
– 2022
In June, victims of grooming gangs in Oldham receive official apologies after a major report says police and the local council failed to protect some youngsters from sexual exploitation but concludes there was no official cover-up.
The report looked into the alleged grooming of children in council homes, shisha bars and by taxi drivers in the town and concluded there was no evidence of a cover-up or “widespread” child sex abuse in those settings.
Despite “legitimate concerns” from police and the council in Oldham of the far right capitalising on the issue of grooming by predominantly Pakistani men, the authorities in the town, which suffered race riots in 2001, did not shy away from tackling the issue, the report says.
In July, an inquiry concludes more than 1,000 children were sexually exploited over at least 30 years in Telford amid “shocking” police and council failings.
For decades child sexual exploitation (CSE) “thrived” in the Shropshire town and went “unchecked” because of failures to investigate offenders and protect children amid fears that probes into Asian men would “inflame racial tensions”, the report says.
In October, the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) publishes its final report, describing the sexual abuse of children as an “epidemic that leaves tens of thousands of victims in its poisonous wake”.
One of the inquiry’s 15 strands looked at what it called “organised networks” and found “extensive failures” in the way child sexual exploitation by criminal gangs is tackled, with police and authorities potentially playing down the scale of abuse over concerns about negative publicity.
It featured harrowing evidence from more than 30 young witnesses across six case study areas – Bristol, Durham, St Helens, Swansea, Tower Hamlets and Warwickshire – and found victims, many of whom had a history of self-harm and running away from home, repeatedly saying that their allegations against their perpetrators had been routinely dismissed by police.
– 2023
Home Secretary Suella Braverman faces criticism after singling out British Pakistani men over concerns about grooming gangs.
Ms Braverman, who alluded to high-profile cases including in Rotherham and Rochdale, pointed to a “predominance of certain ethnic groups – and I say British Pakistani males – who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values, who see women in a demeaned and illegitimate way and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave”.
Her language is rebuked by some campaigners, while the NSPCC emphasises that an excessive focus on race could create new “blind spots”.
– 2024
A report published in January concludes girls were “left at the mercy” of paedophile grooming gangs in Rochdale for years because of failings by senior police and council bosses.
The damning 173-page review covers 2004 to 2013 and sets out multiple failed investigations by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and apparent local authority indifference to the plight of hundreds of youngsters, mainly white girls from poor backgrounds, all identified as potential victims of abuse in Rochdale by Asian men.
