Fact check: How many children have been the victims of grooming gangs?
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Some widely shared posts on social media – including one shared on X by the platform’s owner, Elon Musk – have claimed that more than a million children have been victims of “grooming gangs” in the UK. We’ve also seen different estimates for the number of victims circulating, such as a figure of over 250,000.
Sexual abuse of children is common, and often unreported. It is clear that thousands of children, many of them vulnerable, have been subject to appalling abuse by loosely defined networks of offenders, often known as “grooming gangs”, in cities and towns across the UK.
The Jay inquiry into child sexual abuse said in 2022: “It is clear that the sexual exploitation of children by groups of associated abusers continues to be widespread, to a greater extent than official statistics indicate.”. In its section on prevalence, the inquiry said there were “fundamental flaws with both the criminal justice and children’s social care data sets” in this area. “As a consequence,” it said, “it is simply not possible to know the scale of child sexual exploitation by networks.”.
Where does the one million figure come from?. The estimate of one million victims has been mentioned in a number of different social media posts, including a post on X last week that said “MORE THAN ONE MILLION CHILD VICTIM [sic]”, and cited Ms Champion’s newspaper interview as its source. This was reposted by Mr Musk.
When we contacted Ms Champion to ask about the figure in 2020, she told us: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape – so scaled up.”.
