I was called racist for exposing the grooming gangs… but this atrocity has still not gone away
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THE so-called “grooming gang” scandal that saw thousands of girls in towns and cities across the UK being targeted, ensnared and horrifically sexually abused and exploited is back in the public eye. For many of us — including the victims and their families, whistle-blowers like Maggie Oliver, and feminist campaigners against the sexual violation of women and girls by predatory men — it never went away.
![[Fiona Ivison had, from the age of 14, been groomed then abused by an older man before being murdered aged 18 by a punter]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/bd7cc63d-c331-4b23-aa64-44ba8e2cdbb9.jpg?strip=all&w=689)
It is Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter, who has now latched on to this and forced it back on the public agenda. I first investigated the scandal in the late 1990s when I met members of the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping — a group founded by Irene Ivison.
![[Fiona's mum Irene founded the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/fiona-ivisons-mum-suepw-1126991.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
Her daughter Fiona had, from the age of 14, been groomed then abused by an older man. In 1993, when Fiona was 17, she was murdered by a punter, having been exploited into prostitution by her pimp. Irene had spent the intervening three years battling with police and social services to try to stop the older man gaining access to her daughter — but nothing was done.
![[Blackpool Tower and illuminations along the Golden Mile]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/famous-blackpool-tower-lights-along-775921531.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
Fiona’s so-called boyfriend was black, and had manipulated this vulnerable, middle-class white girl by claiming that her mother disapproved of his race, rather than his age. This tactic, I later discovered, was in widespread use by the men of Pakistani-Muslim heritage at the centre of the more recent grooming gangs — as parents increasingly contacted CROP to seek help because police and social services were doing little or nothing to intervene.
