U.K. to crack down on grooming gangs after Musk comments

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on Thursday told Parliament that the U.K.’s Home Office was already taking steps to crack down on sexual abuse and grooming gangs across the country. The Home Office the same day said it would conduct an audit to decipher the amount of gangs that were actively grooming and abusing children across the United Kingdom.

The Home Office’s statements came after a series of statements by billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, accusing U.K. officials of failing to respond to reports about child sexual exploitation gangs inside their borders. Musk has also demanded that the U.K. Parliament crack down on groups involved in child sexual exploitation. He referenced allegations that many of the grooming gangs getting away with persistent abuse were Pakistani.

What is the Home Office saying it will do? Cooper promised that her agency was taking action to launch more investigations and prosecutions. She ordered police departments across the United Kingdom to reopen all police investigations involving child sexual exploitation where authorities did not take further action after gathering the facts about the situation. She ordered authorities across the country to collect more data on grooming gangs, some of which she acknowledged were Pakistani.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift about a gay couple that each received 100 years behind bars for sexually abusing children they adopted.