The Short and Tall of the New Grooming Gang Data
An attempted deft overview of the new evidence...
While the Labour government continues to stall, delay, and obfuscate on r*pe/grooming gangs, behind-the-scenes independent journalists and grassroots researchers have been putting in the hard yards.
This week, after months of silence from officials, a team of investigators led by GB News and Crime Spotlight UK released what may be the most detailed public record of grooming/r*pe gang activity ever assembled.
The release follows a government promise made back in January.
Labour ministers commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to conduct a so-called “rapid audit” of grooming gang activity. It was due to be published within three months. We’re now in May. And the public has heard little since.
Meanwhile, Crime Spotlight UK and its network of researchers spent thousands of hours combing through news archives, court records, and survivor testimony to meticulously map the scale of the scandal.
The new database confirms over 50 towns and cities with known group-based sexual exploitation cases. From 2007, there have been over 500 convictions. But, as we know, the abuse dates back nearly five decades.
From Plymouth to Carlisle, these networks trafficked and brutalised little white girls in every corner of the country. In some cases, they were transported hundreds of miles for pre-arranged exchanges.
In one notorious case, Arshid Hussain—one of the vile convicted ringleaders in Rotherham—stuffed a young girl in the boot of his car and drove her to London, where she was used to “pay off” his debts to three men.
Many of the men behind these crimes are now out of prison. Some have quietly reintegrated into the same communities where they once preyed on children.
The database includes names, convictions, maps, and patterns—a level of forensic clarity the government itself has never made available—neither under the Conservatives, nor Labour.
It also exposes vast regional blind spots: areas where grooming gang activity has been documented, but never publicly reported by mainstream outlets.
Despite the dossier’s detail, however, Crime Spotlight UK hauntingly remarked on X yesterday:
“To reiterate, this is just the stuff we can share. We’ve heard testimony from police officers who say they’ve been threatened and silenced. We’ve read transcripts that have detail that really underlines the systemic failure. None of that we can share yet. But we will. And we’re working with lawyers to bring as much of this to you as possible.”
Some of these officers have since come out of the woodwork, with former officer John Piekos telling GB News last month that he was threatened with arrest in Bradford after he presented evidence of widespread grooming and trafficking.
West Yorkshire Police FOI Response
Elsewhere, journalists Connor Tomlinson and Lewis Brackpool on Sunday shared new data obtained via FOI request from West Yorkshire Police that evidenced a key trend in the scandal.
The numbers are not subtle. They confirm, in precise terms, what many whistleblowers, survivors, and campaigners have said for over a decade—and what their critics have spent just as long denying.
Between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2024, West Yorkshire Police recorded 7,100 child sexual exploitation and grooming offences across its five districts: Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds, and Wakefield.
The offences involved 7,121 victims and 5,508 named suspects, all related to Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which includes grooming and exploitation offences.
Bradford had the highest concentration of offences, with 2,419 cases—over one-third of the regional total. Leeds recorded 1,601; Kirklees, 1,547; Wakefield, 803; and Calderdale, 730.
The overall charge rate was just 17.9%, meaning more than 80% of identified suspects faced no formal legal consequence.
What stood out most, however, was the demographic breakdown of suspects.
Despite making up just 16% of the population across West Yorkshire (that’s including women and children), individuals identifying as Asian or Asian British accounted for a disproportionate share of suspects.
Ethnic Pakistani individuals alone made up 21.48% (1,183) of all named suspects, or, 507.7 suspects per 100,000 people in West Yorkshire.
Asian Bangladeshi suspects accounted for just 0.89% of the total, but their per capita rate was also high, at 408.3 per 100,000.
“Other” ethnicities (including Arab, Middle Eastern, Latin American, etc.) showed the highest per capita rate in the dataset at 530 suspects per 100,000 people.
In contrast, White British suspects—who make up 74.4% of the population of England and Wales—represented just 44.54% of suspects, with the lowest per capita offending rate at 155.3 per 100,000.
Curiously, West Yorkshire authorities do not provide breakdowns for the demographics of White British except for Bradford.
Black African and Caribbean suspects comprised 1.83% of all suspects but had the third highest per capita rate at 459.1 per 100,000.
In raw terms: non–White British suspects accounted for over 55% of all grooming and CSE (child sexual exploitation) suspects, while making up only 26% of the national population.
To make matters worse, West Yorkshire police has once again limited public understanding.
Nearly 20% of suspects (1,070 total) were logged as “Not Stated” or “Not Recorded” in the ethnicity category—meaning the full demographic scope may be even more skewed than reported.
When factoring in these “unknowns,” the maximum possible share of Asian suspects could be 42.73%—a rate 2 to 4 times their share of the population.
West Yorkshire Police also refused to clearly define group-based sexual exploitation from lone-offender CSE data—despite the FOI request specifically asking them to do so.
The distinction matters. Group-based CSE—commonly associated with r*pe/grooming gangs—has a demonstrably different ethnic pattern than lone-offender abuse.
Yet the force declined to provide the number of identified group-based CSE, citing Section 12 of the FOI Act, which allows them to block requests if they estimate that completing said request takes longer than 18 hours.
With that, another myth may be falling apart.
Certain ethnic minorities aren’t just overrepresented in group-based child sexual exploitation (r*pe/grooming gangs)—they may also be overrepresented in lone-offender CSE in many areas, on a per capita basis.
To West Yorkshire Police’s small credit, they’re one of the only forces to release this level of data to date—something you’d have thought would be routine.
Channel 4’s Recent Documentary
Four days ago, Channel 4 also aired a new documentary, ‘Groomed: A National Scandal’, telling the stories of five young women who survived horrific abuse spanning two decades.
Some survivors criticised the programme for “whitewashing” parts of the scandal—while others, including whistleblowers, praised them for finally addressing it.
This was the same channel that in 2004 canned a documentary last minute about a grooming gang in Bradford after local police warned the programme could inflame racial tension in the city.
So we’re at least making some progress.
In all honesty, both sides have fair points. Channel 4 deserves credit for confronting the issue—but it’s also fair to criticise them for going soft on certain aspects.
Constructive criticism from survivors, whistleblowers, and commentators alike could pave the way for stronger, more honest filmmaking in the future after all.
One thing the documentary did do well to highlight was that this abuse isn’t a just thing of a past. It’s still happening, now, behind closed doors.
It’s a reality that even many who care deeply about the issue often lose sight of. They covered this towards the end of the documentary (link above).
You can access Crime Spotlight UK’s full dossier — here.
For more info on West Yorkshire Police and its chief:
Do you really believe our best days lie ahead if nothing changes?
Will you keep watching from the sidelines as politicians and broadcasters push for more surveillance, censorship, and control?
If you want to push back—if not today, maybe someday—supporting independent journalism can make a real impact.
In the past year, The Stark Naked Brief reached over 90 million people on X. Sometimes, all it takes is one post—one uncomfortable truth—to wake someone up and vote against the ruling class.
Mark Steyn, the Canadian journalist was probably the first non main stream media person raising the issue in 2006 before the UK cottoned on starting with Tommy Robinson 2009-2011 then Andrew Norfolk of The Times in 2011 and Professor Alexis Jay in 2014 with the Jay report then Sarah Champion, Maggie Oliver, Ann Cryer.
More recently since around 2018, Raja Miah has been very active in making sure the issue was not buried by the establishment.
They all deserve commendations.
Tommy Robinson is in prison because he tried to expose this scandal.