Britain has a grooming gang problem — but it isn’t the one you’ve been told to worry about.
Advances in technology and the dominance of online platforms have transformed the scale and nature of child sexual abuse. Offenders no longer need to operate in physical groups or specific locations. They can access victims anywhere, at any time.
Online “communities” — known as Com networks — now share and promote increasingly extreme material. They commission the livestream sexual abuse of children on demand, sometimes for as little as £20, and engage in financially motivated sexual extortion (FMSE), often targeting young boys.
This is not a marginal problem. It is the industrialisation of abuse.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 20 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation in 2024, including over 19 million relating to indecent images of children.
In the UK, the Child Sexual Exploitation Referrals Bureau receives around 1,700 reports every week.
We knew this was coming
When Professor Alexis Jay published her landmark report into child sexual abuse, she did not ignore so-called “grooming gangs”. But she was clear: the bigger and growing threat was online.
While Asian men were overrepresented in some forms of street-based grooming, online abuse is overwhelmingly committed by white men.
That raises an uncomfortable possibility: the apparent overrepresentation in street grooming may reflect what gets investigated and prosecuted, not necessarily the full pattern of offending.
The government at the time chose not to act on these findings. In some cases, ministers openly dismissed or ridiculed them.
A system that stopped prosecuting
At the same time, something more fundamental was going wrong.
Between 2016 and 2020, rape prosecutions in England and Wales fell by more than 60%, with convictions dropping from around 5,000 per year to fewer than 2,000, despite rising numbers of reported offences.
Crucially, this wasn’t because courts stopped convicting offenders. Conviction rates remained broadly stable at around 50–60%.
The collapse happened earlier in the system: cases simply weren’t making it to court.
In practice, this meant that large numbers of serious sexual offences were no longer being pursued at all.
Child sexual offences show a similar pattern. Conviction rates, once cases reach court, are often higher — typically 70–80% — but huge volumes of offences never reach prosecution.
At the same time, police in England and Wales now record tens of thousands of child sexual abuse image offences annually, the vast majority linked to online activity.
The justice system didn’t suddenly become unable to convict — it became unable, or unwilling, to bring cases forward. Home Secretaries like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman turned a blind eye
What has changed
Since the change of government, there are signs of a more serious response.
The National Crime Agency and police forces have strengthened intelligence sharing, improved specialist investigative capacity, and invested in new technology.
They are now arresting around 1,000 suspected offenders every month, while safeguarding approximately 1,200 children.
In a single week in January:
- 252 arrests
- 118 charges
- 407 children safeguarded
- 35 offenders sentenced
This is not a one-off spike — it reflects sustained operational activity.
Alongside this, historical cases are being revisited, with over 1,000 cases reopened.
The political silence
And yet, politically, something doesn’t add up.
The loudest voices on the right, who speak constantly about historic grooming gangs, are largely silent on the far larger and growing threat of online abuse.
Worse than silence — in many cases, they have actively opposed measures to tackle it.
- They dismissed the Jay report
- They resisted stronger online safety laws
- They framed action against online offenders as an attack on “free speech”
- They criticised platforms for removing abusive material
This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.
Politics as performance
What we are seeing from the Conservatives/Reform/Restore is not a serious attempt to tackle child abuse.
It is politics as performance.
Street grooming cases are visible, emotive, and easy to weaponise. They fit neatly into narratives about immigration, culture, and national decline.
Online abuse is different:
- It is diffuse
- It is harder to explain
- And it implicates a very different demographic
So it is ignored.
An uncomfortable question
Why are some politicians so focused on one form of abuse, while resisting action on another that is larger, growing, and better evidenced?
It’s a question worth asking.
Because when you look closely, the demographics of those most animated by culture war narratives — and the demographics of those committing large volumes of online abuse — begin to overlap in ways that are politically inconvenient.
The reality
Britain does have a grooming gang problem.
But it is not confined to specific towns, communities, or ethnic groups.
It is:
- national
- digital
- and growing rapidly
And the political debate needs to catch up with that reality, quickly.