“In a world where you were being abused so much, being raped once was a lot easier than multiple rapes and I think he knew that.”
This is the account of a woman exploited as a child by a grooming gang in Rotherham. The “he” in that quote refers not to a gang member but to an officer in the South Yorkshire Police. BBC News reported that the woman said she “was raped from the age of 12 by a serving South Yorkshire Police (SYP) officer in a marked police car. He would threaten to hand her back to the gang if she did not comply.”
Her story is not an anomaly. The BBC, which broke the story on 29 July, says it has seen accounts from 30 witnesses detailing years of abuse of grooming gang victims by the police whose job it was to keep them safe. Many of these testimonies have been handed over to police, and a criminal investigation into South Yorkshire Police has been launched – incredibly, under the authority of SYP itself. So far, at least five women have come forward alleging abuse, and three former SYP officers have been arrested on suspicion of historic sexual offences.
The details of the allegations are harrowing – including one survivor recalling how one of the officers who had been abusing her turned up to interview her about an illegal abortion she had been pressured into having by the grooming gang. But they are not new. Lawyers for the women claimed they had told authorities about these allegations for years, and that demands for an inquiry had been “resisted”. This came after an eight-year investigation into the SYP’s handling of grooming gangs in Rotherham upheld complaints against 43 officers, with some facing gross misconduct charges.
It’s not the first time this week the spotlight has been focused on the police – and whether or not the public can trust them. On Monday (28 July), I attended Reform UK’s second press conference on crime in as many weeks, at which Nigel Farage reiterated his party’s pledge to recruit 30,000 new officers, funded in part from scrapping all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) roles. The Reform leader also repeatedly stressed the link between high immigration and crime, particularly violent and sexual crime against women and girls.
During the Q&A, I asked how these two aims – scrapping DEI and protecting women and girls – aligned, given the problems police forces face regarding an institutionally misogynist culture. We know that the convictions of Wayne Couzens, the Metropolitan Police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, and David Carrick, who spent 20 years using his position in the Met to rape and abuse women – not to mention numerous other allegations and convictions for assault and misconduct – have led to a decline in trust among women that police will take reports of rape and assault seriously. This is not confined to one police authority: data from the National Police Chiefs’ Council in 2023 found that more than 1,500 officers from police forces in England and Wales had been accused of violence against women and girls in a six-month period. There were signs that national policing bodies were undertaking welcome scrutiny of the working culture and practices that had enabled such crimes. Did the broadside against DEI (and, indeed, female police officers themselves) mean the work to tackle that culture was over?
I’d addressed my question to both Farage and to Colin Sutton, the retired DCI who is leading Reform’s law-and-order task force. Sutton blamed the crimes of Couzens and Carrick on austerity-related cuts to training and vetting programmes (even though the latter joined the Met in 2001), and denied there was any link between their behaviour and the culture of the forces in which they worked. Farage dodged the question entirely.
The news of the Rotherham victims accusing South Yorkshire police officers of abusing them had not yet been published. Farage did discuss the story on his GB News show on Wednesday, using the latest details as a hook to push the narrative again that “diversity” under the Blair government was the main driver of the scandal. He called the allegations “shocking” – the same word used by Kemi Badenoch, who also said the story was “proof that we do need a national inquiry. That’s the only thing that’s going to get to the bottom of what actually happened.”
Yet these allegations, and others like them about abuse from police officers, have been absent from the raging political debate over the multi-decade grooming gangs scandal. They were not discussed when the scandal was reignited at the start of 2025 by the sudden interest from figures such as Elon Musk, nor when Louise Casey published her rapid review on 16 June. When Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, addressed the House following Casey’s review and announced that the government would pursue a national inquiry after all, her statement condemned the failures on the part of institutions – including the police – that enabled exploitation to continue, but steered clear of any insinuation that police corruption may have played a part.
She did, however, focus heavily on the ethnicity aspect of the report: that is, the “clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”, and Casey’s findings of “examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions”.
This is the element that fits the prevailing political narrative: of an institutional “cover-up” on a huge scale carried out by police forces, social services and local government officials because the victims in these horrific cases were white girls and the perpetrators were predominantly Asian men, and people in positions of authority cared more about looking open-minded than they did about protecting children from rape. It is why the scandal, which dates back to the 1990s and has been widely covered since the 2010s, has become a recent source of conspiracy theories regarding Keir Starmer and his current cabinet, and a rallying call for anti-woke crusaders on both sides of the Atlantic.
And, as Casey confirmed, it is an important and previously overlooked part of the conversation. There has been a reluctance on the part of people in positions of authority to collect data on the ethnicity of perpetrators. Concern about “community tensions” was a key factor in why the rape and abuse of thousands of young girls failed to be tackled seriously.
But it was never the only factor. And the desire on the part of those pushing an anti-woke agenda – of politically correct police letting men of Pakistani origin commit rape so as not to be labelled racist – has bulldozed everything else out of the story.
While the role of ethnicity has been a huge talking point in this conversation, the role of misogyny – in particular, institutional misogyny within police forces – has been sidestepped. There have been countless discussions on the need to collect data on ethnicity and “have an honest conversation” about immigration and integration, yet virtually none on how authorities treat vulnerable women who come forward with accounts of sexual abuse.
Nor has there been much discourse on the sexualisation of young girls in the eyes of society that led to, as Cooper put it in her statement, “a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children”. There’s a harrowing scene in Three Girls, the 2017 BBC dramatisation of the Rochdale grooming gangs scandal, in which a social worker is concerned only with the welfare of an underage victim’s unborn baby and has to be reminded that the soon-to-be-mother is herself a child. Where has the outrage been about situations like that? Or about the cultural consensus in the 1990s and 2000s that determined which victims deserved to be taken seriously and which could be disregarded – as “unreliable”, “troubled”, “doing it for attention”, or simply “bad girls” – irrespective of the colour of their rapist’s skin? Or about the role some police officers may have played not just in ignoring abuse, but in perpetrating it?
The people who focus on immigration over all else and reject the role of institutional misogyny and wider societal attitudes to rape don’t seem interested in making life safer for women and girls. The narrative that it is immigrants who are the biggest threat to women’s safety – and woke attitudes to said immigrants that are the biggest barrier to the institutions tasked with protecting us all from doing so – is alluringly simple. But it’s also dishonest, drowning out the voices of survivors and those invested in actually reducing sexual violence rather than scoring political points. It’s not “woke” to want to tackle the toxic culture within some police forces that enables abusers to rise into positions of power, any more than it is to ask why some people seem predominantly interested in the ethnicity angle.
Perhaps the long-awaited national inquiry will confront some of these uncomfortable realities. Perhaps the investigation by South Yorkshire Police into itself will succeed where others have failed and survivors will finally get the justice they deserve. Perhaps Reform UK will acknowledge that it’s not all about immigration and admit there may be a place for diversity efforts to reform police forces after all. Because anyone insisting there’s a simple answer to this web of institutional failure doesn’t care about women and girls. They just care about their own agenda.
[See also: Where did Britain go wrong?]
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