The grooming gangs scandal is still going on – the abusers are using any means possible

Telegraph

01-07-2025

The picturesque town of Keighley is nestled in Brontë country. Old stone terraced houses overlook the windswept moorland that inspired the literary sisters' 19th-century novels. More recently, a far darker story has unfolded in this corner of West Yorkshire.
In 2003, the local Labour MP at the time raised concerns about grooming gangs. Worried mothers had told Ann Cryer their young daughters were being sexually exploited by a group of older Asian men, and that police and social services were failing to take action.
When Cryer spoke out about the issue, she faced accusations of racism and received menacing notes and telephone calls. She stood down in 2010, and several more years went by before anyone was convicted of the sexual abuse. The crimes continued in the meantime.
Multiple local cases have come to court during the past decade. In 2016, 12 men who sexually exploited a vulnerable teenage girl in Keighley between 2011 and 2012 were jailed. By 2023, 37 suspects were reportedly awaiting trial for alleged historic child sexual exploitation (CSE) offences in the wider Bradford area (of which Keighley is part). Earlier this year, eight were jailed for offences dating back to the 1990s. Other cases have yet to come to trial.
But evidence suggests the grooming and sexual exploitation of girls, predominantly by British Pakistani men, is not just a shameful episode in Bradford and Keighley's history. It is still ongoing here, according to multiple sources.
Last week, a new local case landed on the desk of child abuse solicitor David Greenwood. It involved the alleged abuse of two children from the same family, both aged under 12 at the time. They were allegedly picked up in cars by taxi drivers, plied with alcohol and sexually assaulted by multiple people. A white woman was said to be involved in the grooming too.
This isn't a historic incident: it allegedly occurred just 18 months ago, around Christmas 2023, and is currently under investigation by police, says Greenwood.
The West Yorkshire-based lawyer, who has represented survivors of similar abuse in Rotherham, estimates that almost 8,000 girls have been affected by these offences in the Bradford council area since 1996. If the figure is anywhere near this, it would dwarf the scale of grooming scandals elsewhere in Britain. In Rotherham, an independent inquiry in 2014 led by professor Alexis Jay, found at least 1,400 underage girls had been abused between 1997 and 2013.
There are now calls for Bradford to be included in the national grooming gangs inquiry announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last month after a U-turn on the issue (previously he accused those asking for a national inquiry of jumping on the far-Right bandwagon).
'There's been an unwillingness [in Bradford] to look into this in an objective or impartial way,' says Greenwood. 'The council has commissioned inquiries with narrow terms of reference, and they're really not getting to the scale of the problem and the responses [to it], whether good or bad, from the council or police.'
Yet Bradford, he believes, could in fact be the epicentre of this brand of criminality that spans the country.
'Cases I've dealt with [elsewhere] tend to have links with Bradford,' he says. 'All roads tend to lead to Bradford. The men often come from Bradford and/or take the girls to Bradford.'
It's hard to gauge how many girls are currently being groomed and sexually exploited in the area, he says. 'But I'm convinced it's continuing, and will continue…[The perpetrators] are clever, manipulative people who will try any means possible.'
'A constantly evolving threat'
There's a modern residential building in the village of Allerton, 3 miles north-west of Bradford. It's a boxy construction of cream-coloured concrete, set back from a rural lane and surrounded by moors. Back in 2008, it served as a children's home – the first of several Fiona Goddard was placed in during her teens. She wasn't yet being groomed at that point, but knew girls who were.
She was then transferred to a children's home on the other side of Bradford, and within about three months was being groomed herself. About 50 men abused her over a three-year period, she says, trafficking her to other cities and passing her around other men. Her abusers gave her cocaine, telling her it would make her feel better.
In 2019, nine men were convicted at Bradford Crown Court of raping and abusing Goddard and another teenage girl. Goddard, now 31, waived her legal right to anonymity so she could speak out and show other survivors there was nothing to be ashamed of.
She still lives locally and, like Greenwood, is convinced the area's grooming gangs problem has not disappeared. Some of the methods may have changed though. In 2008, Goddard was approached on the street. Today, she says, girls are groomed online, too.
'[On] TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, [the men] contact [girls] and get them to come out. So it's not as open and in your face now.'
There are still local 'hotspots', however, she suggests: certain roads in Bradford where 'you still see it quite often – cars either trying to find [young girls] or driving around with them inside.'
She has heard anecdotal evidence of teenagers currently being abused 'and their families not knowing what to do.'
It's a 'constantly evolving threat', say West Yorkshire Police.
Between 40 and 50 girls Goddard knew of were abused in a similar way to her, she estimates. 'A big proportion were in care homes but not all of them. And they weren't all white. I saw it happen to Pakistani girls, [and] near the end of my abuse, I saw [the men] start targeting Romanian and Polish girls who had just come to the country.'
Much of Goddard's abuse took place at the house of one of her abusers, she says. In other cases, girls have been taken to hotels. Two guest houses have been named by survivors Greenwood is working with.
'The girls said they were taken to rooms in these hotels and raped repeatedly,' he says.
Both hotels remain open today.
'We don't allow it,' says an older man on the reception desk of one, when asked about men bringing young girls here in the past. 'I've no recollection of [it], nothing.'
The other guest house occupies a shabbier-looking Victorian building. Its bricks are blackened by industrial grime; net curtains hang in its windows. A sign on the door says all guests are required to provide ID on arrival. A woman who has worked here for eight years says she knows nothing of any girls being brought here.
'I don't think I'll ever let my kids out'
Bradford is this year's UK City of Culture. The annual Bradford Literature Festival (June 27 to July 6) is also shining a spotlight on the area's arts scene. Ambitious regeneration work is ongoing.
Out of the spotlight, however, there's another side to the city. More than a third (36 per cent) of children here live in poverty, compared to a national average of 30 per cent. In the year ending December 2023, Bradford had an unemployment rate of five per cent, compared with 3.7 per cent nationally.
Such statistics alone don't account for the vulnerability of its young people to grooming gangs. The problem has swept the country since the 1990s, plaguing everywhere from Rochdale to Oxford. But there's a sense among some in Bradford that not only has its scale here never been fully appreciated or understood, but that locals continue to live in the shadow of these crimes.
'I have had, and still have, a range of constituents making contact with me about historic cases and live cases still working their way through the courts, as well as raising concern that this is still happening in Keighley and across the wider Bradford district,' says Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley.
Some have voiced disquiet that perpetrators who targeted them are still at large in the Bradford district. 'The concern is they are still walking free and waiting for their cases, or they're not even [being prosecuted],' says Moore.
On the streets of Keighley, mothers are wary of the dangers. 'I don't think I'll ever let my kids out,' says Chelsea, 26, who doesn't want to give her full name. 'There are quite a lot of men [targeting young girls].'
Lauren, another local parent, agrees. 'It's scary when you've got a daughter,' she says.
Police say tackling CSE remains a top priority in West Yorkshire.
'We have a dedicated team in Bradford which leads on current investigations and disruption activity, while working closely with partners in child protection, including the NHS, local authorities, charities, and schools to protect and safeguard children across the district,' says Chief Superintendent Richard Padwell of Bradford District Police. 'We also have an online child abuse investigation team, which tackles abuse and exploitation in the online space.'
Many investigations are still under way, he adds, with more suspects due to stand trial between now and 2027.
'Not racist to examine the ethnicity of offenders'
What of the vexed question of ethnicity? A report carried out by Baroness Casey, published last month, found there had been nationally 'a collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs'. The subject is 'shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators', her report found. But, stressed Lady Casey, it was 'not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders'.
Her report found 'over-representation' of Asian heritage men among suspects of group sexual exploitation of children, based on data from three police forces, including West Yorkshire.
But Lady Casey also warned that the public should 'keep calm' about the ethnicity of offenders, following heated public debate this year. 'If you look at the data on child exploitation, suspects and offenders, it is disproportionately Asian heritage,' she told MPs. 'If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate and it is white men.'
The problem, suggests Moore, is that 'sensible' people like Cryer have been shut down when trying to discuss the issue, enabling others to gain control of the narrative. Nick Griffin, former leader of the far-Right British National Party, unsuccessfully stood against Cryer in Keighley in the 2005 general election, winning nine per cent of the vote share. A court case in 2006, in which he was acquitted of race-hate charges, heard he had spoken to supporters in 2004 about Asian Muslims raping white girls in the town.
A national, institutional failure to act has enabled the idea to develop that the 'whole Asian community is branded with the same accusation,' says Moore. 'If you speak to the British Pakistani community, a good proportion actually want to have an inquiry…I've always said it's been a minority of predominantly Pakistani British men targeting predominantly white girls. Now you have people entering the debate who are maybe less aware of the complexities.'
If the focus lately has been ethnicity, another key strand of the story is the way marginalised girls were failed by the authorities that should have been safeguarding them. It's been argued by those on both Left and Right that this was partly fuelled by class prejudice against the victims.
'I don't think it was all to do with [trying to prevent] racial tensions,' Fiona Goddard agrees. 'I think some of it was to do with the bad impression that [the authorities] had of us.' She cites a 'lack of respect' for children in care. 'There was a lot of blame put on us.'
She and others are still waiting for the full scale of the scandal in Bradford to be properly examined. The local authority says it has 'nothing to hide.'
Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, leader of Bradford Council, says: 'This is an appalling crime that blights victims' lives. In Bradford we take this extremely seriously, so I welcome the renewed focus on this nationally.
'We work hard with the police to identify historic victims of CSE to get them justice and provide support. So far this has resulted in 52 perpetrators receiving prison sentences totalling 570 years. Over the last 10 years, we have published over 70 reports, independently authored reviews and data, including ethnicity data, for open scrutiny on this subject.'
The council referred itself to the Jay Report in 2014 and gave evidence to it, she notes. 'Going forward, we are ready to participate in any way we can,' she adds. 'We are committed to tackling all abuse so that we can better protect children.'