The British government has announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, revived the issue in a series of vitriolic posts on X.
Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said she had commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” that would examine data on the perpetrators’ ethnicity.
She also said that the government would support and help pay for as many as five local inquiries into so-called grooming gangs, groups of men found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain in the 2000s and early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.
Across a number of towns and cities, groups of men exploited, assaulted and raped girls, some as young as 11 and mostly white. Investigations found that the police and social services often failed victims and parents who asked for help.
