London, June 19 (AHN) At least 250,000 girls and likely more were subjected to gang rape, trafficking, torture, and coerced pregnancy over several decades, with the perpetrators overwhelmingly being of Pakistani Muslim heritage and the enabling institutions overwhelmingly of the British state, according to a 219-page report released by a privately funded parliamentary inquiry into organised child sexual exploitation in the United Kingdom (UK).

The Rape Gang Inquiry, chaired by Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe and led operationally by survivor and advocate Sammy Woodhouse, was funded by over 20,000 donors. It did not have statutory powers, however, it included testimony from survivors, whistleblowers, politicians, and experts across multiple public hearings, according to a report in US-based South Asian TV network Diya TV.

According to the report, the inquiry was started as the state and its institutions had "failed catastrophically over decades." Police, social services, schools, the NHS, licensing authorities, and successive governments at local and national level allowed organised networks of men to operate with what the report termed as the “active or passive consent of the British state.” The report has included the first recorded case of Pakistani gang rape in UK in 1955, when four Bradford-based Pakistani men were charged with raping a 15-year-old girl from Middlesbrough.

"The 250,000 figure originates from a 2019 House of Lords statement by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who extrapolated from the Jay Report’s findings in Rotherham — where at least 1,400 girls were abused between 1997 and 2013 — alongside comparable inquiries in Telford, Oxford, Rochdale, and elsewhere. The inquiry endorses this as a 'conservative estimate,' noting that the British state never systematically recorded the full scale of the abuse, that sexual violence of all kinds is typically under-reported, and that The Independent found nearly 19,000 children identified as sexual exploitation victims in England in a single year even amid institutional resistance to naming the problem," the Diya TV report stated.

According to the inquiry, evidence of gang operations were found in at least 149 local authority districts in the UK. In court records and official inquiries, approximately 87 per cent of those convicted in group-based child sexual exploitation cases were Muslim names, it was reported.

A 2017 Quilliam Foundation analysis of 264 convictions from 2005-2017 found that 84 per cent of offenders were South Asian, with the vast majority identified as Pakistani Muslim. Taj Hargey, an imam at the Oxford Islamic Congregation, estimated that approximately 95 per cent of gang members are Muslims, according to the report.

The method of grooming involved same pattern with girls as young as 11 years old being befriended by a young Muslim man who treated them like adults and provided alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. After weeks or months, girls were picked up from school gates, care homes, and streets in taxis and taken to houses, restaurants, and hotels where they were raped repeatedly by groups of men. In some cases, videos of girls were made for blackmail, they were beaten, burned with cigarettes and passed between perpetrators, made pregnant and forced to abort and trafficked overseas in some cases, including to Pakistan, where some were made to marry in Muslim marriage ceremony. Victims were told they were "white trash" or "kuffar" who should be punished for being non-Muslim, the report detailed.

The testimony section of the report consists of over 100 pages, where dozens of survivors have shared abuse ordeals. One witness, identified as "Chloe", said she was first raped at 11 years of age after her father's death left her in the custody of an abusive step father. She was missing for six months at the age of 14 years and trafficked from "house after house" and "guy after guy" in the UK while her photographs were shared on television as a missing child. Officers who found her released the South Asian man she was with without any charge, Diya TV reported, citing the report. Later, she became anorexic, weighing five stone at age 18, after gang members who had kept her addicted her to heroin as a method of control.

It also highlighted institutional failures across police, social services departments, the NHS, schools, and taxi licensing authorities. As per the report, police ignored repeated complaints from survivors, identified child rape victims as prostitutes, destroyed evidence, allowed known rapists to walk free on bail.

NHS staff recorded genital injuries, sexually transmitted infections in children as young as 13 years, rape-caused pregnancies and suicide attempts and then sent back patients with their abusers without trauma care or safeguarding referrals. Schools excluded victims instead of protecting them and did not report about elderly men picking up girls at the gates. Taxi licensing authorities renewed permits for drivers who the inquiry said were the the logistical backbone of the networks.