How decades-long grooming gang scandal - first raised in Yorkshire by brave women - hit headlines again
The Labour MP had been approached by seven mothers, who said their young daughters were being abused at the hands of Asian so-called “boyfriends”.
They were being plied with drink and drugs, and being raped and molested, they said, however West Yorkshire Police and Bradford Council were not listening.
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Hide AdWhile in South Yorkshire, at the same time, Dr Angie Heal was writing reports for the force on how drugs were being used by grooming gangs to sexually abuse children in Rotherham and Sheffield.
“Very little happened over the five years I was there,” she told The Yorkshire Post, reflecting back.
“It was quite shocking actually the lack of response to children being raped, physically abuse, emotionally abused, their families being targeted.”
But when Mrs Cryer went public with her concerns, she was ridiculed, branded a racist, a liar and a fantasist. The then-Keighley MP was forced to install a panic button in her own home as she became a target herself.
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It took almost a decade for the heinous crimes to fully come to light, and since then numerous investigations and inquiries have found a staggering scale of child sexual abuse, not just in Yorkshire but across the country.
The Jay Report found 1,400 children were sexually abused between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham.
Since then, both police forces have put hundreds of perpetrators behind bars for thousands of years in specialist operations into child sexual exploitation.
However, once again, the spectre of grooming gangs has hit national headlines, and just like in 2003, when Mrs Cryer first raised it publicly, it has proved hugely divisive.
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Hide AdElon Musk, soon to enter President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, has fired off a flurry of posts on the subject on his social media site X, after it emerged that the Government denied requests for the Home Office to lead a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Greater Manchester, instead saying it should be carried out locally.


The Tesla billionaire has suggested that the Prime Minister was “complicit in the crimes” of child sex offenders, and in a separate post added: “Prison for Starmer.”
He also said the Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” and called her a “rape genocide apologist”.
Sir Keir, who was Director of Public Prosecutions when the scandal came to light in 2011, has been forced to defend his record, saying when he left that post “we had the highest number of child sex abuse cases being prosecuted on record”.
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Hide AdHe added: “Those attacking Jess Phillips, who I am proud to call a colleague and a friend, are not protecting victims.
“Jess Phillips has done 1,000 times more than what they’ve even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.”
The Government has rejected Mr Musk’s calls for a national inquiry, instead saying it will implement the recommendations of the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse, chaired by Professor Alexis Jay, in full.
This week, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper also announced a three-month “rapid audit” of the grooming gangs across the country and “victim-centred, locally-led inquiries” in five areas.
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Hide AdHowever, this has led to speculation online and from Conservative politicians that this is not UK-wide and could appear to be a cover up, something which is no doubt fuelled by the scandal’s torrid history.


When Mrs Cryer first raised it decades ago social services and police “failed” to see it as a crime.
“I almost bust a gut, trying to get action from Bradford Council and police,” she previously told The Yorkshire Post.
“It was terribly difficult. I just felt at one point that nothing was ever going to happen. I could only assume, rightly or wrongly, that there was too much hesitation about it. It was seen as being racist.”
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Hide AdWhile Dr Heal did not feel the lack of action from South Yorkshire Police was down to being perceived as being racist, but instead due to a stereotyped-view of the victims.
“My feeling was that they [police officers] treated the girls involved as second class citizens, they thought it was a lifestyle choice,” she said.
“They thought they were choosing for themselves in those situations so it was their responsibility.”
She says a senior officer said to her once: “It’s all very awful, but we’ve got targets of car crime and burglary to meet.”
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Sarah Champion first found out about the scandal, shortly after being elected Rotherham’s MP in a by-election in 2012.
She sat in on a Home Affairs Select Committee investigation into grooming gangs, and says the evidence given “blew her mind”.
She remembers whistleblower Jayne Senior giving evidence to MPs, sitting alone in the middle of a long table.
“What she was recounting was just mindblowing,” she recalled.
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Hide Ad“As she left I walked up to her and said I’d really like to talk to you about this because you’ve just blown my mind.”
Since then Ms Champion has been a leading campaigner around child sexual exploitation, and has become one of a number MPs to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, piling pressure on the Government.
“Local inquiries do not have the power to compel witnesses or evidence, nor would they satisfy the public concern of cover ups,” Ms Champion said earlier this week.
“There needs to be a national ‘Telford-style’ model which is nationally resourced, and victim centred.”
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Hide AdKeighley and Ilkley MP Robbie Moore has been calling for an inquiry into grooming gangs in Bradford since he was elected in 2019.
He has claimed solicitors believe that the scale of child abuse could in the area could “dwarf” that uncovered in Rotherham, and believes “nothing has really changed” since Mrs Cryer first raised the alarm in Keighley in 2003.


When speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Mr Moore was left speechless by some of the accounts he has heard from victims and survivors, saying “it’s the worst thing to hear as an MP”.
Phillipa Hubbard, of the Bradford District Safeguarding Children Partnership, said that IICSA, “which Bradford contributed, has made it very clear that this is a national issue”.
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Hide Ad“Like many local authorities up and down the country, we know that agencies in our district have made mistakes in the past,” she explained, referencing a review carried out in the area in 2021.
“But the view of our partnership remains that a public inquiry would cost a huge amount of money, use precious officer time, and is unlikely to provide us with any new learning that would better protect children from being abused,” she added.
South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard hit out at the idea there has been a “cover up”.
“The idea that this has somehow been swept under the carpet, that somehow there hasn’t been a huge focus on those challenges and then significant and widespread challenges in South Yorkshire in particular is not true,” he told The Yorkshire Post.
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Hide AdDet Ch Insp Scott Harrison, South Yorkshire Police’s child sexual exploitation lead, said: “Since the publication of the Jay Report in 2014, our understanding and handling of cases of child sexual exploitation in South Yorkshire has evolved and developed considerably.
“We have shaped our policing response after listening to the experiences of victims and survivors of these horrific crimes, and their courage and bravery has instigated this crucial change to policing.
“The force has publicly recognised its past failings in terms of its response to child sexual exploitation and we remain absolutely committed to safeguarding victims of exploitation in any form and conducting thorough investigations to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.”