Young victims failed and ignored for years

In 2003, long before the term "grooming gang" entered the lexicon, social workers in Oldham noticed a disturbing pattern: girls from local children's homes were repeatedly going missing.

- Geraldine McKelvie

Often, they were found in the same locations, being harboured by the same men. Each time the authorities thought they had got a grip on the problem, it reared its head again. By 2006, there were concerns that groups of offenders were targeting children at high schools. One girl, later referred to in court as Child X, fell into their clutches while truanting when she was 12 years old. By 14, she had been abused by 300 men and was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin.

"Unless you scratch below the surface you do not realise the enormity of the problem," Ruth Baldwin, then the executive director for young people and families at Oldham council, said in December 2006. "We are not talking about teenage relationships.

These are men in their 20s, 30s, and beyond." Almost two decades later, on New Year's Day 2025, the fate of girls in this former mill town on the eastern fringes of Manchester caught the attention of Elon Musk, the world's richest man. GB News reported that the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, had told Oldham council the government would not fund a statutory inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town. In response, Musk said on X that Phillips should be in prison.

The media storm that resulted forced a reckoning on an issue that has come to haunt Britain, not least because of the apparent overrepresentation of men of Asian heritage in the gangs that plagued towns such as Oldham. Several inquiries have already established that a nervousness about race hampered the response in other parts of the country.

Musk was criticised for spreading misinformation and weaponising the issue to fuel a far-right agenda but it set in motion a chain of events that forced the government to commission a statutory national inquiry on grooming gangs covering England and Wales. A central strand will focus on what went wrong in Oldham, and it will look at "how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses".