Amid the rising crimes in European nations including the UK, it has come to the fore that in London, a rape case is reported every hour. On average, 24 such incidents were reported in a day to the Metropolitan Police with a total of 8,800 cases in 2023. According to the Met Police, the charges of sexual abuse have doubled since 2022, as reported by BBC.
As per the official data, 20,000 sexual crimes were reported in London alone last year while the exact figures stood at 8,852 rape cases and 10,991 other sexual violence. While these numbers are alarming the actual number of cases is obviously much higher than documented. This is better understood from a Rape Crisis report, which states that only one in every six women who are raped reports the crime, compared to one in every five male victims, and only one in every four report other forms of sexual assault. 40% of the survivors don’t approach the police due to “embarrassment”, 38% don’t tell the police since they opine the police will not be able to help them and 34% think that seeking police help would be “humiliating”. Another disturbing aspect is that 1 in 2 adult rape survivors have been raped more than once.
Last year, the police received 11,000 reports of various sexual crimes, with over a quarter coming from youngsters under the age of 18. The BBC report says that the figures represent the number of reports issued from 2018 to 2023, “but do not necessarily mean all the crimes happened within that time period.”
One dataset focused solely on reported cases of rape, while the other included cases of sexual assault, assault by penetration, and attempted rape. From 2018 to 2023, the overall number of reported offences surged by 14%, reaching nearly 20,000. Precisely, the Metropolitan Police received a report of sexual violence or rape every 26 and a half minutes.
The alarming numbers revealed in the official data warrant discussing the existence of Muslim grooming gangs in the United Kingdom. Grooming gangs, particularly in towns and cities such as Telford, Rotherham and Rochdale, have gone unchecked for many years. Much later it was revealed that organised grooming gangs systematically sexually abused young girls. These crimes were sometimes overlooked or downplayed by authorities. The media also contributed to its downplaying by often presenting Muslim grooming gangs mostly involving Pakistani and Afghan origin, targeting white non-Muslim girls “Asian gangs”.
While the perpetrators in the Telford, Rotherham and Rochdale grooming cases were mostly Muslims, a section of the media covered up the religious and racial motivation behind the crime. Notably, drugs and alcohol were commonly used to render victims unconscious or entrap them in a cycle of abuse which went on as threats and blackmailing continued.
Rape and sexual abuse offences in the United Kingdom have frequently gone unchecked or underreported, owing to a mix of systemic failures, societal stigmas, and law enforcement challenges. The above discussion and the UK media reports suggest that victim blaming and fear of stigmatisation, Lack of Trust in Authorities coupled with the fears of being labelled “racist” or “Islamophobic” has been major reasons for the sexual abuse cases being underreported. The incidents of grooming gangs exploiting women, particularly the Telford case, demonstrated how police inaction emboldened the offenders and allowed the abuse of thousands of vulnerable girls and women to continue for years. It took three major grooming gang scandals for the Grooming Gang Taskforce leading to hundreds of arrests, the UK authorities
