Grooming Gangs: Not Merely a British Problem
Rotherham became almost synonymous with the grooming-gang scandal. That was convenient for anyone who wanted the rest of Europe to regard organised sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls as a peculiarly British failure: incompetent councils in northern England, institutional cowardice, local policing failures and a political culture that was afraid of what it might discover.
A disturbing case now before the courts in Dordrecht, in the Netherlands, raises the question of whether that geographical comfort is justified.
According to Dutch reporting, prosecutors allege that an 18-year-old woman living in a residential group home accepted a lift to a railway station in May 2025 but was instead taken to two parking areas. She was allegedly raped by several men, assaulted and filmed, with images subsequently circulated through Snapchat. Six suspects aged roughly 20 to 23 have been identified in the proceedings, while investigators reportedly believe as many as ten men may have been involved. These remain allegations before the court and should be described as such.
The principal suspect, who was born in Syria, has reportedly denied that the woman was forced. The court nevertheless continued his detention. Several of the accused are reportedly related to one another. Dutch politician Geert Wilders seized upon the case to make a much broader claim: "The Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs."
That description immediately creates a second argument alongside the criminal case. What exactly constitutes a "grooming gang," and when is it legitimate to attach a religious or cultural description to one?
The Dordrecht allegations are not identical to the systematic exploitation uncovered in Rotherham, where the Jay Report estimated that approximately 1,400 children had been sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Nor should a criminal allegation involving several Syrian-background suspects automatically be treated as proof of an Islamic phenomenon. The guilt of the individual defendants must be determined on evidence, and the existence of a broader social pattern requires evidence extending beyond a single prosecution.
But neither should the possibility of such patterns be declared illegitimate before the evidence is examined.
That was one of the central lessons of Britain's grooming-gang scandals. The problem was not simply that terrible crimes occurred. Sexual abuse occurs in every ethnic and religious population. The institutional scandal arose because officials sometimes possessed information about patterns of offending yet were reluctant to confront the ethnic and cultural dimensions surrounding particular networks.
Professor Alexis Jay's Rotherham inquiry documented that problem explicitly. Staff described pressure surrounding references to the Pakistani heritage of many perpetrators and fear that raising ethnicity would be interpreted as racism. Jay was careful not to suggest that ethnicity explained sexual exploitation generally, but she concluded that avoiding the subject had obstructed an adequate understanding of what had occurred.
Asking whether particular forms of group offending are disproportionately represented within particular populations, and if so why, is an empirical question. A serious society ought to be capable of investigating it without either racial panic or institutional denial.
Britain demonstrated the cost of failing to maintain that distinction. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere, vulnerable girls were targeted by groups of men, manipulated, sexually assaulted and sometimes passed between offenders. The victims were frequently girls already known to social services and therefore precisely the people public institutions had a particular responsibility to protect.
The exploitation was not merely a succession of unrelated encounters between individual offenders and individual victims. Networks mattered. Cars mattered. Friends and relatives mattered. Access to vulnerable girls mattered. The willingness of offenders to share victims and information mattered. So did the reluctance of institutions to recognise what was happening.
That is why the expression "grooming gang," for all its imperfections, acquired significance. It identified organisation and repeated predation rather than the isolated sexual offender.
The Dutch allegations deserve attention in that context. A vulnerable young woman living in institutional accommodation is allegedly taken away by a group of young men, sexually assaulted by multiple perpetrators and filmed. If prosecutors establish those facts, there are legitimate questions about group dynamics, victim selection and the social environment in which such conduct occurred.
There is also a technological dimension that distinguishes contemporary sexual exploitation from earlier forms. Recording an assault can turn the offence into something that continues after the physical attack has ended. Images can become trophies, pornography, instruments of humiliation or mechanisms of intimidation. Social media allows material once confined to a small circle to be distributed instantly and potentially preserved indefinitely.
Culture, however, cannot simply be ruled out either. Researchers and official inquiries are entitled to investigate whether attitudes toward women, sexual behaviour, family honour, outsiders and gender relations contribute to particular offending patterns. Religion may intersect with those attitudes, but so can ethnicity, clan structures, socioeconomic marginalisation, criminal peer groups, age and the circumstances of migration.
The proper response is investigation rather than taboo. This becomes particularly important when governments oversee large-scale migration from societies with substantially different attitudes toward sexuality and gender. Integration cannot sensibly mean assuming that every cultural norm disappears when somebody crosses a national border. Liberal societies have every right to insist that their fundamental rules concerning consent, equality before the law and protection of children apply to everyone without qualification.
The most disturbing feature of the British experience was that vulnerable girls could become secondary to institutional concerns. Authorities worried about community relations, racial tension and accusations of prejudice while children requiring protection continued to be exploited. Whatever the circumstances ultimately proved in Dordrecht, Europe should have learned enough from Britain to know that protecting the reputation of institutions or communities must never outrank protecting potential victims.
Nor should politicians or journalists be frightened of accurate demographic information. If particular populations are over-represented in a category of offending after relevant variables are considered, that is something governments need to know. If they are not, reliable data can puncture inflammatory claims. Refusing to collect or discuss useful information protects nobody except those who benefit from uncertainty.
The same principle applies to immigration status. A foreign national convicted of serious sexual violence raises legitimate questions concerning deportation under the law of the country concerned. That is quite different from collective punishment of relatives who have committed no offence. Wilders may favour considerably broader measures, but individual criminal responsibility remains one of the principles distinguishing liberal justice from precisely the forms of collective attribution that liberal societies should resist.
Rotherham therefore should not be treated as a British brand name attached permanently to one ethnic group or one historical scandal. Its lasting lesson is institutional.
Authorities must investigate sexual exploitation without fear or favour. They must be willing to examine groups offending rather than treating every offence as an isolated event. They must protect vulnerable girls even when those girls are difficult, troubled, in care or reluctant witnesses. And they must be capable of discussing ethnicity, migration, religion and culture when the evidence makes those factors relevant, without turning demographic categories into presumptions of individual guilt.
Whether Dordrecht ultimately proves to belong in the same category as Britain's grooming scandals will depend upon evidence tested in court and upon what further investigation establishes. It is too early to declare that question settled. It is not too early to insist that the question be permitted.
Rotherham's most important warning was that political sensitivity can become institutional blindness. Europe has no excuse for learning that lesson twice.
