LONDON: 200 members of the Sikh community gathered at Hounslow, West London, chanting, “Jo Bole So Nihaal, Sat Sri Akal,” to rescue a 16-year-old girl held captive by a man in his late 30s. The teenager was raped by 6 other men belonging to a Pakistani grooming gang.
After hours of protests, one of the perpetrators was taken into custody by the police, and the girl was released. A video of the demonstration has gone viral on social media, showing the accused being taken in a police van.
Notably, the accused had befriended the teenager when she was only 13 years old and began to form a relationship with her. She was persuaded through grooming tactics to leave her home when she turned 16.
The area where the accused lives had 20 secondary schools, with several children passing by his home.
Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK have been associated with systematic child sexual abuse for decades. They target young girls, aged 11-16, and lure them with promises of love, gifts and friendship. They usually target Hindu and sikh girls and isolate them from their families. Once they are isolated, the perpetrators blackmail them with threats, and they are also trafficked for money.
It is to be noted that last year, Elon Musk stood up in support of Reform UK Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe. The MP had urged others to ignore the UK prime minister’s calls to vote against a full national inquiry into the Pakistani rape gangs. “They should ignore him and do the right thing,” he wrote on X on January 8, 2025.
Last year in December, the transcripts released by the Open Justice UK revealed chilling facts about the sexual terrorism unleashed by the Pakistani-origin grooming gangs popularly called the ‘Hussain brothers’ in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. The brothers were involved in channelising a systematic network of child trafficking, abduction, torture and murder of the innocent girls.
In the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, men of Pakistani heritage, for decades, targeted and mercilessly exploited the most vulnerable girls of the region. The transcripts released by the Open Justice UK, coupled with the National Audit on group-based Child Sexual Exploitation, reflected the carefully calculated atrocities woven by the Pakistani brothers, which even the state law and order machinery in the United Kingdom failed to dig into and address for decades. It was only in the year 2016 that the trial against the Hussain brothers and their companions revealed the immense scale of atrocities.
How Grooming Gangs Operate Globally and in the UK
The member of Grooming gangs, who are mostly Pakistani Muslims, typically follow a calculated, manipulative process to entrap and exploit their victims:
1. Targeting Vulnerable Victims
Gangs identify individuals—often minors—who are emotionally, socially, or economically vulnerable. These could include children in care, runaways, or those from unstable family environments.
2. Building Trust and Dependency
Perpetrators initially establish a seemingly caring relationship, using gifts, affection, or emotional attention to build trust. Victims often see the abuser as a “savior,” which increases their dependency.
3. Isolation and Control
Over time, victims are isolated from friends and family. Threats, blackmail, and coercion become tools for exerting control, ensuring compliance and silence.
4. Exploitation
Once trust and control are established, victims are subjected to systematic sexual exploitation, often trafficked within networks of abusers.
The atrocities of the Pakistani-origin men in Britain are not a new phenomenon. Since the 1980s, they have been responsible for large-scale crime across the country. Towns such as Telford, Rochdale, Oxford, and Newcastle were hubs of the grooming gangs, who were predominantly British men but of Pakistani origin. For example, the Jay report of 2014 revealed that at least 1,400 children were exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Yet, repeatedly, the ethnicity of the perpetrators was covered up as they were largely Pakistani Muslim men.
