Lest we forget!
There is something profoundly cynical about politicians discovering the victims of child sexual exploitation only when those victims can be turned into political ammunition.
The victims of grooming gangs deserve justice. They deserve to be heard. They deserve to know why institutions failed them and why, in some cases, authorities appeared more concerned about avoiding controversy than protecting vulnerable children.
What they do not deserve is for politicians to take an unreliable estimate, dress it up as an established fact and then use it to inflame public anger.
Yet that is precisely what is happening with the extraordinary claim that 250,000 children – or, depending on which version of the claim you hear, 250,000 young white girls or 250,000 rapes – have been perpetrated by “grooming gangs” since the beginning of this century.
The claim has been promoted by Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain movement and enthusiastically amplified across the political right, including by supporters of Reform UK.
There is one small problem.
It isn’t established.
The figure is not a reliable calculation of the number of victims of grooming gangs. It is an estimate based on assumptions and extrapolations from limited data. Some of the figures used in the calculation relate to child sexual exploitation generally, rather than group-based exploitation specifically.
That is an enormous difference.
It is beyond dispute that organised child sexual exploitation has occurred in Britain. The scandals in Rotherham, Telford and elsewhere exposed appalling failures by public authorities. Children were abused. Some were raped. Some were exploited by groups of men. Some victims were ignored, disbelieved or failed by the very institutions that were supposed to protect them.
The scale of that abuse is serious enough without politicians inventing numbers.
The 250,000 figure can be traced back to claims made by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, but even its definition has changed. At one point it was described as the number of “young white girls raped this century”. Elsewhere it became the number of victims of “radical Muslim grooming gangs”. Rupert Lowe has subsequently referred to it as a minimum of 250,000 rapes.
Those are three entirely different claims.
A victim is not a rape.
Child sexual exploitation is not automatically rape.
Child sexual exploitation is not automatically group-based.
And evidence concerning victims of different sexes and ethnicities cannot suddenly be converted into a precise figure for white girls allegedly raped by Muslim gangs.
Yet this is the statistical sleight of hand at the heart of the political narrative.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Britain does not possess reliable national data capable of telling us exactly how many children have been victims of organised sexual exploitation.
That is not because the problem is imaginary. Quite the opposite.
Child sexual abuse is significantly under-reported. Victims may be threatened, manipulated, frightened or ashamed. Many never report what happened to them. Others only speak out years later.
But acknowledging under-reporting does not give politicians a licence to select a number and declare it fact.
That is not how evidence works.
The national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation published in 2025 acknowledged serious deficiencies in the available data and concluded that the scale of the problem could not be reliably estimated. It highlighted inconsistent definitions and incomplete information across policing, local authorities, health services and the criminal justice system.
In other words, we know the problem is serious, but we do not know the precise number.
That should be the starting point for an honest political debate.
Instead, Lowe’s Restore Britain report attempts to give the 250,000 figure renewed credibility by claiming that further evidence and an “extreme under-reporting factor” support it.
But where is the evidence?
Where is the methodology?
Where is the independently verified calculation?
If the figure is as solid as Lowe and his supporters insist, why can it not withstand serious scrutiny?
This is where the politics becomes particularly disturbing.
Reform UK has built much of its political appeal around immigration and the alleged failures of the political establishment. The grooming gang scandal fits neatly into that narrative, particularly when the perpetrators are identified as men from particular ethnic or religious backgrounds.
That does not mean those crimes should be ignored.
It means they should be investigated honestly, without allowing political parties to exploit them to promote broader claims about immigration, race or religion.
The victims of Rotherham and other scandals should not become props in somebody else’s political campaign.
Neither should their suffering be inflated with numbers that cannot be substantiated.
There is a genuine scandal to expose: children were failed. Authorities did not always act when they should have. Some perpetrators escaped justice. Institutional failures must be investigated, and those responsible must be held accountable.
But the truth is not made more powerful by exaggeration.
Indeed, the opposite is true.
When politicians make claims that cannot survive fact-checking, they hand ammunition to those who want to dismiss the entire issue. They risk turning a genuine national scandal into another partisan culture-war battlefield.
Reform UK and Restore Britain should be demanding better data, better investigations, better policing and justice for victims.
Instead, we are being offered a number.
A huge, emotionally explosive number.
A number that changes its meaning depending on who is using it.
And a number that, according to the available evidence, has not been established.
The victims of grooming gangs have already been failed once by institutions that should have protected them.
They should not now be failed a second time by politicians who exploit their suffering for political gain.
The victims deserve the truth.
Not a slogan.
Not a culture-war talking point.
And certainly not a number pulled from a statistical hat and presented as fact.
If Reform UK and Restore Britain genuinely care about these victims, they should stop telling the public what they think the number ought to be and start demanding the evidence needed to establish what it actually is.
