A new government inquiry, marking a significant policy shift, will investigate the influence of Islam on the U.K.’s grooming gangs, predominantly composed of Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
The Home Office announced on December 9 that, according to its terms of reference, the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs will “examine how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses at a local and national level, as well as other issues of denial, as discussed in the National Audit. It will also consider the background (including ethnicity, religion and culture) of perpetrators and victims.”
This is not a fire that can be fought blindfolded.
Casey Report Omitted Reference to Islam
A June 2025 report into the rape gangs that sexually exploited mostly white, working-class British girls on an industrial scale omitted any reference to Islamist links or motivations of the overwhelmingly Muslim perpetrators, FWI reported.
While identifying clear evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani-heritage perpetrators, the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, published by the Home Office, focused on the offenders’ ethnicity rather than on their religion.
The identification of the perpetrators as “Asian” and “Pakistani” in the report by Baroness Louise Casey angered Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians of Pakistani heritage, as well as Asians from other countries, who asked the government to specify the religion of the suspects.
Victims’ Testimonies Point to Role of Islam
Victims’ testimonies revealed that Islam played a significant role in the sexual abuse of more than 250,000 white working-class girls in at least 50 British towns and cities since 2001.
In a key testimony, a Rotherham victim said that her rapists “believed they had a position of religious moral superiority over ‘non-believers’” and “believed it was their duty to punish us, as they believed that doing so made them good Muslims.”
“I was told that if you don’t scream when you’re raped, then you’re consenting to the rape, so you should be stoned to death. I was told that Muslim girls know this (because the Quran says that Alisha’s [sic] silence was her consent to the marriage to Mohammed),” she added.
The victim “was told that Muslim girls are good and pure, and stay virgins until marriage, but all the white girls are slags, and they sleep with hundreds of people.” White girls “don’t obey Allah” and “don’t dress modestly,” so “they deserve to be punished.”
Another victim talked of “a perpetrator reciting the Koran during her abuse” and justifying the abuse “because of her lower status as a non-Muslim.” A third victim was forced into a sharia marriage and treated like a sex slave, the Network of Sikh Organizations said.
New Islamophobia Definition Could Hinder Inquiry
Carys Moseley, Public Policy Researcher at Christian Concern, explained that a likely reason thus far for the silence on Islam as a factor in the gang culture is the description of Islam handed down in 2016 by Justice Haddon-Cave in the case of Shakeel Begg against the BBC. In section 94 of the judgment, Justice Haddon-Cave ruled: “It is common ground that Islam is a religion of peace. The Qur’an is a book of peace.”
Commentators are also concerned that the government’s new definition of “Islamophobia” as “anti-Muslim hostility,” as reported by Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), could silence voices that seek to draw links of causation or correlation between Islam and the rape gang culture.
Speaking to FWI, Moseley warned of “a real danger that the inquiry could fail to probe in sufficient depth and detail the motivations of these gangs and opt instead to stigmatise responses by people of faith, including Christians, to the gangs as ‘Islamophobic.’”
“We should regard with great suspicion the timing of the government’s publication of its definition of anti-Muslim hatred,” she emphasized, noting that this was the same government that had released the draft Terms of Reference for the inquiry only a few days earlier.
Islamic Scholar Confirmed Role of Religion in Abuse
In November, Mark Durie, a Senior Research Fellow at the Melbourne School of Theology’s Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam and a Middle East Forum Writing Fellow, argued in an exhaustive report that populist versions of Islamic law and theology were key drivers fueling Britain’s grooming gangs, FWI reported.
Durie’s report on U.K. Grooming Gangs and Islam identifies eight aspects of Islam that influenced the grooming gangs, including the Islamic doctrines of the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims, superiority of men over women, and the belief that women must be kept secluded to protect men from the perceived threat of female sexuality.
Durie also identified sex slavery as an aspect of the laws of jihad, the treatment of conquered non-Muslim peoples in Islamic law (dhimmitude), and the doctrine of “love and hate for the sake of God” as factors that played a role in the sexual subjugation of the victims.
“There is compelling evidence that religious identities and cultures of both victims and perpetrators have played a role in grooming gang crimes. These crimes cannot be understood without acknowledging the contribution of religion,” Durie told FWI.
Durie elaborated:
This is not a fire that can be fought blindfolded. It is high time for the authorities to open their eyes to the religious aspects of the gross abuses that have become an open wound on the soul of the nation. Until this happens, the authorities will not be able to combat these crimes effectively. Nor will they be able to satisfy the demands of victims and their families for justice and healing.
“The task now is to ensure that the religious drivers behind these gangs are properly investigated, not minimised in any way,” Moseley noted.
The inquiry has been given three years to investigate and publish its findings, and a budget of £65 million to achieve its goals.
