SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is throwing his weight behind growing calls in the United Kingdom for a new investigation into the scandal of child abuse by grooming gangs, going so far as to back calls for King Charles III to intervene.
“National inquiry now!” Musk stated on X on Friday, declaring the scandal “the worst mass crime against the people of Britain ever.”
The U.K. has for years been dealing with the revelation that a number of grooming gangs, often consisting of men of South Asian or British Pakistani heritage, exploited children for decades across the north of England in cities and towns including Rochdale, Telford, Manchester and Rotherham.
A 2014 independent review of grooming in Rotherham found that the majority of perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage and said that it was “hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered.”
“They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,” the report said. “Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”
That report found that around 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013. It also stressed that abuse “is not confined to the past but continues to this day.”
The report found that police gave no priority to the abuse cases and failed to act. It also found that at least one report “was effectively suppressed” and others were ignored by local authorities. It found that while some did not believe the information, others were spooked by political correctness.
“Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so,” it said
