On June 22, 2026, three brothers, Amar, Kamar, and Kamran Ilyas, of Sheffield, were sentenced to a combined 40 years in prison for the rape and sexual abuse of five girls between 2004 and 2008, when the victims were as young as 12. One victim was abused by all three brothers. Amar Ilyas, who fled to Pakistan while on bail and was sentenced in absentia, was convicted of 20 offences against the five victims.
The case was not officially described as a grooming gang by prosecutors or investigators, although it shared several characteristics with cases that carry that label. It involved multiple offenders acting against multiple underage victims over a prolonged period, repeated sexual exploitation, and familial coordination, with one victim abused by all three brothers. The perpetrators were Pakistani, the ethnicity most commonly associated with such cases.
Grooming gang crimes typically involve children coerced or deceived into sex through gifts, alcohol, drugs, or a claimed relationship, and then passed to other men for further abuse. Other ethnicities associated with these cases include Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iranian, and Turkish.
Political correctness has enabled these gangs because the police and the liberal media are avoiding attributing the crimes to migrants or Pakistanis. In fact, many on the left claim that the grooming gangs are a right-wing conspiracy theory or that most of the perpetrators are white.
However, the 2018 Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, case illustrates how British authorities have prevented the public from learning that most of the defendants were Pakistani. In October 2018, 20 men were convicted of more than 120 offences against 15 girls as young as 11, committed over a seven-year period from 2004 to 2011.
Ringleader Amere Singh Dhaliwal was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 18 years, while the other sentences ranged from five to 18 years. The court heard that many perpetrators in the case were never identified.
Details of the convictions, including the offenders’ ethnicity, could not be published until reporting restrictions on a series of linked trials were partially lifted. Former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson was arrested in May 2018 for reporting on the case via livestream while the restrictions were in effect and was jailed for contempt of court.
Supporters argue that Robinson was acting as a courageous citizen journalist shining a light on a highly sensitive issue (grooming gangs) that they believe the mainstream media and local authorities were deliberately downplaying or covering up due to political correctness. They frame his arrest as an attack on free speech and independent journalism. At the same time, government documents, including child safety training materials, refused to acknowledge that the problem centered on foreign-born perpetrators.
Standardized training materials used across two-thirds of English schools, provided by the platform GovernorHub, presented a hypothetical example describing “men belonging to a particular religion” committing “violent crimes against women” and instructed staff to identify it as “disinformation” and an “online safety risk.”
Chris Philp, a senior Conservative opposition lawmaker who serves as the party’s spokesman on policing and immigration issues, said the training was “propaganda designed to aid the cover-up of these appalling crimes,” and lawmakers and parents described the course as “shocking” and “concerning.” The disclosure came as hundreds of previously closed grooming gang cases were under review by the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
In 2025, the British government commissioned Baroness Louise Casey, a member of Britain’s unelected House of Lords, to conduct a national audit on child sexual exploitation after years of calls for a wider inquiry. Her report, published June 16, stated that the scale of group-based child sexual exploitation could not be assessed nationally because of inconsistent definitions and incomplete data across police, local authorities, health services, and the criminal justice system, and found that ethnicity was not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators nationally.
A 2017 report by the Quilliam think tank concluded that 84% of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders were of South Asian origin, a euphemism often used in crime reporting to mask the fact that the perpetrators were Pakistani.
The Quilliam finding was widely disputed. Researchers Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, writing in the journal Race & Class, called it “shoddy pseudoscience,” and a 2020 Home Office literature review concluded the report’s methodology was not suitable for drawing conclusions about offender ethnicity.
The official figure, based on National Police Chiefs’ Council data on group-based cases in 2023, put the Pakistani share of suspects with known ethnicity at 6.9%, compared with a 2.7% Pakistani share of the population of England and Wales, an overrepresentation by a factor of roughly 2.5. Comparable breakdowns for other ethnic groups associated with these cases, including Bangladeshi and other South Asian communities, have not been made public in the suspect data.
Casey’s audit stated that “flawed data” had been used to dismiss claims of disproportionality, and disputed the “majority white” framing built on the NPCC figures above: “The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with White perpetrators when that can’t be proved… This does no one any favours at all, and least of all those in the Asian, Pakistani or Muslim communities who needlessly suffer as those with malicious intent use this obfuscation to sow and spread hatred.” The audit also found that some authorities discouraged publicizing convictions to avoid increasing community tensions.
Cases were documented in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, Telford, Oxford, Bradford/Keighley, Derby, and Newcastle. In Rotherham, the 2014 Jay Report found that group-based child sexual exploitation affected an estimated 1,400 girls between 1997 and 2013, abused predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage. Casey’s audit stated that a case file was found in which the word “Pakistani” had been physically removed with correction fluid.
In Oxford, seven men were convicted at the Old Bailey in May 2013 of offences that had taken place from 2004 to 2011, including rape, arranging child prostitution, sexual activity with a child, and trafficking a child within the UK for sexual exploitation. The victims were White British girls and the offenders were mainly of Pakistani heritage. Victims or their families had approached social services and police on several occasions, and accusations had previously been made about some of the offenders.
In Rochdale, nine men were convicted in 2012 under Operation Span. Ringleader Shabir Ahmed worked as a welfare-rights officer for Oldham Council in 2005 despite having already been accused of child sexual abuse; police did not notify the council of the prior allegations, and he was seconded to the Oldham Pakistani Community Centre. Simon Danczuk, a former Member of Parliament for Rochdale, has said senior Labour politicians warned him against discussing the ethnicity of perpetrators in his constituency for fear of losing votes.
In Newcastle in 2017, 17 men from Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, and Turkish communities were convicted. Conservative minister Mike Penning asked the attorney general to treat the offences against “young white girls” as racially motivated, but the presiding judge ruled that the girls had not been targeted because of their race.
Labour MP Sarah Champion later wrote in The Sun that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.” Her statement drew criticism from other MPs and the Muslim Council of Britain, and she later apologized.