London faces reckoning as 9,000 cases reviewed despite mayor’s previous denials
The Metropolitan Police is reviewing some 9,000 grooming gang cases in a huge new investigation despite Sir Sadiq Khan previously denying any operated in London GB News, revealing a crisis that officials have long refused to acknowledge in the capital.
The announcement follows a damning report by Baroness Louise Casey that criticised decades of institutional failure to protect children from so-called “grooming gangs” Al Jazeera. In response, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs Al Jazeera in June 2025.
The Hidden Scale
According to the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (2025), 28.5% of cases of contact sexual abuse can be described as sexual exploitation (17,000 in 2024) Wikipedia, though experts believe this captures only a fraction of actual cases.
Suspected grooming gang and child exploitation cases from the last 15 years will be reviewed, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said in a letter to Mayor Sadiq Khan Yahoo!. The cases reveal systemic failures. Young girls from multiple London boroughs were found with adult men days after going missing and, despite alleging sexual assault, saw inadequate police action. They include Olivia*, from Lambeth, who was missing from care when she was discovered in a hotel room with six adult men in March 2022. The 17-year-old was under the influence of class A drugs and alcohol Yahoo!.
Patterns of Abuse
Gangs used grooming techniques to find their victims in public: girls aged 11 to 16, mostly white, often from troubled backgrounds, would be flooded with attention from men a few years older, who often worked as taxi drivers or in takeaways. The girls would be given alcohol or drugs and then deceived or forced into sex with one man, who would then pass them on to be raped, often violently, by his friends or relatives The Week.
“It is 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.” Children were “doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes The Week.
London’s Denial
While northern towns like Rotherham and Rochdale received extensive media coverage, London’s problem remained hidden. Sadiq Khan had access to and is known to have read several separate reports which identified six victims of these gangs. These documents also outlined the dreadful details of the abuse endured by these girls — some as young as 13. Some of the girls were raped by multiple men in London hotel rooms after being plied with drugs and alcohol UnHerd.
When questioned earlier this year by Susan Hall about how many rape gangs were operating in London, Khan repeatedly responded by asking Hall to clarify what she meant. He insisted that ‘the situation in London in relation to young people being groomed is different to other parts of the country’ spiked.
Former detective Jon Wedger tried to sound the alarm nearly two decades ago. Back in 2006, Wedger submitted a list of 50 youngsters who had been groomed and sexually abused in the capital, providing details such as car-registration numbers of perpetrators. But he was told to back off by social services because he was generating “extra work” UnHerd.
Why Systems Failed
Casey found that institutions utterly let down those whom they are supposed to protect. The ethnicity of perpetrators was “shied away from” for fear of appearing racist New Statesman. Baroness Casey’s audit confirms that ethnicity data is not recorded for two-thirds of grooming gang perpetrators GOV.UK.
The second failure is what Casey terms the adultification of teenage victims. Due to prejudice, classism and misogyny – victims of child sexual abuse (many of whom grew up in care) are still treated with “uneasiness and awkwardness” by some professionals New Statesman.
Survivor Fiona Goddard told investigators: ‘We’ve not got the justice we deserve from the past and have not made an impact in the future’ The Justice Gap.
The scandal exposes how thousands of vulnerable children were systematically failed by institutions meant to protect them—failures that continue to have devastating consequences today.
