‘250,000 victims of rape gangs’ is not a reliable estimate

On a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, the Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe MP discussed a report on rape gangs he has published, saying: “We’ve estimated that a minimum of a quarter of a million rapes have taken place.”

The report itself, which was published last month, says that “it has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls” have been the victims of so-called “rape gangs” or “grooming gangs”.

This figure is mentioned on other occasions in the report, and has been widely shared online, including on X by Mr Lowe and by Elon Musk.

As we have said before, this number is an estimate that was not calculated in a reliable way. It assumes that victimisation rates from a small number of prominently affected towns can be used as a guide for the whole country. It is also partly based on estimated rates of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in general, not rates of CSE by gangs specifically.

The sexual abuse of children is common, and often unreported, which means it is under-reported in official statistics. But it is estimated that around half a million children are sexually abused in some way in England and Wales each year.

Though there is a shortage of specific data, there is clear evidence that it is likely that thousands of children, and girls in particular, have been the victims of organised CSE, often involving gangs of men, in many locations around the UK. But estimating how many thousands is extremely difficult, and may be impossible to achieve reliably.

A National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, published in June 2025, was unable to provide an estimate for the scale of the problem. It said:

“There is no recent study of the prevalence of child sexual abuse and exploitation in the population. Confusing and inconsistently applied definitions and incomplete data across the police, local authorities, health and the criminal justice system, obscure it.”

What this number really means

The new report cites comments in Parliament by Lord Pearson of Rannoch in 2018 and 2019 as the original source of the 250,000 figure.

We looked into Lord Pearson’s estimate in an article about this issue last year, and the Irish news site the Journal reported more details about it shortly afterwards. We’re grateful to the Journal for sharing what Lord Pearson’s office sent them.

Both Lord Pearson and the more recent report seem to define the number quite loosely. In 2018, citing past inquiries into CSE, Lord Pearson originally said it was the number of “young white girls raped this century”. But in 2019 he described it as the number of “victims of radical Muslim grooming gangs” specifically, not all of whom would have been white or girls, or victims of rapes, or of offences that occurred this century.

In his comments on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mr Lowe said it was the number of rapes, not the number of victims.

The new report cites Lord Pearson’s figure and says it counts “young white girls”, but it also says the figure is based on evidence from other inquiries that included victims of all sexes and ethnicities, some of whom were exploited in ways that did not include rape, or were victims of offences that occurred before this century.

Describing “Lord Pearson's working out behind the 250,000 number”, his office provided the following explanation, to which we have added notes highlighting a number of issues.

In short, this calculation appears to be an estimate of the number of victims of CSE in general, not of group-based CSE, and it is certainly not an estimate of the number of white girls raped by groups of Muslim men specifically. It is also not reliable because it assumes without providing evidence that the victimisation rates in some prominently affected places can be extrapolated to the whole country.

We attempted to contact Lord Pearson about the figure last year and again for this article, but have received no response on either occasion.

What the new report adds

The June 2026 report led by Mr Lowe repeats some of Lord Pearson’s calculations, and goes further, saying:

“This extrapolation now has greater support due to further data that has been collected, derived from scaling the patterns documented in major inquiries... When the Rotherham/Telford scale is applied across the documented national distribution, and multiplied by the extreme under-reporting factor accepted by official reviews, the total reaches the 250,000 threshold as a bare minimum."

Last year’s national audit led by Baroness Casey made clear that CSE is under-reported, but it did not mention a numerical “under-reporting factor” that could be used to estimate the number of unknown victims. We also cannot find any details of “further data” beyond what was in Lord Pearson’s original calculation anywhere else in this report, although it claims to have found evidence of similar gang-based CSE in 149 local authority districts across the UK.

We have asked Mr Lowe and his party Restore Britain about this, but so far they have not replied.

At this stage, we can see nothing in the new report that further substantiates Lord Pearson’s estimate. And even on its own terms, it is not an estimate of the number of white female victims of Muslim rape gangs specifically.