How many children have been the victims of grooming gangs in the UK?

Some widely shared posts on social media—including one shared on X by the platform’s owner, the businessman Elon Musk—have claimed that more than a million children have been victims of “grooming gangs” in the UK. We’ve also seen different estimates for the number of victims circulating, such as a figure of over 250,000.

We know that the sexual abuse of children is common, and often unreported. It is clear that thousands of children, many of them vulnerable, have been subject to appalling abuse by loosely defined networks of offenders, often known as “grooming gangs”, in cities and towns across the UK.

We have not been able to find a reliable estimate for the total number of victims, however. We therefore cannot say whether the figures quoted in these posts are right or wrong.

Full Fact first wrote about the one million estimate in 2020 and found then that it was not reliable. It was calculated in 2015 by the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, who told the Mirror: “There are hundreds of thousands and I think there could be up to a million victims of exploitation nationwide.” When we asked Ms Champion about the figure again this week she told us it was “completely unreliable”, and that it was based on an extrapolation.

The Jay inquiry into child sexual abuse said in 2022: “It is clear that the sexual exploitation of children by groups of associated abusers continues to be widespread, to a greater extent than official statistics indicate.”

In its section on prevalence, the inquiry said there were “fundamental flaws with both the criminal justice and children’s social care data sets” in this area. “As a consequence,” it said, “it is simply not possible to know the scale of child sexual exploitation by networks.”

Unreliable figures should not be shared as if they were authoritative estimates or facts. This may mislead people into believing that something is definitely known to be true, when in reality it is very uncertain.

Where does the one million figure come from?

The estimate of one million victims has been mentioned in a number of different social media posts, including a post on X last week that said “MORE THAN ONE MILLION CHILD VICTIM [sic]”, and cited Ms Champion and the Mirror as its source. This was reposted by Mr Musk.

When we contacted Ms Champion to ask about the figure in 2020, she told us: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up.”

We emailed her again to ask about the figure in 2025, and she told us that her extrapolation involved scaling up the figures for a “70 year period”, acknowledging that was a “completely unreliable” estimate.

We are not sure exactly how Ms Champion’s calculation produces an estimate of about one million, but as we said in 2020, it is not a reliable method anyway. We cannot simply extrapolate the level of abuse in Rotherham to the rest of the country, because the rate of victimisation in Rotherham may have been higher or lower than average, as may the rate of reporting.

In our 2020 article, we said we also thought that the 15% figure came from a government report from 2013. If so, it represented the proportion of women who reported the most recent incident of serious sexual assault they had experienced, which is not necessarily the same as the proportion of child exploitation victims identified in Rotherham.

A different estimate

Mr Musk also reposted a video shared by the X account of the political activist Tommy Robinson, showing a speech made in 2018 by the former leader of the UK Independence Party, Lord Pearson of Rannoch.

The post from Mr Robinson’s account said: “Lord Pearson questioned the CONservatives [sic] over the upwards of 250,000 British children gang raped by predominantly Pakistani men across every major city of the UK, this century alone!”

In his 2018 speech, Lord Pearson said: “If we extrapolate nationally the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford, there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men.”

Later, in another contribution using the figure in 2019, he referred to “250,000 victims of radical Muslim grooming gangs” and claimed this was “probably an underestimate”, adding: “If you take the accepted figure of 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone and extend it across the country, you come to a much larger figure. Indeed, Rotherham’s MP, the courageous Sarah Champion, has put the figure at 1 million.”

We have attempted to contact Lord Pearson to ask about the 250,000 figure, but we have not yet heard back. It’s not clear if Lord Pearson himself was the original source of the estimate.

An inquiry into abuse in Rotherham did say that its “conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited” between 1997 and 2013. It’s unclear from Lord Pearson’s remarks how the 250,000 figure was calculated, which means it’s difficult to say how reliable it is. But any national extrapolation from one place, or a group of places, is based on the potentially unreliable assumption that similar rates of offending and reporting occurred throughout the country.

What data do we have?

We’ve not found any authoritative estimate of the total number of victims of grooming gangs in the UK.

The 2022 Jay inquiry’s report into child sexual exploitation by organised networks set out some of the specific difficulties in calculating any total figure, including the fact that there is no specific offence of child sexual exploitation, and the “subjective and thus variable” nature of flagging these offences manually.

Similarly, a 2020 Home Office report into “Group-based child sexual exploitation” did not offer an estimate for the total number of victims and said “a consistent challenge has been the paucity of data”. It said group-based child sexual exploitation was probably under-reported, and said it had identified “over 70” live investigations at the time, adding that this figure very likely would have been higher had more police forces provided data.

We have asked the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice if they can direct us to any reliable estimates for the total number of victims. The Ministry of Justice told us that it did not publish any relevant data. We’ll update this article with any new information we receive.

Last year the government said a Grooming Gangs Taskforce set up in 2023 had helped police forces identify and protect “over 4,000 victims” in a 12-month period.

Although we cannot say how many children in total have been victims of grooming gangs, we can put the estimates circulating in recent days into context by giving a very rough idea of the total number of potential victims in the period in question.

Using Office for National Statistics (ONS) mid-year population estimates, we can say that between roughly eight and nine million people in the UK were girls aged 11-15 at some point between 2001 and 2018, when Lord Pearson made the speech being shared on X.

This number would be higher if we included girls who were younger than 11 or older than 15, or if we looked at a longer time period, or if we included boys. It would be lower if only white children were included, or only those considered vulnerable to exploitation.

A survey published by the ONS in 2020 found that about 7.5% of adults in England and Wales had experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16, including about 3.5% of men and 11.5% of women, equivalent to around 3.1 million people. 

We approached Mr Musk, Mr Robinson and the Mirror for comment.

Our thanks to Marcus O’Brien, a Royal Statistical Society Statistical Ambassador and a senior statistician at the ONS, for his help with the final section of this article.