From the late 1980s until 2013, group-based child sexual exploitation affected an estimated 1,400 girls, generally from care home backgrounds, in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. Between 1997 and 2013, girls were abused by grooming gangs predominantly consisting of men of Pakistani heritage. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history". In July 2025, investigations were being carried out into allegations that police officers had also raped child victims.
Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16. From January 2011, The Times covered the issue, discovering that the abuse had been known by local authorities for over ten years.
Following these reports, alongside the 2012 trial of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee conducted hearings and published its recommendations in six reports. Alexis Jay led an independent inquiry, known as the Jay report, which found multiple failings of the police and local authorities. Girls would be regularly taken in taxis to be abused, and were gang raped, forced to watch rape, threatened, and trafficked to other towns. The resultant pregnancies, miscarriages, and terminations caused further trauma to the victims. Most victims were White British girls but British Asian girls were also targeted. British Asian girls may have feared social isolation and dishonour had they reported their experiences. Failure to address the abuse has been linked to factors such as fear of racism allegations due to the perpetrators' ethnicity; sexist and classist attitudes towards the mostly working-class victims; lack of a child-centred focus; a desire to protect the town's reputation; and lack of training and resources.
Following the Jay report, Rotherham Council's chief executive, its director of children's services, as well as the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire Police all resigned. The Independent Police Complaints Commission and the National Crime Agency both opened inquiries. Rotherham Council was also investigated and found "not fit for purpose". Nineteen men and two women were convicted in 2016 and 2017 of sexual offences in the town dating back to the late 1980s.
Background
Rotherham
Rotherham is the largest town within the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, with a population of 109,691 in the 2011 census. Around 11.9 per cent of Rotherham's population belonged to black and minority ethnic groups, compared to eight per cent of the population of the borough (population 258,400); three per cent of the population of the borough belonged to the Pakistani-heritage community. Unemployment in the borough was above the national average, and 23 per cent of homes consisted of social housing. The area has traditionally been a Labour stronghold. Until Sarah Champion was elected in 2012, it had never had a female MP. The council was similarly both controlled by Labour and male-dominated.
Terminology
In 2009, the Department for Education began using the term child sexual exploitation (CSE) to replace the term child prostitution, which implied consent. CSE is a form of child sexual abuse in which children are offered something—monetary or otherwise—for sexual activity, with violence and intimidation common. CSE includes online grooming, and localised grooming which typically happens in a public place. Targets of abuse sometimes include children cared after by the local authority, as was particularly common in the Rotherham case. In CSE, children may be contacted initially by another child, who hands the target to an older man. The adult then enters into a "relationship" with the target, but often the girl is used for sex by a larger group, in some cases leading to group rape. Trafficking is common, with the child "sold" to other groups. According to one victim, targets are preferably 12–14; the group loses interest as the child ages and expects the child to supply other, younger children.
History
From the early 1990s, several managers of local children's homes set up the "taxi driver group" to investigate reports that taxis driven by Pakistani men were arriving at care homes to take the children away. The police reportedly declined to act. In 1997, Rotherham Council created Risky Business, a local project to work with girls and women aged 11–25 at risk of sexual exploitation on the streets. Jayne Senior, awarded an MBE for her role in uncovering the abuse, began working for Risky Business as a coordinator around July 1999.
Around 2001, Senior began to find evidence of a localised grooming network. Most Risky Business clients had previously come from Sheffield, which had a red-light district; now the girls were younger and came from Rotherham. Girls as young as 10 were being befriended, perhaps by children their own age, before being passed to older men who would rape them and become their "boyfriends". Many of the girls were from troubled families, but not all. The children were given alcohol and drugs, then told they had to repay the "debt" by having sex with other men. The perpetrators obtained personal information about the girls and their families—where their parents worked, for example—which was used to threaten the girls if they tried to withdraw. According to Senior, Risky Business gathered so much information about the perpetrators that the police suggested she forward it to an electronic dropbox on the South Yorkshire Police computer network to protect the identity of Risky Business's sources. She later learned the police had not read the reports, and they could not be accessed by other forces. Risky Business was seen as a "nuisance" and shut down by the council in 2011.
In July 2025 it was reported that five survivors of abuse had said that they were also raped by police officers when they were as young as 12. Three former police officers were arrested as part of an investigation, and another had died. The women accused corrupt police officers of turning a blind eye or participating in the grooming.
Criminal proceedings and convictions
Criminal proceedings are ongoing and expected to continue until 2027. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said assumptions that abuse had fallen since high-profile cases in Rotherham and Rochdale were "flawed", and that children were still being sexually exploited in all parts of England and Wales in the "most degrading and destructive ways".
Operation Central (2010)
In 2008, South Yorkshire Police set up Operation Central to investigate the allegations. Eight men were tried at Sheffield Crown Court in October 2010 for sexual offences against girls aged 12–16. Four victims testified. Five men were convicted, including two brothers and a cousin. One of the brothers, Razwan Razaq, had a previous conviction for indecently assaulting a young girl in his car, and had breached a previous sexual offences prevention order. His brother Umar appealed against his sentence and was released after nine months. All five were placed on the sex offenders' register.
Operation Clover, trials (2015–2017)
Initial convictions (December 2015)
In August 2013, South Yorkshire Police set up Operation Clover to investigate historic cases of child sexual abuse in the town. Six men and two women were tried on 10 December 2015 at Sheffield Crown Court. Four were members of the Hussain family—three brothers and their uncle, Qurban Ali—named in Adele Weir's 2001 report. The Hussain family were said to have "owned" Rotherham. Ali owned a local minicab company, Speedline Taxis. One of the accused women had worked for Speedline as a radio operator. On 24 February 2016, Ali was convicted of conspiracy to rape and sentenced to 10 years.
Arshid "Mad Ash" Hussain, reportedly the ringleader, was jailed for 35 years. In late 2018, Arshid Hussain sought visitation rights for his child, who was conceived during a rape. Sammy Woodhouse, the child's mother, started a petition to change the Children's Act 1989 to deny access rights to rapists. The petition obtained over 200,000 signatures. Basharat "Bash" Hussain was sentenced to 25 years, and was later also convicted of indecent assault and given an additional seven-year sentence, to run concurrently. Bannaras "Bono" Hussain was jailed for 19 years. The court heard that the police had once caught Bannaras Hussain abusing a victim in a car park next to Rotherham police station, but had not taken action. Two other men were acquitted, one of seven charges, including four rapes, and the second of one charge of indecent assault.
In November 2016, a fourth Hussain brother, Sageer Hussain, was jailed for 19 years for four counts of raping a 13-year-old girl and one indecent assault. The girl's family had reported the rapes at the time to police, their MP, and David Blunkett, the home secretary, to no avail. The police collected bags of clothes the girl had saved as evidence, but lost them two days later. The family was sent £140 compensation for the clothes and advised to drop the case. Unable to find anyone to help them, they moved to Spain for 18 months in 2005. Two cousins of the Hussains, Asif Ali and Mohammed Whied, were convicted of rape and aiding and abetting rape, respectively. Four other men were jailed for rape or indecent assault.
Karen MacGregor and Shelley Davies were convicted of false imprisonment and conspiracy to procure prostitutes. MacGregor, who had worked as a radio operator at Speedline Taxis, was sentenced to 13 years. Davies was given an 18-month suspended sentence. MacGregor and Davies befriended girls and took them to MacGregor's home, where they bought them food, clothes, and alcohol. The girls were told to earn their keep by having sex with male visitors. MacGregor had previously applied for charitable status for a local group she had set up, Kin Kids, to help the carers of troubled teenagers.
Eight men went on trial in September 2016 and were convicted on 17 October that year. In January 2017, six men, including three brothers, went on trial and were convicted of 21 offences relating to assaults on two girls, aged 12 and 13 when the abuse began, between 1999 and 2001. A rape by Basharat Dad was reported to the police in 2001 but he had been released without charge. One of the girls became pregnant at age 12. She had been raped by five men and did not know who the father was. DNA tests established that it was one of the defendants. In May 2017, another man was found guilty of sexual offences, bringing the total to 26.
Operation Stovewood (from 2014)
In December 2014, the National Crime Agency (NCA) set up Operation Stovewood to conduct a criminal inquiry, and to review South Yorkshire Police investigations in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. This followed the release of the Jay Report in August 2014 which found a number of failures by South Yorkshire Police. Similar failings were reported by the subsequent Drew report in March 2016. It had been described as the single largest law enforcement investigation into non-familial child sexual exploitation and abuse in the UK. The NCA stopped taking on new investigations on 1 January 2024 after identifying more than 1,100 victims and hundreds of perpetrators in their nine-year investigation. Criminal cases are expected to be ongoing until 2027.
2017–2019
In November 2017, three men were convicted for the indecent assault of a girl under the age of 14 between June 1994 and June 1995. Asghar Bostan was convicted in February 2018, followed by Tony Chapman and a sixth man, both in May 2018. In 2018, five men were charged with a total of 21 offences, including rape and indecent assault against two girls under the age of sixteen between 2001 and 2004. The girls were groomed in and around the Meadowhall shopping centre when they were 12 or 13, and one of the accused had sex with a girl in the shopping complex. Three of the men were found not guilty on all counts. A fourth man absconded but was arrested in Bulgaria in November 2023 and extradited back to the UK. After his conviction, Asghar Bostan was ordered by the High Court to pay £425,000 in damages to his victim. The complainant, known only as Liz, started civil proceedings against her abuser in 2020 after she felt the justice system had failed to sufficiently punish her attacker. Her solicitor Robin Tilbrook described it as an "ice-breaker" case, which would allow "others to follow".
In October 2018, taxi driver Darren Hyett was sentenced to nine years in prison for sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl. Later that month, seven men were convicted of sexual offences against five girls committed between 1998 and 2005, including two who raped a young girl in Sherwood Forest between August 2002 and 2003, giving her drugs and alcohol and threatening to abandon her if she did not comply. The girl became pregnant and decided to have an abortion. One girl said she had been assaulted by 100 men by the time she was 16.
In August 2019, seven men were convicted for the sexual exploitation of seven teenage girls over a decade previously. Four were already in prison at the time of sentencing. Takeaway delivery driver Aftab Hussain was sentenced to 24 years for indecent assault after being jailed for 3 years and 4 months back in April 2016 after he admitted two counts of sexual activity with a child and attempted witness intimidation in another case. Masaued Malik was sentenced to 5 years after being previously sentenced to 15 years in September 2016 for similar offences. Mohammed Ashen pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent assault, and was already serving a 17-year sentence, reduced from 19 years, for murdering Kimberley Fuller in a Rotherham nightclub in 2005. He had previously been jailed for threatening a former partner with a knife. Waseem Khaliq was sentenced to 10 years in prison and then sentenced for a further 45 months after admitting three counts of witness intimidation. He also called the National Crime Agency control centre from prison to threaten two of the investigating officers.