Were 250,000 English Girls Raped by Grooming Gangs?

A quick analysis of the Rape Gang Inquiry Report's estimate

Note: The purpose of this article is only to criticize the estimated number of rapes proposed by the report. I do not deny the other sensational claims made by the authors, such as that most of the perpetrators are Muslim, and that authorities often turned a blind eye out of fear of being called racist.

On June 16, Rupert Lowe, a member of parliament in the United Kingdom, announced that his independent project, The Rape Gang Inquiry Report was finally complete, after more than a year. The Report quickly garnered a lot of attention on X and other social media sites. Most of this attention was paid to its shocking estimate of how many young English girls had been abused by grooming gangs: 250,000. Here, I show that this estimate is without a sound basis.

The Origin of the Estimate

On the first page of the Executive Summary, the Report states:

These crimes have been committed for decades, since the 1950s…[paragraph break] It has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma. The true number is probably higher.

The citation given for this “established” estimate is to a statement made by Lord Pearson in parliament in 2019, where the 250,000 figure is given as an aside, with no mention of where it comes from. Pearson says:

I start with the assistance the Government are giving to the victims of grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere … [T]he basic support seems to be running at some £7.2 million per annum, and that is for the victims of all sexual abuse, not just for the 250,000 victims of radical Muslim grooming gangs, which in itself is probably an underestimate.

I say that because, 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.

Pearson seems to claim that 250,000 children having been abused by “radical Muslim grooming gangs” is an accepted estimate, which can then be compared to a higher estimate obtained by extrapolating from Rotherham to the rest of the country. But what is the source for the number? It appears to be Pearson himself. In 2018, a year before he gave the speech quoted earlier, he told parliament:

[I]f 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 [by grooming gangs], very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years?

His method for deriving the overall estimate of 250,000 is not given, but what the number is supposed to represent is now clearer: 250,000 white girls were raped by grooming gangs in England between 2000 and 2018 (when he gave that speech). This number is, on its face, absurd. A rough calculation indicates that, for it to be true, 3% of all girls in England had to be raped by grooming gangs. If instead we use Sarah Champion’s suggestion of 1,000,000, which Lord Pearson appears to cite favorably, the conclusion is that 11% of all white girls in England were raped by such a gang.¹

Inconsistent Labels

It does not help Pearson nor the Rape Gang Inquiry Report that the label attached to this number is inconsistent. In 2018, Lord Pearson said that the figure represents the number of white girls raped up to that point in the 21st century by grooming gangs. But in 2019, he described it as referring to the number of “victims of radical Muslim grooming gangs”. Here, the sex and race of the victim are no longer restricted to white girls; but, at the same time, only those who were abused by “radical Muslim grooming gangs” are included. Despite these changes, the count remains at 250,000. By the time it was cited in the Report’s Executive Summary, the number amounted to how many “young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma”. The sex and race of the victims reverts back to white girls, but the count appears to now exclude cases where members of grooming gangs rape a girl once, but not repeatedly, as well as cases where the victim was molested, but not raped, tortured, trafficked, or forced to convert. Furthermore, it appears that the estimate applies to the entire history of grooming gangs in England, whose origin the Report places in the mid 1950s—seven decades instead of 18 years. Later, the authors go on to say:²

The 250,000 figure is not a precise count. No such count exists because the British state has failed to record it. But we may regard it as a conservative estimate that accounts for the organised, repeated nature of the abuse (many girls raped hundreds of times by multiple perpetrators) and decades of institutional concealment.

The implication is that 250,000 is not the number of victims, but the number of victimizations. To see how large a shift in definition this is, recall Pearson’s statement in 2018 that a quarter million white girls were raped, “usually several times a day for years”. If “several” is taken to mean 3, “years” taken to mean two years, and “usually” taken to mean on average, this amounts to 547 million rapes. The number, then, went from 547,000,000 rapes of white girls between 2000 and 2018, to 250,000 rapes of all children between the 1950s and today. A few dozen pages later, however, the Report once again refers to there being “at least 250,000 victims”, not victimizations. These inconsistencies are what we would expect from a number that was never derived from a consistent definition in the first place.

How Was It Calculated?

In 2018, when Lord Pearson first referenced the figure, he said that it was an extrapolation from local reports on Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford. Of these, Rotherham is by far the best known, being the subject of the Jay report, which found 1,400 cases of child exploitation in that town, between 1997 and 2013. However, these cases represent all forms of child sexual exploitation, not just rape by grooming gangs. According to a recent update, about 1,100 victims of grooming gangs were identified through ongoing investigations, though even this number still includes cases not involving rape. Furthermore, Pearson’s claim specifically was that 250,000 white girls had been raped, despite the Jay report only providing estimates of the total number, regardless of the victim’s sex or race. For Oxford, the likely source was this report from 2015, which gave the total number of victims over the past sixteen years (i.e., from 1999 to 2014) as 373, of whom 330 were female (how many were white is, once again, not known). This figure does not represent the number raped by grooming gangs, but, rather, the number of cases involving grooming or child sexual exploitation. Therefore, instances of child sexual exploitation unrelated to grooming gangs were included, as were cases of grooming that did not lead to sexual contact. And, of course, child sexual exploitation is a much broader crime than child rape. This number is effectively unusable for estimating the number of white girls raped by grooming gangs. Finally, at the time that Pearson made his claim, the only numerical estimate for Telford was an investigation published by the Sunday Mirror, which concluded that there may have been as many as 1,000 victims over the span of forty years. This number purports to include only victims of grooming gangs, though how this was done is never explained. (An official report on Telford was published later, in 2022, which concluded that the estimate of 1,000 was plausible as the number of child sexual exploitation cases—not grooming cases.)

This, then, was the evidence that Pearson had to rely on in 2018 to make his claim that 250,000 white girls had been raped by grooming gangs in the last two decades. None of the data pertained to white girls specifically, and only one of the numbers even claimed to represent the number raped by grooming gangs. Furthermore, the data did not pertain to England as a whole, but, rather, three different towns. Pearson had to extrapolate from Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford to the rest of the country. His calculation can be reconstructed as follows. He first combined the numbers of victims—330 females in Oxford, 1,000 children in Telford, and 1,400 children in Rotherham—for a total of 2,730. He then assumed that all of the victims were white girls, and that they were specifically victims of rape by grooming gangs, rather than any of the other crimes which would fall into the same category (child sexual exploitation or grooming). Next, he combined the populations of Telford, Rotherham, and Oxford from the 2011 Census, for a total of 575,821. After this, the number of cases was divided by the population, and that quotient was multiplied by the total population of England (53,012,456), for an estimate of 251,335, which becomes 250,000 when rounded. However, there was a major problem with even this: the figure of 330 victims applies to the whole of Oxfordshire, not just the city of Oxford. When the population of Oxfordshire, which is about four times as large as that of Oxford, is used instead, the total becomes 134,000. Furthermore, this estimate is supposed to represent the number of victims between 2000 and 2018—a span of 19 years—when the cases span 16 years for Oxfordshire, 17 for Rotherham, and 40 for Telford. When this is also adjusted for, the new estimate for 2000–2018 becomes 120,000. Even making all of the extreme assumptions that Pearson makes, the true estimate is less than half of what he reported.

In 2019, Lord Pearson made the claim for the second time:

250,000 victims of radical Muslim grooming gangs … is probably an underestimate. [Paragraph break] I say that because, 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.

Despite calculating the total of 250,000 by extrapolating from three locations to the whole of England, he now says that this estimate is an underestimate, as evidenced by the fact that extrapolation from Rotherham yields “a much larger figure”. This statement only makes sense if Pearson believes Rotherham to be more representative of the nation as a whole than the combined data from three locations (including Rotherham). Either way, extrapolating from Rotherham alone does not get you a figure much higher than 250,000. Multiplying the per capita rate from Rotherham by the population of England, and adjusting for the number of years covered, yields a total of 322,000, nowhere near the estimate of one million that he cites favorably.

In the Executive Summary of the Report, Pearson is used as the source for the 250,000 number, though the span of time to which it applies is implied to be much wider, going back to the 1950s. Later, the authors refer to Pearson again for the same figure, quoting his 2018 speech (though misciting it as being from 2019). After this second mention of the estimate, they write:

This extrapolation now has greater support due to further data that has been collected, derived from scaling the patterns documented in major inquiries:

● Rotherham (Jay Report, 2014): At least 1,400 girls abused between 1997 and 2013, with some updated estimates exceeding this. Perpetrators were overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men.

● Telford Inquiry (2022): More than 1,000 children (predominantly girls) over decades, again with the same perpetrator profile.

● National footprint: The grooming gang model has been confirmed in dozens of towns and cities. Our independent Inquiry, led by Rupert Lowe MP, has heard evidence demonstrating coordinated operations extending to all corners of the country, in at least 149 local authority districts…

They list three pieces of evidence that, they claim, increases confidence in Pearson’s extrapolation. However, the first two pieces of evidence, referring to estimates for Rotherham and Telford, were already used by Pearson in the statement from which they quoted. As I showed above, they both must have been used in this form (1,400 cases in Rotherham, and 1,000 in Telford) for his calculation to work. The last bullet point refers to the Report’s mapping, based on the testimony they heard, that grooming gangs were operating “in at least 149 local authority districts”. But this does not strengthen the estimate: Pearson’s original calculations already assumed that grooming gangs operated in all parts of the country—otherwise, it would make no sense to extrapolate from locations where they were known to have operated to England as a whole. The fact that fewer than 40% of all local authority districts have evidence of grooming gang activity can only reduce the credibility of Pearson’s estimate.

The next claim in the same passage is even more confused:

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.

The only change since Pearson’s statement in 2018 was the removal of the data for Oxfordshire, and the inclusion of an unspecified “extreme under-reporting factor accepted by official reviews”, by which the total was corrected for underreporting, presumably by dividing the total by the rate of reporting. Assuming that the Report is referring to the same nineteen-year period as Pearson, we can try to replicate their calculation, to find out what divisor they used to adjust for underreporting. Using just the data for Telford and Rotherham, placing it on a 19-year scale, and multiplying the rate by the population of England, we can find the total before adjustment, and from there reverse engineer the multiplier needed to get it to 250,000. The unadjusted total is 255,000—implying a divisor of 1.02, or, in other words, a reporting rate of 102%. Obviously, there are no official reviews which accept that 102% of rapes by grooming gangs are reported, nor would a rate of 102% be accurately described as an “extreme under-reporting factor”.

The confusion continues when, much later, the Report reveals that the estimate “accounts for the organised, repeated nature of the abuse (many girls raped hundreds of times by multiple perpetrators) and decades of institutional concealment”. We are made to believe that the calculation somehow accounts not only for underreporting, but also for the fact that the girls are often raped multiple times. Somehow, adjusting for underreporting and multiple rapes decreases the total number of victimizations! Furthermore, as stated above, the estimate somehow changes from one of the number of victims to the number of offenses. By now, it should be clear that the Report’s estimate of 250,000 is even less serious than Pearson’s original attempt, which itself was poor.

What is the real number of grooming gang victims?

The recently published National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (2025), known as the Casey Audit, provides the best estimate: In 2023, there were 719 reported cases of group-based child sexual exploitation—a category that represents any form of sexual exploitation of children by loosely organized groups. While this number is not a direct estimate of grooming-gang rape victims, it is a better starting point than Pearson’s local extrapolations because it is national and closer to the relevant offense category. But, even treating it generously, it points to an order of magnitude far below 250,000.

This category of crime surely includes many cases that do not involve rape by grooming gangs, but it comes much closer to filtering out irrelevant charges than any of the data cited above. Furthermore, some cases would be mislabeled (especially because the dataset used is not retroactively updated when information changes; thus, the coding only represents what the case was thought to have consisted of early on in its investigation), and others may have been missed entirely from underreporting. While it is impossible to know for sure how these biases work out, it is unlikely that there are more than 700 or so cases per year, and probably the true number is much lower. Admittedly, this is speculative, but it is a fact that grooming gangs are simply not common. A recent study was able to uncover fewer than 500 defendants in trials involving grooming gangs between 1997 and 2017—not even two dozen per year. Indeed, the Rape Gang Inquiry Report itself mentions a man who helped authorities identify “nearly 1,300 suspected child sexual predators”. Of these, only four appeared to be engaging in child trafficking (0.3%), and even that is a much looser criterion than being part of a grooming gang.

Conclusion

The estimate that 250,000 children were raped by grooming gangs between 2000 and 2018 originated in a statement by Lord Pearson before parliament. His estimate, while much too high, was at least intelligible. Since then, the number has stayed the same, but the label and supposed math behind it has changed. In the beginning, when Pearson first made the claim, it represented the number of white girls raped by Muslim grooming gangs from 2000 to 2018 extrapolated from three locations to the rest of the country. By the end, when it was recalculated by the Report, it had become something else entirely: the number of individual instances of rape of children of any sex, by grooming gangs of any religion, between the 1950s and today, adjusted for underreporting. Despite all of these changes in labels and methods, the number itself did not change. It was never a serious estimate, but it was repeated in the Rape Gang Inquiry Report, and is now treated by many as an established fact. While it is impossible to estimate the true number of victims, the available evidence provides no support for a figure anywhere near 250,000. Indeed, even granting Pearson all of his extreme assumptions and correcting only his basic mathematical errors reduces the estimate from 250,000 to 120,000. Using better, national data, and assuming that over-inclusion and underreporting roughly cancel out, the number of cases falls to about 700 annually, or 13,500 for a period of the same length as Pearson’s. Even this number is likely an overestimate, including sexual exploitation of children not involving rape, as well as group abuse by groups other than grooming gangs.

1. The 2011 Census for England and Wales represents about the midpoint of this period (2000–2018). There were 4,067,743 white girls in England and Wales under the age of 16 at the time. Assuming that this number was constant for every year between 2000 and 2018, the total number of white girls in the denominator can be obtained by multiplying this number by 34.5/16 = 2.15625, for a product of 8,771,071. (This multiplier is used because anyone born between 1984/85 and 2018 would be included in the under 16 population at some point during this period, but the 2011 Census’ under-sixteen count represents only those born between 1995/1996 and 2011.) If 250,000 white girls were raped between 2000 and 2018, that would represent 2.85% of all such girls in England and Wales. If, instead, 1,000,000 is used, as Lord Pearson appears to think is reasonable, the proportion becomes 11.40%. These numbers, already too high to be believable, would be higher still if Lord Pearson meant “this century” in the technical sense, so as to exclude the year 2000.

2. Technically, this is in reference to the Report’s own estimate, also equalling 250,000 as the lower bound. But, as discussed below, their estimates are achieved in essentially the same way, and their descriptions of what they represent are equally erroneous.