How many children have been raped by pakistani rape gangs in the uk
Executive summary
There is no reliable national tally of how many children in the UK have been raped by perpetrators described in reporting as "Pakistani grooming gangs"; official reviews and reporting document dozens of convictions in specific local scandals but explicitly warn that national data are incomplete and that a definitive number does not exist [1] [2] [3]. Independent audits and inquiries have identified clusters of cases—most prominently Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Derbyshire—where many convicted offenders were of Pakistani or South Asian heritage, but these local totals cannot be summed into a trustworthy nationwide figure because of inconsistent data collection and differing definitions of "group‑based" abuse [4] [1] [3].
1. What the official reviews actually say about numbers
Government-commissioned and independent reviews repeatedly emphasise the absence of a reliable national count: the national audit and subsequent summaries note specific convictions—for example 26 teenage girls abused in a Derbyshire case—and document that many local investigations had predominantly British‑Pakistani defendants, yet they stop short of producing an aggregate national rape count because police recording and definitions vary [1] [4] [3].
2. High-profile local scandals and documented convictions
Reporting and inquiries point to clear, documented convictions in a string of local scandals: Rotherham’s Operation Stovewood recorded 323 suspects and 42 convicted individuals with nearly two‑thirds of convicted defendants of Pakistani background in that probe, while other operations such as Derbyshire (Operation Retriever) and Telford produced multiple convictions involving teenage victims and predominantly Pakistani‑heritage defendants in those investigations [4] [1].
3. Why a national figure cannot be credibly produced from media lists
Both academics and policing bodies caution that extrapolating from high‑profile cases to a national total risks error: the BBC and University‑based analysts note that the evidence base is uneven and that early studies used limited, unrepresentative samples to claim majority‑Pakistani makeup of grooming gangs, while police chiefs underline that only a small proportion of all child sexual offences are "group‑based" and national reporting systems historically did not capture ethnicity consistently [3] [5] [6].
4. What recent audits and statements add — and their limits
The 2025‑26 audits and public statements have acknowledged "over‑representation" of men of Pakistani heritage in datasets from specific forces (Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire) and called for a national inquiry and better data collection; these findings confirm patterns in local cohorts but explicitly point to flaws in data collection that prevent a defensible national rape tally attributed to Pakistani‑origin perpetrators [2] [1] [5].
5. Scale of group‑based offending in context
National policing data cited by senior officials show that group‑based offending represents only a small share of recorded child sexual offences—examples given include fewer than a thousand group‑based offences in a large quarterly dataset and estimates that the "grooming gangs" typology is a minority fraction of total child sexual offending—underscoring that even credible counts of group incidents do not map directly to an overall number of child rapes by any single ethnic label [6] [7].
6. Reporting, politics and contested interpretations
Media, political actors and advocacy groups have used the patchy evidence to advance competing narratives: some sources and commentators emphasise the over‑representation seen in certain local inquiries and call for frank discussion, while others warn that sweeping generalisations fuel racism and obscure the broader picture of child sexual abuse committed by many demographics; authoritative sources—academic reviewers, police chiefs and the national audit—advise improved, standardised data collection and statutory inquiry powers to produce the kind of national count the public is asking for [1] [5] [3].