The Origins of the Grooming Gangs

A brief history of how the grooming gangs arrived in England.

There is always a lot of talk about the horrific crimes committed by the Pakistanis who have been imported, predominantly from the Mirpur region, but there is very little understanding of how they actually got here in the first place or why they were brought over.

The partition of British India in 1947 divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan along religious lines, resulting in mass violence and the splitting of the Indus River Basin.

India gained control of the headwaters of the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej), while Pakistan inherited most of the downstream flow of the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab), creating immediate disputes over water allocation.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed on September 19, 1960, in Karachi by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Ayub Khan, with World Bank President Eugene Black as a witness.

After nine years of negotiations following the partition, the treaty resolved the bitter water dispute by dividing the six main rivers of the Indus Basin. India received unrestricted use of the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej), while Pakistan was allocated the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab), securing roughly 80% of the total annual flow for Pakistan.

The agreement required Pakistan to build a vast replacement infrastructure system to compensate for losing control over the eastern rivers, which had long irrigated large parts of Punjab and Sindh. This included constructing link canals to transfer water from the western rivers eastward, storage reservoirs, and major dams. The World Bank provided substantial financial support and mediation, making the treaty one of the most expensive water-sharing deals in world history at the time.

Among the critical projects was the Mangla Dam on the Jhelum River in the Mirpur district of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The treaty's allocation of the Jhelum to Pakistan made the dam essential for storing water, generating hydroelectric power, and regulating flows. Construction began shortly after the treaty's signing, directly linking the 1960 agreement to the mass displacement and subsequent migration that would reshape communities in both Azad Kashmir and Britain in the decades that followed.

Displacement from the Mangla Dam project reached its peak as the reservoir flooded approximately 280 villages, large parts of Mirpur city and Dadyal town, along with farmlands, mosques, markets, and graveyards. An estimated 100,000–110,000 rural Mirpuri Muslims lost their homes and livelihoods.

The Pakistani government's inadequate compensation and substandard resettlement schemes (such as the poorly equipped New Mirpur City) left many families with no viable future locally. The Pakistani government negotiated with the UK to resettle some of the affected families as part of a labour recruitment drive to fill post-war shortages in the declining British industries. Young men from Mirpur arrived first, working mainly in textile mills, factories, and the transport sector in Northern and Midlands towns (Bradford, Birmingham, Oldham, etc.). Chain migration and family reunification in the 1970s turned these into permanent foreign communities within England.

As Pakistani migration to Britain began, isolated instances of sexual offences involving Pakistani men and underage girls started to appear in court records. One of the earliest documented examples occurred in Bradford in 1955, where four Pakistani men were accused of having sexual relations with a 15-year-old girl.

These cases were sporadic and not yet the scale of organised networks which we now know about, but they represented some of the first recorded instances of group-based exploitation linked to the newly arriving Pakistani communities. These vile incidents emerged shortly after the initial waves of young Pakistani men settling in industrial towns.

Many of the locals in these areas raised concerns over the heinous acts but nothing was ever acted upon by the authorities. These failures are predominantly the actions that led to violence on the streets by local men protecting their communities from hostile migrants. This has now been manipulated to portray the British as racist thugs who were "paki bashing" but in reality they were protecting their women and children from hostile migrants.

Displaced Mirpuri in Britain quickly took advantage of migration chains, using family ties and World War service connections to sponsor relatives through invitations. Brothers, cousins, and later their wives and children arrived via family reunification, shifting temporary workers into permanent enclaves.

Remittances from UK jobs in mills, factories, and transport flowed back to Azad Kashmir, funding the rebuild of homes, mosques, schools, shops, and small businesses in Mirpur, Kotli, and Poonch. This money visibly revived areas hit by Mangla flooding and strengthened ties between the diaspora and their homeland, while accelerating the growth of concentrated Pakistani enclaves in Britain by decade's end. It was an absolute disaster all round for the people of Britain.

As Pakistani communities expanded through chain migration, early reports emerged of Pakistani men approaching and exploiting underage girls. In West London and Hounslow, families later recalled cases from the late 1960s and early 1970s where young girls were targeted, groomed with gifts or attention, and sexually abused by groups of Pakistani men.

These incidents often went unreported to police because of family shame, fear of community backlash, and distrust of authorities. The tactics used, such as pretending to be boyfriends or offering rides in their cars, would later appear in many of the organised grooming cases documented in northern towns during the following decades.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Telford, chaired by Tom Crowther KC and published in July 2022, confirmed that organised sexual abuse of children in the town stretched back decades, with victims and survivors describing experiences as far back as the 1970s. The inquiry examined cases from 1989 onward but heard direct evidence from individuals groomed, raped, and trafficked in earlier decades, noting that the pattern of grooming had become "generational" and for some families, inevitable and unavoidable.

The report estimated more than 1,000 children were exploited over a 40-year span, often involving grooming tactics such as offers of alcohol, drugs, money, or transport, followed by repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, and violence or threats. Authorities, including police, social services, and schools, frequently dismissed reports as "child prostitution" rather than serious crime, with failures to investigate or intervene allowing the abuse to persist unchecked for generations.

This early emergence in Telford mirrors patterns seen in other towns, where initial isolated cases from the late 1960s and 1970s evolved into more systematic networks by the 1980s and beyond, often linked to groups of men in the night-time economy. The inquiry highlighted how institutional reluctance, including concerns over race and community tensions, contributed to the prolonged failure to protect vulnerable British girls.

As the family reunification scheme brought wives and children to join the earlier migrant men, Pakistani communities became more settled and self-contained. During this period, they established numerous mosques, community centres, and cultural associations that helped preserve their traditional norms, including clan-based social structures (biraderi), strong emphasis on family honour, and backward traditions rooted in rural Mirpuri and Punjabi customs.

At the same time that sporadic reports of sexual abuse involving Pakistani men began to surface more consistently in Rotherham and similar areas, children’s home staff and local residents noted Pakistani taxi drivers approaching vulnerable girls from care homes or disadvantaged backgrounds as early as the late 1970s, offering lifts, cigarettes, or small gifts in what would later be recognised as classic grooming behaviour.

These incidents remained largely under-reported during the 1980s, often dismissed as individual cases rather than part of an emerging and widespread pattern. Authorities rarely linked them to organised networks, and concerns about race or community relations meant many warnings were not acted upon, allowing the problem to grow quietly in the shadow of expanding night-time economy roles like taxi driving and takeaway shops, where these men frequently worked.

The grooming and organised sexual exploitation of British girls has shifted from systematic organising to more widespread, systemic, and industrial-scale abuse and neglect than in previous decades, with coordinated criminal networks now operating across the entire country, from online manipulation to county lines and wilful institutional neglect. Official inquiries have confirmed that past institutional failures allowed these groups to persist with relative impunity, and while responses have improved, many perpetrators continue to act as though they are untouchable.