Image Credit: Dave Benett / Contributor / Getty 
Award-winning broadcaster, writer, and former politician Sir Trevor Phillips has said that Muslim grooming gangs have targeted “tens of thousands” of White children across Britain, describing the abuse as “industrial” in scale and protected by political fear.
Speaking to Times Radio, Phillips said the ongoing grooming gangs inquiry has been hindered by authorities’ reluctance to confront the link between race and sexual predation.
“What’s coming together here is a really horrid combination that nobody really ever wants to talk about — the intersection of race and sexual predation,” he said. “Let’s be honest, a lot of this is bringing those two things together in an unpleasant way.”
🇬🇧 “We’re talking about tens of thousands. It’s industrial. These children are chosen because they are White.”
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) October 28, 2025
An important shift in the language being used by mainstream broadcasters in relation to Asian grooming gangs operating in the U.K. pic.twitter.com/Ps6D0eyQd4
Phillips accused successive governments and local Labour councils of failing to act for fear of inflaming community tensions. “The government clearly never wanted these two things to be put together,” he said. “Much of this took place in areas run by local Labour councils, and the authorities who ought to be watching over this — stopping it, monitoring it — did nothing.”
He said that, unlike other forms of child abuse, these crimes were not hidden. “The difference with this grooming gangs thing is that everybody knows. It happens in public. The girls are first attracted by young men from within those communities — flash cars, cigarettes, drugs — and then they’re passed around amongst older men,” Phillips said.
Drawing on decades of reporting on child abuse, he added that the victims were deliberately chosen “because they are White and because they are outside the community of the groomers.”
Phillips, who won a Royal Television Society award for a 1988 documentary on pedophiles, said this form of abuse stood apart due to its vast scale and the complicity of public institutions. “These people know that they are protected,” he said. “They’re protected politically, by social workers, by local police, because everybody says we don’t want to ramp up tensions in the community.”
The remarks come as the government’s ongoing inquiry into grooming gangs faces criticism for being too limited in scope. The investigation follows revelations such as the 2014 Jay Report, which found that more than 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, often by groups of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage. Similar networks were later uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, and dozens of other towns, primarily across England.
Phillips warned against attempts to downplay the racial and cultural dimensions of the scandal, calling it “completely different” from other forms of child exploitation. “This could not be more different,” he said. “That’s the scandal here.”
Me and the other survivors have come together to speak about the main issues that lead to us resigning and we have responded to the home secretary's statment last night with conditions that would need to be met to ensure that this inquiry runs smoothly for us to consider… pic.twitter.com/l6JTzHO811
— Fiona goddard (@fionagoddarduk) October 22, 2025
In recent months, the government’s inquiry into grooming gangs has faced renewed controversy after several victims resigned from its advisory panel, saying their voices were being ignored and that the investigation had become “toothless.” Former participants accused officials of narrowing the inquiry’s scope to avoid confronting the ethnic and religious factors of the abuse.
Rape gang survivor Ellie Reynolds tells the truth about real racism in Britain. pic.twitter.com/jHgbbYTKZX
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) October 27, 2025
At a press conference with Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage on Monday, one rape gang survivor, Ellie Reynolds, told journalists, “It’s taken the media decades to recognize grooming gangs that are coming over and raping our children because they are White.”
In a joint letter addressed to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood last week, four survivors who resigned from the Victims and Survivors Liaison Panel said they had been “dismissed, silenced, and called liars” by government officials, including Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, whom they accused of publicly contradicting their accounts.
They said they would only consider rejoining the inquiry if Phillips resigned, if survivors were consulted on the appointment of an independent chair, and if the inquiry’s focus remained strictly on grooming gangs and group-based child sexual exploitation. The survivors said their conditions represented the “bare minimum” required to restore trust, warning that without them, the process risked becoming “yet another exercise in protecting the reputations of failed institutions rather than seeking truth and justice for victims.”
