Rupert Lowe’s “Rape Gang Inquiry Report”, published yesterday, has brought the issue of organized child sexual abuse back to the forefront of Britons’ minds. This is especially pertinent given the slow progress of the ongoing Government inquiry, which Baroness Casey criticized yesterday on the anniversary of the publication of her National Audit into grooming gangs. It’s well established now by official reports that even with inadequate data, there’s a clear perpetrator and victim profile: Pakistani men and underage white British girls. Also apparent is the complicity of institutions in covering up these crimes. In her audit, Casey even explicitly instructed local authorities not to delete files.

Against this backdrop, and without the power to compel witnesses to appear, focusing on survivor and whistleblower testimony was both the obvious and most worthwhile angle for the Restore Britain leader to pursue. His report, however, is flawed.

For one thing, much of what it advocates was widely discussed when the issue of grooming gangs came to national prominence over a year ago, and some proposals are already Government policy. One example is mandatory ethnicity recording for offenders; another is the Home Office publication of foreign offender deportation figures by national background. This reflects an inherent limitation of an evidence base built primarily on survivor testimony: powerful though that testimony is, it is unlikely to generate recommendations that go significantly beyond the existing policy consensus.

Some proposals also sit in tension with what the wider evidence base on grooming victims tells us. Having heard the volume of testimony involving care homes, the report leans towards making it harder for children to enter local authority care. But the threshold for removal is already high, and what we know about grooming victims more broadly shows that vulnerability typically precedes care placement rather than starting with it.

There are also specific factual claims in the report that warrant scrutiny. The figure of 250,000 victims has been circulated widely today, presented as an established minimum. In fact, it originates from a 2019 House of Lords question by former Ukip leader Lord Pearson, who extrapolated from Rotherham’s 1,400 victims to suggest a national estimate. Sarah Champion, Rotherham’s MP, has put the number as high as one million on similar reasoning. While there are many towns that share Rotherham’s failures, not every town is Rotherham, and that kind of extrapolation doesn’t hold up. Many survivors used this report as an opportunity to speak publicly for the first time, and claims that don’t withstand scrutiny risk overshadowing their testimonies.

Lowe’s report is right to mention Islam as a factor in these crimes, but in doing so it risks flattening a more complex set of drivers around clan culture and ethnicity. Many people, most notably Tommy Robinson, have landed on the “anti-jihadism” framework and treat the religion itself as the causal variable. Yet plenty of the perpetrators are nominal, non-practicing Muslims, with the common profile of abuse involving drinking and drug use. The focus on Islam is a culture-war framing that masks the real culprit of clan mentality. One might recognize the same structure of these gangs in the village politics of the most Hindu parts of rural India. Consider the Henry Nowak case, where details of the involvement of the murderer’s Sikh family continue to unravel — a variation of the pattern.

What produced these gangs in English towns was not religious ideology but geography and kinship: dense, intermarried communities with their own authority structures, enough accumulated local power to capture institutions, and a strong instinct to close ranks against outside scrutiny. The presence of Islam in the abuse supplies the social glue and vocabulary rather than the motive. And it is precisely the ordinariness of that motive that made this so dangerous: these were not acts of ideological warfare but the product of communal loyalty. The banality is the point.

By framing this as a civilizational conflict, the new report mistakes the nature of what it is describing, making it harder to understand and harder to prevent. An analysis rooted in clan culture and institutional failure would be more accurate, leaving us better equipped to address the rot that actually allowed these horrors to take place.

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Adam Wren is an analyst and the founder of Open Justice.

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