28 August 2026 - 10:30am
The grooming gangs are just the tip of the iceberg: Britain has a mafia problem. This is the clear inference from The Network Map, a report due to be published this week.
The report details the level of interconnection between key individuals in purportedly localised grooming gangs, collating over 1,000 convicted perpetrators, regional gangs, extended families, establishments, and “notable individuals” including councillors and police officers. What is likely to emerge is a network of affiliation both across gangs and with other forms of crime in Britain and beyond.
This issue is so grave that the researchers who compiled the report have chosen to remain anonymous, because they fear retaliation from the gangs. Their report should be welcomed across the political spectrum, for the opportunity it offers to move on from a polarising and paralysing culture war focus in media discussions of these gangs.
The well-documented details of the gangs’ atrocities and ethnocultural makeup are incendiary, and the suffering of their child victims rightly continues to elicit horror. But within the terms incentivised by short-form social media discussion, this has tended to mean public discussion focuses on these highly emotive aspects, while the question of networked criminality is sidelined.
The grooming gangs are, as is now widely acknowledged, predominantly of Pakistani heritage. Their crimes are horrific and enraging. And yet: what if organised, systematic, racialised child rape is less the problem than an epiphenomenon of the real problem, namely a nationally and internationally networked criminal mafia? There have been many other such criminal gangs with an ethnocultural component: for example, Triads (Chinese), Yardies (Jamaican), or, of course, the mafia of Francis Coppola’s movies (Italian) in the USA and Italy.
Most of us have seen Coppola’s Godfather movies, where it’s clear that the mafia is grounded in Sicilian norms and extended families. But the criminal network formed on that basis extends beyond Sicilian-heritage Americans to many complicit others in positions of power, including officials and police.
Britain’s grooming problem can be understood in similar terms. If the scourge of child grooming and rape is just one of many criminal activities conducted by ethnic mafias embedded in wider British society, several otherwise dissonant details make more sense. For example, the journalist Suzanne Moore has described how, as a social worker, she witnessed the grooming phenomenon in London years ago, but with predominantly black victims. Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, insists that the widespread phenomenon of grooming in London is in fact more about “county lines” drug dealing than sexual crime.
When the issue of these gangs is hijacked by culture war, details such as these obscure more than they reveal: for example, those fearful of racial polarisation point to London’s black child victims to suggest that bad actors are tendentiously amplifying the racial element. On the other side of the debate, Khan is accused of downplaying the racial element by focusing on drugs. But a less conspiratorial explanation is that both are partially right: the ethnic element is real, but so is the multifaceted nature of organised crime within a mafia.
This model would also explain why asylum seekers from a range of ethnicities have started showing up in grooming gang trials. We already know people smuggling is a lucrative form of international organised crime. It would stand to reason that some of the individuals smuggled via mafia networks might remain within the mafia’s orbit.
If Britain’s real problem is ethnic mafias, this would also explain more persuasively than “political correctness” why their crimes keep being reported, only for enquiries to be restricted, or slow-walked by authorities, or to happen only to find key records have somehow disappeared. Being accused of racism may endanger your job; getting on the wrong side of a mafia can endanger your life.
The chronically online will doubtless assert that focusing on organised crime rather than skin colour is yet another PC whitewash of an issue that’s fundamentally about foreign abuses of British people. But while the clickbait potential of racialised sex horror is evident, and the crimes themselves appallingly real, this angle is deeply polarising in a way that inhibits rather than aids effective response. And it is not clear what policy programme should follow from this angle that could garner sufficiently broad public assent to be achievable.
By contrast, a focus on organised crime is far more likely to garner the cross-party consensus needed to tackle the gangs themselves. And if officials across the country really have been compromised by mafia networks, the issue won’t be tackled without such a consensus.
No ordinary British citizen, of any ancestry, wants to live in a country dominated by clan-based criminality. So decent people across the political spectrum should welcome this report. For decades we have ignored or failed to recognise the issue of British-based mafias abusing children, breaking laws, suborning public officials, and blighting our country with drugs, guns, and corruption as well as the sexual torture of children. Perhaps this report can signal the beginning of a new and desperately needed political consensus to begin addressing this rot at the scale its gravity demands.
