From Rhetoric to Safeguarding: What “Grooming Gangs” Narratives Miss About Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation

by Ying Xue

In recent months, the UK media has reignited intense debate about so-called ‘grooming gangs.’ The phrase dominates headlines, talk shows, and political statements and is often used as shorthand for group-based child sexual exploitation (CSE).

‘Grooming gangs’ is not a legal definition. It is a media-created term that emerged in coverage of high-profile cases from the 1990s to 2010s. To understand the issue accurately, it is vital to return to the definitions used in safeguarding and child protection practice:

• Child sexual abuse (CSA) is an umbrella term that includes various forms of abuse, such as intrafamilial CSA, online CSA, and child sexual exploitation.

• Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a subset of CSA that involves a power imbalance in which a child is coerced or manipulated into sexual activity in exchange for something they need or want.

• Group-based child sexual exploitation (group-based CSE) is a subset of CSE involving two or more perpetrators who act together to exploit children or adolescents.

Framing the discussion around group-based CSE rather than ‘grooming gangs’ shifts the focus from rhetoric to safeguarding. Understanding group-based CSE as child sexual abuse matters. It focuses attention not on stereotypes or political narratives, but on patterns of behaviour, systemic weakness, and the lived realities of survivors.

Listening to Survivors’ Realities

For many survivors, group-based child sexual exploitation does not begin with overt violence, but with grooming disguised as care. Gifts, affection, attention, and promises of protection create a false sense of safety. These gestures may include food, cigarettes, or drugs that gradually create dependency and trust. In some cases, a young man may pretend to be a romantic partner, using that emotional bond to introduce the child to others who go on to exploit her. What begins as attention soon becomes entrapment, as survivors find themselves controlled, isolated, and coerced into sexual activity within a network of offenders.

The survivors' situation could also create conditions for ongoing trauma. For particularly vulnerable survivors, such as girls and adolescent women under local authority care, instability and insecurity in housing can exacerbate trauma and push them into danger repeatedly. Survivors describe feeling “passed around,” stripped of agency, and terrified that no one would believe them. This fear is not unfounded, as many who were meant to protect them overlook the realities that the survivors' experiences are actually situated in their living environments.

A survivor-centred response demands listening without judgment, rebuilding trust, and ensuring that survivors define what recovery looks like for them. It also means addressing the structural inequalities that shape who is heard and who is silenced. Girls and adolescent women from ethnic minority and migrant backgrounds frequently encounter cultural stigma, racism, or fear of authorities that compound their vulnerability and limit access to justice and care.

To respond effectively, priorities should include:

1. Safety and stability: Secure housing, trauma-informed mental health support, and long-term casework that recognises the slow pace of healing.

2. Continuity of care: Survivors often face abrupt service cut-offs when funding ends. Sustainable, survivor-led services are essential to lasting recovery.

3. Representation and inclusion: Survivor voices, especially those from marginalised backgrounds, must shape safeguarding policies, research, and public discourse.

   
   

Understanding group-based CSE as a form of child sexual abuse helps connect it to broader patterns of misogyny and inequality. Understanding the survivors' situations clarifies how individual survivors experience this abstract context and the real issues such as institutional neglect they face during recovery. Recognition is not only the foundation of justice; it is the beginning of healing. By shifting focus away from divisive narratives and towards survivor experiences, we move closer to what truly matters- a society that listens, protects, and acts.

Towards Contextual Safeguarding

Protecting young people from group-based CSE requires more than individual interventions. It calls for an understanding related to the context of the places, relationships, and social settings where exploitation occurs. Traditional child protection systems have largely focused on the family home, yet for many children, harm happens elsewhere: in peer groups, schools, neighbourhoods, or online spaces.

Contextual safeguarding extends protection into these wider environments. It encourages agencies to look beyond the individual child and ask what it is about their surroundings that makes exploitation possible.

In practice, this means:

1. Building positive peer networks. To foster safe, respectful peer relationships and help young people shape social norms that discourage exploitation. This includes understanding how peer pressure, exclusion, or status can create risk; and building group cultures based on empathy, equality, and mutual protection.

2. Engaging community partners. To train teachers, youth workers, transport staff, and business owners to recognise and respond to signs of exploitation.

3. Sharing responsibility. To ensure education, health, police, and social services coordinate intelligence rather than working in silos.

4. Embedding survivor insight. To design policies informed by those who have lived through exploitation.

Contextual safeguarding challenges the idea that children “choose” risky situations. It reframes them as navigating unsafe contexts created by adult neglect and social inequality. This shift moves responsibility back where it belongs, to systems and communities that must ensure safety, not blame vulnerability.

This approach would mean prevention is no longer reactive or case-by-case. Instead, protection becomes proactive which is woven into the social fabric of schools, communities, and public spaces where young people live their everyday lives.

Reframing the Conversation

The phrase “grooming gangs” simplifies what is, in reality, a complex and deeply rooted form of gender-based violence. Reframing the issue through the lens of group-based CSE and contextual safeguarding allows us to centre survivors and strengthen accountability.

This shift requires leadership from all levels, including policymakers, practitioners, educators, and communities, to move beyond rhetoric and toward sustained, coordinated action. Survivors of group-based CSE have told us what they need are to be believed, to be safe, and to be part of shaping the solutions.

Protecting them means listening not just to their stories, but their concerns on the environments that failed them; and rebuilding those contexts with care, equity, and vigilance. When safeguarding becomes truly contextual, prevention becomes collective. And that is how lasting change begins.