United Kingdom: a report revealed that dozens of girls were sent to the Middle East and forced into marriage

The independent report The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, driven by British MP Rupert Lowe and published on June 16, revealed that girls victims of grooming gangs in the UK may have been trafficked outside the country and sent to predominantly Muslim destinations, where they were subjected to Islamic marriages.

The investigation, spanning 219 pages and led by survivors like Sammy Woodhouse, gathers testimonies from victims, family members, whistleblowers, and specialists. The document exposes how these sexual exploitation networks operated for decades in various British cities, with a recurring pattern of recruitment, abuse, internal trafficking, institutional silence, and control over vulnerable minors.

The investigation asserts that the victims were mostly white British girls, many of whom came from vulnerable backgrounds, who were contacted by adult men, manipulated with alcohol, drugs, or gifts, and then taken to houses, hotels, restaurants, or taxis where they were abused by organized groups. In some cases, according to the document, the girls were also sent abroad to prevent reporting, maintain control over them, and reinforce a logic of “ownership” by the abusers.

One of the strongest points of the report indicates that some victims were trafficked to the Middle East to be subjected to Islamic marriages. It also mentions testimonies about attempts to transfer them to Pakistan and other regions, which led British lawmakers to call for a specific national investigation into international trafficking, modern slavery, and exploitation linked to these networks.

The report attributes the phenomenon mainly to gangs made up of men of Pakistani and Muslim origin. The audit commissioned by the British government in 2025 had warned that authorities had avoided recording or accurately analyzing the ethnicity of perpetrators for years due to fear of accusations of racism, although it also acknowledged local evidence of a disproportionate presence of men of Asian origin in cases of group sexual exploitation.

The most cited figure from the report speaks of at least 250,000 victims since the mid-20th century. However, this is not an official count - given that the Labour government deliberately operated to avoid the issue gaining prominence - but rather an estimate based on previous extrapolations