{"id":216671,"date":"2025-10-22T00:45:04","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T00:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/216671\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T00:45:04","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T00:45:04","slug":"london-grooming-gang-victims-killing-themselves-sadiq-khan-told-uk-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/216671\/","title":{"rendered":"London grooming gang victims \u2018killing themselves\u2019 Sadiq Khan told | UK | News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victims of London grooming gangs are killing themselves while \u201cdelusional\u201d Sadiq Khan<\/a> denies the city has a problem, an author and campaigner for children in care has claimed.<\/p>\n

Chris Wild, who has spent the past 15 years working in London\u2019s<\/a> care system, said he had first-hand experience dealing with over 40 cases of child sexual exploitation where the authorities took no action.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve seen kids committing suicide because nothing’s happened,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked in a children’s home where four girls were being sexually abused and raped. I remember going through that process of reporting it to the police.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c[I did a] Missing Persons Report, [for] a young girl who had been picked up by grown men in a car in London, driven to a location [and] forced to do things against her will. [She\u2019d] come back to the children\u2019s home crying her eyes out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShe used to soil her pants [to] protect herself so nobody would want to go around that area because it would be seen as unhygienic. That is fear on a different level.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen [I] report[ed] it to the police they didn’t take it seriously. Can you imagine how demoralising that is? You lose faith in your human instinct, everything, you lose faith in humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you see it as a care worker, you’re willing to do anything to risk your own job to keep her safe. [But] it’s not my job to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wild has been a longstanding critic of official denials that grooming gangs don\u2019t exist in London. In June, shortly after the mayor claimed there were \u201cno reports\u201d or \u201cindications\u201d of such groups in the capital, he wrote on X: \u201cWhen it comes to grooming gangs in London, it\u2019s dangerously naive to believe they don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best-selling author said his experience showed that the capital was \u201c10 times worse\u201d and \u201con another level\u201d compared to the rest of the country.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cIt’s on the rise. The statistics are going up [and] children will continue to be abused because we don’t have the right laws or legislations in place. We don’t take it seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is 2025 in England. This is not another part of the world where they’re really struggling economically or financially. We’re one of the richest countries, but we can’t keep children safe in our care systems. What does that tell you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wild said he was dismayed by the messages coming from City Hall about grooming gangs and questioned why Sadiq Khan would deny that London has an issue.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cTo hear reports from the Mayor’s office saying \u2018but this is not a problem here\u2019 show the guy’s deluded. You’ve got to ask yourself the question: \u2018who are they protecting? What are they protecting?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to questions on child sexual exploitation, both Khan and the Met have frequently said that drug gangs pose a bigger threat to young Londoners.<\/p>\n

And while Mr Wild welcomed the emphasis on broader criminality, he believed that gangs who sexually exploit children should be made to wear the shame their horrific crimes carry.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet’s stop giving them this bravado name of gangsters and criminal gangs. They are paedophiles,\u201d said Mr Wild. \u201cIf you rape a child, you are a paedophile. And then if you start labelling them in court, putting them on a sex register list as well for the rest of your life, it’s going to be a deterrent.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will be their problem when they end up in prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wild was one of the experts the Express consulted for our investigation into public reports read by Sadiq Khan that appeared to show evidence of grooming gangs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His verdict was not only that these were examples of child sex abuse rings in London, but just a small sample of many.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wild\u2019s response to a victim case study from a 2016 Met Police inspection report that described a 16-year-old girl being raped over a three-year period by a group of men who would threaten to hurt her if she spoke out was: \u201cYeah, that’s ubiquitous, happening all over London.\u201d<\/p>\n

Presented with details about another child from Tower Hamlets discussed during the 2022 Grooming Gangs inquiry, who was suspected of being plied with alcohol and raped by a group of men from the age of 13, Mr Wild said: \u201cI would say if you’ve got 80 girls in care, 79 of them will have a story like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

After being presented with the findings of our investigation, the Metropolitan Police made a remarkable reversal of its previous official stance on grooming gangs<\/a> by admitting it had a \u201cvery significant number\u201d of cases being reassessed as part of an official Home Office grooming gangs review.<\/p>\n

In response to the issues raised in this story a spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: \u201cThe Mayor has always been clear that the safety of Londoners is his top priority and nowhere is this truer than in safeguarding children.<\/p>\n

\u201cSadiq is committed to doing all he can to protect children in London from organised criminal and sexual exploitation and bring perpetrators to justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis includes his \u00a315.6million Violence and Exploitation Support Service which provides specialist support to young Londoners who are vulnerable, caught up in or being exploited by criminal gangs in the capital as well as supporting the Met to deliver a new child first approach to safeguarding and enforcement action to tackle county lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe remain vigilant to emerging and changing threats and will continue to do everything we can to protect children in the capital from abuse, violence and exploitation in all its forms.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Met Police added: “We understand the very real concern the public have around so-called grooming gangs and treat all allegations of sexual offences and exploitation extremely seriously.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur data shows the group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation picture in London is more varied than in other parts of the country and does not neatly align with patterns of methodology, ethnicity or nationality seen elsewhere and reported on extensively.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are utterly committed to protecting vulnerable children and bringing those responsible to justice. There is still much work to be done, including encouraging reporting of offences so we have the fullest possible picture, but we have made significant improvements in the past decade to enable us to do that effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Victims of London grooming gangs are killing themselves while \u201cdelusional\u201d Sadiq Khan denies the city has a problem,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[92013,92935,924,59,57,58,16968,92934,50,14751,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-216671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-child-sexual-exploitation","9":"tag-chris-wild","10":"tag-crime","11":"tag-gb","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-greatbritain","14":"tag-grooming-gangs","15":"tag-london-grooming-gangs","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-sadiq-khan","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}