‘This is a film I hoped I’d never have to make,” Anna Hall says of her new documentary, Groomed: A National Scandal, which airs on Channel 4 on Wednesday. “I didn’t want to do this again because I knew what I was going to put myself and everyone else through … it takes an emotional toll.”
When Hall exposed what is now known as gang grooming in her first film, Edge of the City, in 2004, she never imagined she would be revisiting the subject 21 years later.
Groomed is not a look back at a moment of shame in Britain’s history, but a victim-first account of how a scandal that affected thousands of young girls throughout the 1990s and 2000s is still unfolding today. The safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, appeared to suggest this month that regional inquiries into the gangs promised in January by the government might not now go ahead, forcing the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to insist days later that they would.
“There is still unresolved business for all of those women,” says Hall, 56. She is sitting in her office in Leeds amid an eclectic mix of family heirloom furniture and her framed Bafta-nominated film posters.
Hall began investigating grooming gangs as a 28-year-old television researcher in 1996. She “stumbled upon” the story when, during a meeting in the office canteen in Yorkshire, a senior director at Barnardo’s children’s charity told her they had uncovered a pattern of grooming.
“They had documented a cycle of abuse where children were being sexually exploited,” says Hall, showing the folder of handwritten notes she kept from that meeting.
The story went on to consume three decades of her life. “The level of confidence that I’ve had in this story is because of that research that I saw in 1996, because I knew it wasn’t a spurious claim,” she says. “It was Barnardo’s saying, ‘This is what we’ve uncovered and this is the pattern’.”
Dismissed as ‘child prostitutes’
In Groomed, five women from across the UK, including Manchester, London and West Yorkshire, recount how criminal networks, largely consisting of men of Pakistani origin, sexually exploited and abused them, while the authorities, aware of what was happening, labelled the girls child prostitutes and did little to intervene. The “driving force” behind the new film, Hall explains, was a long-standing police source telling her that “grooming is even worse now than it was in 2004”.
As Chantelle, a 32-year-old victim from Manchester, speaking publicly for the first time, explains: “I was labelled a prostitute at the age of 14. You carry that label with you. For all those years, I’ve been too embarrassed to speak about it, I thought that I was the problem. But now I want everyone to know about all the trauma, all the let-down, everything that I’ve been through.”
The abuse networks spanned towns and cities across the UK, including Rotherham, Bradford, Oxford, Derby and Oldham, but the pattern was always the same. Girls aged about 11 or 12, usually from vulnerable backgrounds, were targeted by groups of men posing as their “boyfriends”. They were plied with drink and drugs, raped, offered out for sex with other men and threatened or beaten into silence. Against a backdrop of fraught racial tensions nationwide, the authorities, afraid of being labelled racist, were reluctant to tackle the problem. Several police forces have since issued public apologies.
“There was a really long period where everybody was pussyfooting around the issue. I was really angry about that,” says Hall, who “had to ride out the storm of being called a racist” after Edge of the City.
Years of neglected reports, unaccounted-for children and abandoned police inquiries followed. The total number of victims is unknown. An inquiry in 2022 said it was “not possible to know the scale of child sexual exploitation by networks”.
‘Why did Elon Musk have to intervene?’
Although Hall has been working on the documentary for three years, the issue was thrust onto the world stage in January, when the tech tycoon Elon Musk, in a series of posts on his social media platform X, accused the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, of failing to deal with the scandal while head of the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013. Starmer implied this was “spreading lies and misinformation”.
Yvette Cooper then announceda nationwide review of grooming gang evidence, as well as five government-backed local inquiries, leading to questions about whether this had occurred only as a result of Musk’s intervention. The government insisted it hadn’t.
While Hall encourages action, she questions whether it will actually result in change.
“I couldn’t believe it was happening again. It felt like déjà vu, suddenly we were right in the middle of something,” says Hall. While she thought Musk’s comments were “ridiculous”, she wonders: “Why did Elon Musk have to intervene for a Labour government to take action?”
Hall’s other work has explored the scandal from multiple perspectives. Edge of the City, a film that caused the director “sadness” because of the way “it came and went”, was told through the eyes of social workers in Bradford. In 2011, she spoke to the Pakistani community for Dispatches: Britain’s Sex Gangs. From 2009, she trailed Telford police for three years as they concluded Operation Chalice, one of the country’s biggest child sex abuse cases, in The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Gangs. After the documentary aired, Starmer, then the director of public prosecutions, joined Hall, the victims and their families at a private round-table meeting.
“He listened, there was a positive change after that film,” Hall says. She requested an interview with Starmer for the new documentary but he declined.
‘I didn’t want victims hidden in silhouette’
Hall’s focus this time is on women such as Chantelle, whose childhoods were taken from them and whose lives have been plagued by failed attempts to convict their abusers.
“What I felt had been missing was the voice of the survivor,” says Hall. “I didn’t want to do a film where they’re hidden in a blacked-out silhouette.”
The documentary is difficult to watch. One woman who became caught up in a grooming gang when she was 14 says the number of men who abused her is in the hundreds. A year after the abuse started she was placed under a police protection order, yet after an incident involving her, another younger girl and a group of groomers, she was charged and imprisoned for inciting sexual activity on a minor. She remains on the sex offenders’ register, while her abusers remain at large.
Chantelle was contacted by Greater Manchester police in 2019 as part of Operation Green Jacket, which is reinvestigating cases from the early 2000s. After countless interviews, and having identified an abuser in an identification parade, nobody has been charged. During that time, Chantelle says one of her abusers admitted himself to a mental health unit. Another has died.
“That’s what’s going to happen before the rest of the men get charged or caught: they’ll die,” says Chantelle. She continues to struggle in her communications with police and claims they have failed to deliver on countless promises of convictions, as well as denying previous conversations with her. “I was told it would take a maximum of two years because I didn’t want to drag it all back up,” she says. “I didn’t want to put myself through it all again.”
Hall hopes the film will help people “to see that the thousands of victims should have been treated as children, not consenting adults”. She says her police sources from the early 2000s tell her that the same pattern of grooming is still happening today, exacerbated by the internet and social media. One woman in the film became a victim of gang grooming in 2022, after initially being contacted through Snapchat.
“In 1996, Barnardo’s were warning parents of a pattern of sexual exploitation. Fast forward to 2025 and every parent in the country needs to know that every child is at risk of exploitation online,” says Hall. “It would be foolish to think this doesn’t happen in every city, it does. I want people to think, ‘Is this happening in my city?’ The trafficking of schoolchildren is happening all over the country.”
She doesn’t plan to make any more films on grooming gangs, but is calling for the creation of an independent national child protection agency.
“We need to stop authorities marking their own homework and sweeping things under the carpet,” she says.
Although speaking out has been difficult for victims such as Chantelle, having the confidence to do so more than two decades later is a huge relief.
“Throughout my childhood and my early adult life, I tried to put everything I’d been through into a dark hole, but now I’ve found my voice,” she says. “Apologies mean nothing, I want to see actions, I want to see people held accountable and I want to know why car crime and burglaries were more important than my childhood. I wasn’t the problem, I was a child who was let down. I’m speaking out so that all those other girls know they’re not alone. There’s thousands of us.”
Chantelle is supported by the Maggie Oliver Foundation, which provides support to survivors and those at risk of childhood sexual abuse and exploitation.
Groomed: A National Scandal is on Channel 4 on Wednesday at 9pm
