
Last month, Elon Musk wrote a series of posts on X about a British scandal stretching back two decades. Gangs of men—almost all Muslim men of Pakistani ancestry—groomed and raped hundreds, and possibly thousands, of British girls, starting from the early 2000s. Social workers were cowed into silence, fearful of being called “racist.” Local police ignored, excused and, in some cases, reportedly abetted pedophile rapists across as many as 50 cities. And senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.”
Most Americans heard about this case for the first time after Musk started tweeting. Soon after, our own piece on the horror, “The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History,” went viral.
But one woman has been sounding the alarm for 22 years. Maggie Oliver was a police constable in Manchester, where she was the first to uncover the grooming gangs scandal. She doggedly pursued hundreds of cases, and tried to persuade victims to testify against their abusers. But she was repeatedly thwarted by authorities who didn’t want to rock the boat. Eventually, she resigned in protest.
Today she tells the story of her decades-long fight for justice. —The Editors.
Over the past few weeks, politicians, journalists, and commentators have expressed outrage that gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men have been raping British girls for years—and that many have not been punished. Many in these institutions have had every opportunity to help shut down this abuse over the last two decades, but they’re only speaking out now because it’s safe to jump on the bandwagon.
To those who have finally found a conscience, I ask: Where were you 20, or even 10, years ago?
Because when I tried to tell the world about this scandal, no one wanted to listen.
It all started with Victoria Agoglia. Born to a single mother, Victoria was only 8 years old when she was first placed in foster care, losing her mom soon afterward to cancer. After that, she grew up in a state-run care facility in Manchester, England. In 2001, after she turned 13, a man in his 20s started turning up at the care home and giving her hard drugs. Staff thought he was her pimp and dealer, and reported him to the police. But incredibly, the police never investigated him.
By 2003, Victoria had gone missing hundreds of times. She repeatedly returned to the care facility upset, disheveled, and drunk. She also told the staff that she had been threatened, assaulted, sexually abused, and raped by multiple men. But when staff also learned that she was being injected with heroin by an older man, no one thought to tell the police. Perhaps they assumed no one would lift a finger to help.
In September 2003, a young man picked Victoria up at the care home and took her to the apartment of 50-year-old Mohammed Yaqoob. That’s where Yaqoob twice injected her with heroin—leading her to overdose. After two days in a coma, she died at just 15 years old.
Victoria left behind a scribbled note, later given to police, which read:
I drank, smoked weed, took pills, had blown coke, had heroin—just for what? All you do is get a laugh out of it but it can also kill you. I got the rest of my life ahead of me. I am only 13. I have slept with people older than me, half of them I don’t even know there [sic] names. I am a slag and that is nothing to be proud of.