Oxford grooming survivors say 'hundreds' of abusers remain free and unpunished

Sarah walks past a shop, a petrol station, a restaurant. In each one, she sees a man who raped her. She was eleven when it started—cigarettes laced with heroin, then alcohol, then the debt that could only be paid with her body. More than twenty years later, three of her abusers sit in prison. The rest are free.

She is not alone in this. Two other women, Chloe and Rachel, have spoken to BBC Panorama about the same reality: they live in Oxford, the city where they were abused as children, and they regularly encounter men who were never charged, never tried, never convicted. All three believe hundreds of perpetrators remain unpunished. A former detective who led the initial investigation agrees with them.

The Oxford grooming gang prosecutions began in 2013, when seven men were convicted of trafficking and raping six girls over eight years. That trial opened a door. Subsequent investigations identified many more victims—by 2015, the estimate had reached more than 370 children affected in the city alone. Twenty-one men have now been convicted in connection with the gang. But the women say the investigations stopped far short of the truth.

Sarah's case illustrates the machinery of abuse and its aftermath. The men who groomed her told her the cigarettes and alcohol were gifts, then told her she owed them money. When she could not pay, they brought other men—one, two, six, seven at a time—and locked her in rooms. She was a child. The debt was a fiction. The abuse was systematic. In 2020, three men were convicted and jailed for between five and 24 years. By then, Sarah had spent most of her life fighting heroin addiction and had been imprisoned herself. "I think they should stay in there forever, because obviously they've taken my life," she says.

Chloe was thirteen when her abusers began the same pattern: befriend her, buy her things, get her drunk, tell her she owed them. She has never reported what happened to her. None of her abusers have faced justice. She is now in her thirties, a mother, and when she sees these men in the supermarket or driving around her neighborhood, she feels sick and cold. "This is where I live, it's where I grew up," she says. She cannot leave.

Rachel was twelve when the abuse began. She was trafficked to other towns and cities where men paid the gang for sex with her. When she tried to tell police what was happening, they did not believe her. Years later, she became a key witness in the 2013 trial. But even after convictions, she knows the scale of what was never prosecuted. She describes a police officer in Oxford who tried to sexually assault her in the back of a van—an incident she never reported because she had already learned that police were not safe. "There are a lot of people out there who have been involved in this to some degree or another, that have just been allowed to get on with their lives," she says.

Simon Morton, the former senior detective who led the initial investigation, does not dispute the survivors' account. "It's crazy, it's just ridiculous, the amount of people that were involved," he says. "We should've done more. It's tragic." He believes this type of abuse is still happening in Oxford. The core group was caught, he explains, but identification is extraordinarily difficult. The girls were often drugged, thrown into rooms with mattresses, subjected to a procession of men. Getting a victim to stand up in court a year later, to relive everything, to open the wound again and again—that is where the system fails.

The government has launched a national inquiry into why vulnerable children were not protected in England and Wales, examining whether attitudes toward the girls or the ethnicity of the perpetrators—many were older men of Pakistani heritage—contributed to police failures. In Oxford, a serious case review found no evidence that fear of being seen as racist had delayed action, but the question of why so many perpetrators were never identified remains unanswered. The three women continue to live with the consequences. Sarah says she has not been emotionally present for her children because she is not emotionally present for herself. Chloe panics about keeping her daughter safe. Rachel calls it the biggest scandal of a lifetime. They are asking for something that has not yet been delivered: an accounting of all the men who did this, and a promise that it will not happen again.