By Maureen O’Hara

The similarities between the two types of child sexual exploitation network

The trafficking networks run by Jeffrey Epstein and the UK networks usually called ‘grooming gangs’ operated in different countries and within very different socio-economic environments, but were both part of the wider sex trade in which girls and women (and sometimes boys and young men) are routinely sexually abused and traded between men for money or other forms of gain. There were some important differences between the operation of the two types of network, but the ways in which they abused and exploited girls and women are very similar.

The primary motivation of the ‘grooming gangs’ is financial gain. As well as sexually abusing the girls they target themselves, they sell them to other men who sexually abuse them. They are pimps. Calling them ‘grooming gangs’ obscures this fact. All child sexual abuse except assaults by strangers involves the grooming of children, but not all child sexual abuse is motivated by financial gain. I use the term pimping gangs here because it describes what they do more accurately than ‘grooming gangs’.

Epstein operated differently in some ways, but his networks still revolved around the buying and selling of girls and women as sexual commodities. He paid for sex with girls and young women – sometimes by paying the girls themselves and sometimes by paying traffickers. He also trafficked the young women he controlled to other men. Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Epstein for more than two years from the age of 16, described being “trafficked to a multitude of powerful men”. (1, p.111)

Both the pimping gangs and Epstein’s network abused adult women as well as minors. They are both sometimes referred to as ‘paedophiles’, which implies that they are exclusively interested in children sexually, but this is not the case. Fiona Goddard, who was abused by a pimping gang while she was in local authority care in Bradford, has said:

“They got their own enjoyment out of it, But I don’t think it was because they were attracted to children, I think it’s because they knew we were easier to target and control. We were vulnerable and susceptible.” (2)

Epstein sexually abused minors and young adults, and he was also involved in trafficking adult women.

Both Epstein and the pimping gangs targeted girls and young women, groomed them to break down their boundaries and make them easier to control, sexually abused and coercively controlled them, and exchanged them with other men either for money or for other gains. In both cases, this included enhancing their social standing within networks of other abusive men. In Epstein’s case, providing other wealthy men with girls and women they could treat like sexual commodities helped him maintain a powerful position within elite male networks, who included financiers, politicians, and other influential men.

In both cases, the girls and women who were targeted were often vulnerable because of histories of abuse, experience of care systems, poverty, and homelessness. Most of the girls targeted by the pimping gangs were working class. So were many of the girls targeted by Epstein. All of them came from backgrounds with much less economic and social status than Epstein and the elite circles he moved in.

The pimping gangs often use their younger members to recruit girls by acting like ‘boyfriends’. Later the ‘boyfriends’ introduce the girls to the older men who control the gang. Epstein used one of his adult partners, Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as some of the girls and young women he had already abused, to recruit girls. They offered the girls employment with Epstein, often as masseuses. Epstein was also provided with girls by other traffickers.

The girls were controlled by the creation of emotional dependence and by different forms of coercion.

The pimping gangs often used physical and sexual violence to maintain control. In her 2014 Inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, Alexis Jay states:

“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.” (3, p. 1)

Epstein does not seem to have used physical violence, but he used threats relating to his powerful social position to prevent the girls he controlled from telling anyone what he was doing.

Virginia Giuffre described Epstein showing her a photograph of her younger brother; telling her that he knew where he went to school; and then saying, “And I own the Palm Beach Police Department, so they won’t do anything about it.” (1, p.83).

Giuffre said that her “job” with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was:

“… to do whatever they asked whenever they asked it. There were no bars on the window or locks on the door. But I was a prisoner trapped in an invisible cage.” (1, p.75)

Institutional denial and victim-blaming

For many years, in the case of both Epstein and the pimping gangs, institutions whose role was to safeguard children from harm or to hold perpetrators of abuse accountable, denied or minimised the sexual abuse of the girls or blamed the girls for it.

Police and social services’ denial in the UK

In the UK, social services departments, who are the key agency with responsibility for child safeguarding, failed to take action when the girls or their families reported the abuse to them, and often held the girls responsible for their own abuse. Police services often failed to investigate when reports were made to them.

Rochdale Borough’s Safeguarding Children Board (RBSCB) commissioned a review of multi-agency responses to the sexual exploitation of children in the area during the period from 2007 to 2012. It notes that children’s social care services generally took ‘no further action’ when sexual exploitation was reported to them, and that their case files often stated that children were engaging in “consensual sexual activity”.

Fiona Goddard has talked about the way she was described in social services files. Social workers said she was making wrong choices, that she was the ringleader, that she was exchanging sex for gifts, and that she was running a brothel. Fiona was 15 years old when social workers made these comments. Her files also record that she had made seven reports of rape or sexual assault to social services while she was in their care. Social services failed to investigate any of them.

These are just some examples of the professional denial which has taken place. It has been identified in inquiry reports relating to child sexual exploitation in other areas, including Alexis Jay’s report about Rotherham, and reports relating to Oxfordshire and Telford.

Public discussion about the failure of the police and social services to take action against the pimping gangs in many areas has focussed on their fear of being seen as racist. Among the pimping gangs who are known about publicly, Pakistani Muslim men have been over-represented compared to men of other ethnic and religious groups: although the backgrounds of perpetrators of other forms of child sexual abuse tend to broadly reflect the backgrounds of the general population.

In her 2025 national audit of what she calls group-based child sexual exploitation, Baroness Louise Casey states:

“The question of the ethnicity of perpetrators has been a key question for this audit, having been raised in inquiries and reports going back many years. We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.

Despite the lack of a full picture in the national data sets, there is enough evidence available in local police data in three police force areas which we examined which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination.” (7, p.8)

Whatever the proportions of different ethnic and religious groups among the UK’s pimping gangs, it is clear that when they have been from Pakistani or other Muslim backgrounds there has been institutional reluctance to acknowledge the abuse, at least in the past.

Alexis Jay states that several social services staff members interviewed for her report said they were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators in Rotherham, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so. Several councillors interviewed believed that identifying the race of the perpetrators would “give oxygen” to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion.

However, fear of being seen as racist was not the only reason for institutional complicity with the abuse. Misogyny and class prejudice played an important part. Alexis Jay’s report states that the police in Rotherham regarded the girls who were being abused with contempt.

When asked why she thought the agencies failed to take action about the abuse she was subjected to, Fiona Goddard has said it was because of:

“An over-the-top sense of political correctness, not wanting to offend people or hurt people’s feelings which played into a fear of racism. Deeply embedded classism that seem to come within these services where we were seen as less than, all compounded by misogyny.”

State prosecutors’ denial in the US: Jeffrey Epstein’s “sweetheart deal”

Epstein’s sexual exploitation of girls and young women was reported to the police long before his prosecution in 2019.

In 2005 a 14-year-old girl reported to the Palm Beach Police Department that Epstein had sexually assaulted her. In 2006, after a year’s investigation, the police initiated a prosecution against Epstein and another person accused of trafficking girls to him for multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with minors. The police had statements against Epstein from five girls below the age of consent, and knowledge of seventeen other possible victims of his abuse.

In an unusual move in this sort of case, the Palm Beach County State Attorney took control of the case and arranged for a grand jury to investigate the charges against Epstein and his co-defendant.

A grand jury is different from a jury which tries defendants. Its role is to assess the evidence presented by prosecutors and determine whether there is “probable cause” to believe an individual committed a crime and should be put on trial. If the grand jury determines there is enough evidence, an indictment (charge) will be issued against the individual. In Epstein’s case, the grand jury did not indict Epstein or his co-defendant on a single count of child abuse.

After some legal wrangling, the Justice Department and Epstein’s lawyers agreed a plea agreement, under which Epstein would not go to trial if he pleaded guilty to two offences. These were one count of solicitation of prostitution of an adult, and one of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18. These offences carry a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment. Epstein was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and served thirteen months. Throughout his sentence Epstein was allowed to leave the prison for 12 hours every day. This came to be known as a “sweetheart deal”.

The prosecutors also agreed to a federal non-prosecution agreement in relation to all of the other individuals who were alleged to have been involved in Epstein’s offences.

In Epstein’s case, the police seem to have taken the allegations seriously and done a thorough investigation, but the case was undermined by state prosecutors. Julie K Brown, an investigative journalist who has written a book about Epstein, interviewed the police officers involved in the investigation years after the “sweetheart deal” (8). They told her that they had the impression at the time that prosecutors were throwing the case, and that they had held back important evidence from the grand jury. They also said that some evidence had disappeared.

Detective Joe Recarey said that the prosecutors’ reasons for sabotaging the prosecution were partly linked to local Democratic party politics. Epstein was a party donor and well connected to Palm Beach’s elites. Recarey said that the Palm Beach State Attorney was motivated by his career ambitions. The prosecutors also seem to have been intimidated by Epstein’s lawyers.

After the 2008 “sweetheart deal”, no criminal proceedings were taken against Epstein again until 2019, when he was charged with offences relating to the sex trafficking of minors during the period from 2002 to 2005. Epstein died in prison while awaiting trial. The official position is that he committed suicide.

In 2021 Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of several offences relating to the sex trafficking of minors over the course of ten years. In 2022 she was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

Institutional victim-blaming and the framing of prostitution

A newspaper columnist interviewed by Julie K Brown who had covered the first Epstein case told her that he recalled prosecutors telling him that:

“…the girls amounted to nothing more than prostitutes.” (8, p.129)

These were the words of prosecutors, whose role was to bring perpetrators of abuse to justice. The phrase “nothing more than” expresses deep contempt, portraying girls and women who are prostituted as worthless and not deserving of protection.

Similar comments were made by social workers and police officers in relation to girls who were being sexually exploited by pimping gangs in the UK.

Professionals in both the US and the UK used the word ‘prostitute’ to mean that the girls were freely choosing what was being done to them and it was therefore not abuse, or if there was any abuse involved the girls were bringing it on themselves.

This was despite the fact that most of the girls were not old enough in law to consent to sex and were of an age when most adults would not see them as mature enough emotionally for sex, especially with much older men. It is as if the exchange of money in prostitution makes the sexual abuse it involves invisible. For some of the professionals who were supposed to be protecting the girls this seems to have been the case even when the money went to pimps and not to the girls, and when the girls were telling them that they were being raped.

The sex trade is founded on sexual abuse, de-humanisation, and coercion, mainly of women and girls, but this reality is persistently denied or minimised within patriarchal culture. If the reality of the sex trade was widely acknowledged and discussed, it would be impossible to justify and maintain it.

The sex trade treats women and girls like commodities who can be used for someone else’s sexual pleasure (or sense of power), but the patriarchal framing of this trade minimises its abuses and blames and stigmatises those who are de-humanised and not those doing the de-humanising.

The victim-blaming of girls is linked to the victim-blaming of adult women who are prostituted. When the sexual commodification of women is normalised, this helps to create cultural contexts in which the sexual commodification of girls is more easily normalised or excused.

The sexual exploitation of girls and women are part of the same trade. Both the pimping gangs and Epstein’s network abused adult women as well as minors. A pimping gang prosecuted in Newcastle in 2017 was found to have sexually exploited girls and women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five. Epstein sexually abused young adults as well as minors, and he was also involved in trafficking older adult women to other men.

The sexual exploitation of children is an integral part of the sex trade. As long as the wider sex trade exists and is normalised, the trade’s sexual exploitation of children will continue.

After the institutional denial of the pimping gangs’ abuses of girls became known, policy makers decided that moving away from using the language of prostitution and referring to child sexual exploitation instead would help to improve institutional responses. The term ‘exploitation’ is helpful to some extent in that it emphasises harm, but it also obscures the profit motive involved and the links between the sexual exploitation of girls and adult women, understanding of which is essential to a full understanding of this form of child sexual abuse. The use of the term ‘grooming’ rather than ‘pimping’ has the same effect.

In the early 2000s, the children’s charity Barnardo’s suggested using the term ‘children abused through prostitution’ (10), but it was not widely adopted because of the use of the word ‘prostitution’, despite the fact that this term makes it clear that the involvement of children in prostitution is abuse. Had this term been adopted, professional and public understanding of the nature of what is now called child sexual exploitation might be much better developed.

The potential of the Nordic Model for challenging the sexual exploitation of children

The sexual exploitation of children can ultimately only be effectively challenged by an approach to law and policy that aims to work towards the reduction and long-term eradication of the wider sex trade. This would involve reducing men’s demand, which fuels the trade, because as long as there is demand pimps and traffickers will find ways to profit from it.

Reducing demand is the central aim of the Nordic Model. This model makes the purchase of sex a criminal offence, and decriminalises those who sell sex and provides support to help them to exit the trade. It also criminalises profiteering from the prostitution of others.

The law in  all of the UK currently criminalises the buying of sex with children, so the potential importance of the Nordic Model for challenging child sexual exploitation may not be immediately obvious. However, its importance lies in the potential of this model for changing the attitudes which give rise to the sexual commodification of both adults and children, and for helping to create a cultural context in which this commodification is no longer normalised. *

The potential effectiveness of an approach based on the Nordic Model for challenging the commercial sexual exploitation of children as well as adults is shown by the outcomes of the Ipswich Street Prostitution Strategy, which was developed in response to the murders of five prostituted women in Ipswich in 2006. This was a multi-agency strategy that aimed to deter sex buyers, provide routes out of prostitution, and prevent the entry into prostitution of children and young people in particular.

The project identified and supported over 400 children who were at risk of sexual exploitation over a six-year period. Its work was facilitated by an understanding that the prostitution of adults and of children are part of the same exploitative trade. If police officers, social workers, prosecutors and other professionals who play a role in protecting children and adults from abuse or in bringing perpetrators of abuse to justice understood this, institutional responses to children who are being sexually exploited, or who are at risk of sexual exploitation, could be transformed.

*A version of the Nordic Model was introduced in Northern Ireland in 2015. Research into its operation to date has not considered its impact on the sexual exploitation of children.

Works cited

1. Giuffre, V (2025) Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. Doubleday
2. Goddard, F (2026) ‘Bradford Grooming Gangs: Fiona’s Story – Escaped Trafficking to Pakistan – PART THREE,’ Open Justice UK,
3. Jay, A (2014) Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997-2013. Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council.
4. Rochdale Borough Safeguarding Children Board (2012) Review of Multi-agency Reponses to the Sexual Exploitation of Children. Rochdale Borough Safeguarding Children Board.
5. Bedford, A ( 2015 ) Serious Case Review into Child Sexual Exploitation in Oxfordshire: from the experiences of Children A, B, C, D, E, and F. Oxford Safeguarding Children Board.
6. Independent Inquiry into Telford Child Sexual Exploitation (IITCSE) (2022), Telford and Wrekin Co-operative Council.
7. Baroness Casey of Blackstock (2025) National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.
8. Brown, J K (2021) Perversion of Justice: The Jeffery Epstein Story. Harper Collins
9. Perraudin F (2017) ‘Eighteen people found guilty over Newcastle sex grooming network’, The Guardian. 09 August.
10. Crawley, Roberts and Shepherd (2004) Taking stock: Children and young people at risk of, or involved in, abuse through prostitution in Stockton-on-Tees. Barnardo’s,
11. Caton A (2016) ‘Written evidence submitted by Alan Caton OBE’, Home Affairs Committee Prostitution Inquiry, PRO0007’, 23 February 2016.