Bias • June 19th, 2026

UK Rape Gang Inquiry Report Widely Covered by Right, Barely by Left and Center

United Kingdom,Sexual Assault,Muslims,Islam,Sexual Misconduct,Media Bias,Media Bias Alert

iStock via Sky News

On Tuesday, British MP Rupert Lowe and his right-wing Restore Britain party released a privately-funded 219-page report that accused British authorities of allowing the “repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy,” and “forced Islamic conversion” of “at the very least, 250,000 young white girls.” The inquiry placed blame on decades-long sexual exploitation networks run primarily by men of Muslim origins.

As of early June 19, AllSides found 28 pieces of coverage from 20 different sources on the right, but from the left and center, only Sky News (Lean Left), UnHerd (Center), and Lead Stories (Lean Left) covered the story.

Coverage of the report has been a bit of a slow burn, with many outlets not posting about it until several days after it was published. British outlets UnHerd and Sky News both published coverage earlier than many American outlets on the right, likely, at least in part, to the international nature of the story. The report was first widely circulated on X after Lowe himself shared it, which could also be a contributing factor to the slow-burning nature of coverage.

‘Rape Gangs’ in Mainstream Media

“Grooming gangs” or “rape gangs,” as they are often referred to in media, have been a controversial issue for years in the United Kingdom. The topic’s last major appearance in the American news cycle came in January 2025, when Elon Musk raised concerns that the story had not been paid enough attention. Then, mainstream outlets across the spectrum published drastically different perspectives on the matter.

From the Left

Sky News (Lean Left) and Lead Stories (Lean Left) were the only outlets from the left AllSides found to cover the story.

Sky News didn’t mention the report in its headline or lead. It instead framed the story through the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) decision to reinvestigate certain cases pertaining to grooming gangs. It mentioned Lowe’s report, which generated a lot of interest from outlets on the right, with some context at the end of its article.

Lead Stories highlighted in a fact check that the 250,000 figure included in Lowe’s report was based on a 2019 claim by former Independence Party leader MP Malcolm Pearson. Pearson first made the claim months earlier, in 2018, when speaking to parliament. He based his estimate on a hypothetical extrapolation of figures included in “the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford.”

The Jay Report was a 2014 inquiry commissioned by Rotherham – a city of 110,000 – that found “at least 1,400 children were being systematically sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013” by men predominantly of Pakistani ethnicity. In its coverage, Lead Stories linked to the final report on the inquiry, which was published in 2022.

Separately, a 2016 investigation by The Mirror (Left) claimed up to 1,000 children were sexually abused in Telford – a city of 155,000 – since the 1980s.

From the Center

The only coverage AllSides found from a Center outlet was an opinion from Adam Wren published by UnHerd (Center). Wren, who has only published one other feature with the publication – an April 2025 opinion, also about grooming gangs – described Lowe’s report as “flawed.” Wren noted that “much of what [the report] advocates was widely discussed when the issue of grooming gangs came to national prominence over a year ago, and some proposals are already Government policy.” He proposed looking further than just Islam as a culprit and into “a more complex set of drivers around clan culture and ethnicity.”

He concluded:

“What produced these gangs in English towns was not religious ideology but geography and kinship: dense, intermarried communities with their own authority structures, enough accumulated local power to capture institutions, and a strong instinct to close ranks against outside scrutiny. The presence of Islam in the abuse supplies the social glue and vocabulary rather than the motive. And it is precisely the ordinariness of that motive that made this so dangerous: these were not acts of ideological warfare but the product of communal loyalty. The banality is the point.

By framing this as a civilizational conflict, the new report mistakes the nature of what it is describing, making it harder to understand and harder to prevent. An analysis rooted in clan culture and institutional failure would be more accurate, leaving us better equipped to address the rot that actually allowed these horrors to take place.”

Rupert Lowe’s rape gangs report is a missed opportunity - UnHerd (Center)

From the Right

The right covered the story far more than the left and center, producing a volume of headlines that were flush with sensationalism, subjective qualifying adjectives, viewpoint placement, and slant, among other forms of bias. While opinions are expected to be biased, many outlets from the right showed significant amounts of bias in news coverage as well.

Notably absent from coverage on the right as of early June 19 were several major mainstream outlets like Daily Mail (Lean Right), Newsmax (Right), The New York Post (Lean Right), and The Washington Examiner (Lean Right).

Several outlets published multiple pieces on the matter, including The Daily Wire (Right), which published four separate news articles.

News & Analysis

Opinion

Notably, one of Britain’s most mainstream conservative newspapers, The Telegraph (Lean Right), has covered grooming gangs extensively in recent months and twice in the past week, though neither feature mentioned Lowe’s report. It did publish a piece on Lowe, however, titled, “White supremacists fund Rupert Lowe’s party.”

When The Telegraph asked Lowe for comment for the piece, he replied, “The Telegraph has failed to cover the findings of our rape gang inquiry report, which details the mass rape of young vulnerable English girls by gangs of Pakistani Muslims, yet finds the time to publish such pointless smear pieces. Absolutely pathetic.”

Note: AllSides team members have commented internally on the Media Bias Rating of The Telegraph several times over the past year and are currently reviewing the outlet, which has been rated Lean Right since it was first assessed in 2016. A March 2026 Blind Bias Survey of over 381 respondents across the political spectrum yielded a result on the left side of AllSides’ Center rating at -0.43.

British Political Context

Rupert Lowe founded the right-wing Restore Britain party in March as part of a split from the right-wing party Reform UK, which is led by MP Nigel Farage. Both parties have expressed strong views against immigration, with Lowe’s new Restore party appearing, at the moment at least, to desire a more hardline approach.

Lowe’s report came just days before a parliamentary election on June 18 in Makerfield, where the liberal Labour party candidate secured the parliamentary seat with 55% of the vote. Reform won 35%, and Restore won 7%, despite pre-election polling showing Reform was likely to be the most popular choice. The result stands in contrast to how Makerfield voted in May during council elections, when Reform swept all wards in the district and made huge gains across much of the UK.

The Left and Center Missed, But You Don’t Have To

Considering the above coverage analysis, it is clear that Lowe’s report was very much of interest to sources on the right, and of minimal interest to those from the left and center. One could argue that outlets from the left and center felt the story didn’t fit their agenda, or instead that they didn’t deem the report credible or interesting enough to warrant coverage. On the other hand, outlets on the right authored a flurry of coverage on the matter, much of it rife with many forms of bias.

Nonetheless, considering the severity of the allegations, long track record of investigations, and political enthusiasm for both immigration and sexual assault, it’s unlikely that news and discourse on grooming gangs will go away any time soon. Due to the heavily lopsided split in coverage, readers could have missed the news entirely – illustrating yet another solid example of why it’s important to consume a variety of media across the spectrum. Without doing so, readers could easily become trapped in one algorithmic bubble or the other and never be given the chance to see the various sides of major social and political issues.

Andy Gorel is the Managing Editor of AllSides. He has a Center bias.

This piece was reviewed by Emily Allen, Education Experience Manager & News Editor (Left), and Johnathon Held, News Editor & Bias Analyst (Lean Right).

United Kingdom,Sexual Assault,Muslims,Islam,Sexual Misconduct,Media Bias,Media Bias Alert