Taiyab Hussain, Mohammed Hizar Rizwan, Shaheem Ratyal, and Sohail Raja Ali pleaded guilty to sex offences against four girls aged between 13 and 14 years old.
The four men, aged 18 to 19, admitted to a range of offences including sexual activity with a child, possessing indecent photographs of children, and causing a child to engage in sexual activity at Stafford Crown Court on Friday.
The four men resident in Burton upon Trent, West Midlands, England, were only brought to justice after one of the young victims watched a film that warned girls could be groomed without realising it, and then told her father that she was being abused.
Staffordshire Police began an investigation and found four girls had been sexually abused between December 2016 and March 2017.
Detective Inspector Simon Caton, the Senior Investigating Officer for the investigation from the force’s Child Sexual Exploitation Team, said: “These vulnerable girls found themselves in an impossible situation at the hands of these men who clearly acted together using coercion and intimidation to take advantage of them. They exploited the victims for sexual gratification.”
Hussain, 19, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual activity with a child; two counts of causing a child to engage in sexual activity; and two counts of possession of an indecent photograph of a child.
Rizwan, 18, admitted to four counts of sexual activity with a child; one count of causing a child to engage in sexual activity; and one count of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
Ratyal, 19, pleaded guilty to one count of sexual activity with a child and five counts of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
Ali, 19, admitted to three counts of sexual activity with a child and one count of causing a child to engage in sexual activity.
All four child abusers will be sentenced on April 16th.
In 2014, a West Midlands police report found that three-quarters of known child sex groomers in the county were of “Asian” (South Asian) ethnicity, specifically of Pakistani origin, and 82 per cent of the victims, aged 14 to 16, were white.
The issue of child grooming and sexual exploitation by groups of Pakistani-origin Muslim men has been exposed following the Rotherham and Rochdale grooming scandals in 2013 and 2010 respectively, where it was found that authorities failed to act in the protection of the mostly white, English victims for fear of being called racist.
Child sex abuse rings are still being prosecuted across the country; in August 2017, nearly 20 predominantly Pakistani Muslim men were convicted for operating a child sexual exploitation ring in Newcastle in the largest case of its kind since Rochdale and Rotherham.
In January, chief of children’s services in Rotherham Ian Thomas denied that there could be a racial aspect to grooming gangs.
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