A days-long resurgence of interest in so-called “grooming gangs” — a polite newspeak for racist child rape gangs — in the UK has seen horror and outrage reignited and X-platform owner Elon Musk weigh in, amplifying the already surging discussion.

UK social media has been dominated over New Year’s by attention to the decades-long scandal, but really only made public in the past ten years, of gangs of predominantly but not entirely Pakistani men sexually abusing young English children. In the parlance of the UK media, these gangs are called ‘grooming gangs‘ as a polite shorthand, because the girls are ‘groomed’ with bribes including sweets, alcohol, and drugs before they are drawn into patterns of coercion and sexual abuse, and because it circumvents printing the graphic detail of cases in headlines.