Andrew Norfolk had given everything. Four years of obsessive and searing investigative journalism had exposed a scandal of negligence by police and social services, leading to many hundreds, if not thousands, of vulnerable young girls being raped by a ring of grooming gangs of Pakistani heritage.
Emotionally battered and physically spent he may have been, but his investigation from 2011 made the most eloquent case for the importance of his profession: his reports in The Times led to several inquiries, a national action plan on child sexual exploitation, enhanced funding and training to tackle the issue, and new guidelines from the Crown Prosecution Service that led to a big increase in convictions.
When Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley, first raised concerns in 2003 about girls being groomed by older men of Asian heritage outside two local schools, Norfolk’s first thought was that it was a “dream story for the far right”. Yet he continued to notice groups of men being prosecuted for sexual grooming in the north of England. The cases always involved girls between the ages of 11 and 15 being plied with alcohol and drugs, put into cars and taken to “parties” where a lot of men were waiting to have sex with them. Cases had one other thing in common. Most of the defendants were of Pakistani heritage.
Norfolk still demurred but the itch would not go away. Finally, in August 2010, he heard a radio report of nine men convicted at Manchester crown court for multiple sex offences against a 14-year-old who had been “befriended” and “passed around”. That night he looked the case up. All in the dock were of Pakistani heritage. “I decided I’ve got to get over my fear that this story is impossible to cover,” said Norfolk, whose mien of restrained owlishness belied how deeply he cared and who was never long separated from a Marlboro Gold.
Norfolk’s next three months exemplified old-fashioned tradecraft, scouring archive court material and local newspaper articles in libraries. He identified 17 cases in 13 places where 56 men had been convicted; 50 were Pakistani Muslims. “We found clear evidence of a crime pattern that was having the most devastating impact on some of the most vulnerable, innocent people in our society.”
When he put his findings to the police and social services, he was met by a “wall of silence”, and told that ethnicity had no relevance to the pattern of offending.
Norfolk then made contact with two charities, who put him in touch with victims, many of whom came from troubled backgrounds, often living in care. He heard a recurring story of mothers not being listened to. “Police officers and social workers regarded victims with contempt as wilful teenagers.”
He wrote slowly, agonising over the smallest detail. His first splash, “Conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs”, was published on January 5, 2011. After the coalition government announced an inquiry, Norfolk thought his work was done. He was wrong. James Harding, who was then the editor of The Times, told him that the story was going to be his full-time job “until we are satisfied that every public body in England has the knowledge and systems in place to protect children and prosecute offenders”.
Norfolk suffered a torrent of abuse, particularly from what he called “left-wing academics”, accusing him of racism. He also received two death threats, but having met the girls (some of whom had abortions as a result of being raped), he vowed to continue. His next big exposé was on the town of Rochdale, where a girl had gone missing from a children’s home 15 times in two months. She had been taken to a house in Greater Manchester, where 50 men raped her in one night. Norfolk was told of a case in Rotherham where police were called to a flat at 2.30am and found an almost naked and “blind drunk” 13-year-old girl and seven men. The girl was arrested and then convicted of being drunk and disorderly. The men were not even questioned.
“I kept coming back to Rotherham,” Norfolk recalled. “It seemed extraordinary that the authorities knew so much and did so little.” Needing hard evidence, he got it when the Rotherham social worker Jayne Senior gave Norfolk two “very large” cardboard boxes crammed full of hundreds of confidential social services case files and police documents. He went on to publish a series of stories in 2012 and 2013 about how grooming gangs were acting with “virtual impunity” in the South Yorkshire town.
South Yorkshire police knew exactly what was happening. They knew the girls, they knew the men, the places they were taking these children to and they shrugged their shoulders and did nothing. Rotherham metropolitan borough council sought to block his first story in May 2012 with a High Court injunction, but failed to turn up on the day of the hearing. It was published in The Times a day later. The police launched a criminal inquiry into the leak and accused The Times of “exploiting the victims”.
Finally, Rotherham council ordered an independent inquiry in August 2013 because, its chief executive admitted, “The Times won’t leave us alone”. Professor Alexis Jay’s report in 2014 found that 1,400 girls had been groomed and abused in Rotherham since the late 1990s. Children had been trafficked to other cities. Some were doused with petrol and told they would be set alight if they told anyone. The council was placed in special measures. Heads rolled. Norfolk would win the Paul Foot award and the Orwell prize for his investigations and was named the 2014 Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards.
Yet many grooming trials were collapsing. Norfolk met Sir Keir Starmer, then director of public prosecutions, to discuss how CPS regulations were hampering prosecutions. A key point was that victims, who had been “out of their heads on alcohol and drugs”, could not recall what happened, when and where. Norfolk had witnessed many being subjected to cruel cross-examination. Starmer introduced new guidelines that Norfolk said led to a “huge increase” in convictions across the country.
Norfolk was now ready to lock up his case files for ever. “I said to The Times I can’t carry on because of the unrelenting grimness of it,” he told BBC Radio Four’s The Media Show this year. “I had always been able to relax at the end of the day, have a glass of wine, watch The West Wing and chill.” From 2011 he had often worked until 2am and risen at 6am to start again.
Andrew Mark Norfolk was born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1965 to David Norfolk, a headmaster and Methodist lay preacher, and Olive (née Bellerby). The family was steeped in the non-conformist denomination and mixed mainly with other adherents. Andrew felt like an outsider from an early age, but was close to his father who would rewrite sermons late into the night with a rigour his son would inherit.
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When Andrew was 11 his father was appointed headmaster of Ashville, an independent school in Harrogate, north Yorkshire. The move was a wrench. Sport brought succour; Andrew excelled at hockey. Literature was his other love; he studied English at Durham University and joined The Scarborough Evening News in 1989. He moved on to The Yorkshire Post in 1995, where he learnt the resilience required for door knocking, once being told to, “F*** off, you bald c***.”
His award-winning reporting of a corruption scandal at Doncaster council led to him being recruited by The Times in 2000. Norfolk was too self-effacing to seek the job. His brother Tim applied on his behalf, pasting his “Donnygate” stories on A3 paper. He was summarily employed by the paper’s then editor Peter Stothard. Despite his abiding devotion to Tottenham Hotspur — he had the club’s crest tattooed on his ankle — Norfolk hated London and after two years threatened to resign unless he could relocate to Leeds.
Norfolk became chief investigative reporter of The Times in 2012. He later investigated the scandal of abuse at some of the UK’s leading boarding schools and wrote an exposé about a Qatari-controlled British bank that was providing financial services to Islamist extremist-linked groups and charities.
Away from work, Norfolk cut a jollier figure. Within his small circle of trusted friends, he would deploy dry wit while emptying expensive bottles of red wine. He had a ticket for next week’s Europa League final between Spurs and Manchester United.
Years of unrelenting intensity took an increasing toll on his health. Ailing with rheumatoid arthritis and walking with a stick, he retired from The Times last November. He remained uninterested in maximising the publicity and acclaim from his achievements in journalism, but in January felt compelled to publicly correct comments by Elon Musk, who claimed that the government, Starmer, and the media had been “complicit in the rape of Britain”.
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Norfolk had one regret. Abuse would never be fully stamped out, he said, until there was “proper research into and understanding” of the issues of religion and culture that had allowed the gangs to flourish.
Otherwise he was quietly proud. “This story is an example of why newspapers matter. When all else failed a very brave person placed their trust in journalism. Those documents I was handed revealed something shameful. Something people whose job it was to protect children had chosen to keep hidden. It was an uncomfortable story but sometimes uncomfortable truths are the ones for journalists to tell because if we don’t no one else will.
“Those articles have ended up changing the way this country responds to and tackles the sexual exploitation of children by groups of men. Some children, I hope, are safer as a result.”
Andrew Norfolk, investigative journalist, was born on January 8, 1965. He died after collapsing before a routine medical examination on May 8, 2025, aged 60
