It’s long been known that the victims of the so-called grooming gang scandal were abused and degraded not only by the perpetrators, but also by many professionals. This included social workers, health professionals, and those in the criminal justice system.

But fresh revelations that come as no surprise to some of us (myself included) will nonetheless shock many others. New testimony reveals that at least five victims were sexually assaulted and raped by serving police officers, one of whom threatened to “hand her back to the gang” unless she did as he told her.

It is almost beyond belief. We already know that in Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls fell victim to gangs of men who raped, tortured and pimped them. But the town is also home to a number of police officers who were complicit in their abuse — and even, in some cases, colluded with the perpetrators.

Thankfully, these allegations are now the subject of a new investigation, but why were these men allowed to get away with this for so long? Other officers — though perhaps not directly involved in the abuse — would have known it was happening. And it’s certainly true that the perpetrators were only able to carry out these heinous crimes against the most vulnerable victims imaginable because they were allowed to act with impunity.

The cases of Wayne Couzens, David Carrick and other exposed abusers in the police show this isn’t just about a few bad apples. Policing too often attracts men who enjoy the power it gives them to harm vulnerable women and girls, knowing they can get away with it. The widespread lack of accountability has created a situation in which police officers are even involved in the gangs themselves, driving around known hotspots to pick up their next victim.

They take full advantage of the fact that these young women and girls are already being terrorised and controlled by men outside of the police force. These girls are also raped, abused and blackmailed by the very people whose job it is to protect them from such harms.

What needs to happen? How do we deal with the problem of police perpetrators? As research conducted by the Centre for Women’s Justice has unveiled, police-perpetrated domestic abuse, which also involves rape and sexual assault, is not only prevalent within the force but largely ignored, tolerated, and covered up. Many of the victims are themselves female police officers or civilian staff who have discovered that when they try to report these abusers, nothing is done. These men were never going to confine their misogyny and violent behaviour to just one woman: they have already been reassured that they can get away with abusing women known to them, so what’s to stop them targeting the girls who have largely been ignored when reporting abuse by grooming gangs?

As long as misogyny by male police officers is seen as merely unpleasant rather than criminal, it will keep happening. Whether there is evidence of abuse (and there usually is), action must be taken against these officers, as the law requires. There is no shortage of warning signs, but where is the further scrutiny?

With the vast majority of perpetrators of gang-related child abuse still walking free, surely the very least we can do is stop those funded by public money from adding to the pain of these girls.

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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