The Film-Maker Who Exposed Grooming Gangs: ‘Things Are Worse Now’
27th April 2025
Anna Hall’s Channel 4 documentary blew the lid off a national scandal in 2004. Her latest film, Groomed, shows children are still being failed
his is a film I hoped I’d never have to make,” Anna Hall says of her new documentary, Groomed: A National Scandal, which airs on Channel 4 on Wednesday. “I didn’t want to do this again because I knew what I was going to put myself and everyone else through … it takes an emotional toll.”When Hall exposed what is now known as gang grooming in her first film, Edge of the City, in 2004, she never imagined she would be revisiting the subject 21 years later.Groomed is not a look back at a moment of shame in Britain’s history, but a victim-first account of how a scandal that affected thousands of young girls throughout the 1990s and 2000s is still unfolding today. The safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, appeared to suggest this month that regional inquiries into the gangs promised in January by the government might not now go ahead, forcing the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to insist days later that they would.