Girls were left ‘at the mercy’ of pedophile gangs in Rochdale for years due to failings by senior police and council bosses, a report has said.
The scathing 173-page review covers the period 2004 to 2013 and details multiple failed investigations by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and the local authority’s apparent indifference to the plight of hundreds of young people, mainly white girls from poor backgrounds, who all are identified as potential victims of abuse. in Rochdale by Asian men.
One revelation detailed in the report includes an incident where GMP secretly took the aborted fetus of a 13-year-old victim from Rochdale Hospital for DNA testing, without the consent of the girl or her parents.
Malcolm Newsam CBE, co-author of the report, said: “Successive police operations were launched during this period, but these were insufficiently resourced to match the scale of widespread organized exploitation in the area.
“As a result, children were put at risk and many of their abusers have not been apprehended to this day.”
The report identifies 96 men who are still considered a potential risk to children, but this is “only a portion” of the numbers involved in the abuse.
At a press conference on Monday, GMP apologized for its failures, as Chief Constable Stephen Watson said: “One of the most important responsibilities of the police is to protect the vulnerable from brutality and predators, and in this regard we have failed you left.
“It remains, of course, a source of deep regret that we cannot turn back the clock,” adding: “We remain committed to doing all we can to bring offenders to justice.”
The Rochdale report follows reports by the same authors on ‘grooming’ in Manchester and Oldham, which found authorities were once again abandoning children, sending them into the clutches of pedophile gangs.
Eight of the men involved in the grooming gang, Abdul Rauf, Hamid Safi, Mohammed Sajid, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Qayyum, Adil Khan, Mohammed Amin and Kabeer Hassan, were found guilty of conspiracy and rape.
Mr Newsam, a renowned childcare expert, wrote the report with Gary Ridgeway, a former Detective Chief Inspector, following allegations made by whistleblowers Sara Rowbotham and Maggie Oliver in a BBC TV documentary The Betrayed Girls, which aired in 2017.
Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham commissioned the authors to look at the issues raised by the women in the documentary.
The report said Ms Rowbotham, co-ordinator of the Crisis Intervention Team set up to support young people in Rochdale, and former GMP detective Maggie Oliver, who resigned in disgust, were ‘lone voices’ who had noticed the clear evidence of “prolific serial rape of numerous children in Rochdale.”
The report states that there was “compelling evidence” of widespread, organized child sexual abuse in Rochdale as early as 2004, citing multiple reports of the involvement of groups of Asian men.
But children’s reluctance to make a formal complaint was repeatedly used as an excuse not to investigate.
In 2007, the Crisis Intervention Team led by Mrs Rowbotham alerted GMP and Rochdale Council to the presence of an organized crime group involved.
GMP identified the ringleaders, described as “prolific career criminals”, but did not investigate further because children were too scared to help.
The report said this was a “serious failure” to protect the children, ignoring the coercion and control the groomers had over their victims and families, who were sometimes threatened or subjected to violence or had their homes attacked.
Another police investigation into two takeaways in Rochdale, involving 30 adult male suspects, was also stopped prematurely after police bosses failed to provide resources and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) deemed the main child victim an unreliable witness.
Three years later, in January 2010, the specialist Sunrise Team was set up in Rochdale, where a child told a social worker about the widespread abuse of children by up to 60 men.
A police report said: “What is clearly emerging is an organized industry where vulnerable young children are targeted for sexual abuse….”
The detective inspector asked for more staff to investigate, but police bosses rejected the request.
The report states: “Once again, children were left at the mercy of their abusers due to an inadequate response from GMP and children’s social care to the serious exploitation of vulnerable children.”
In December 2010, more than two years after first becoming aware of abuse surrounding two takeaways, GMP finally acted and launched Operation Span, which in May 2012 led to the conviction of nine men in a high-profile trial targeting far-right attracted demonstrators. .
The trial heard that girls as young as 12 were exposed to alcohol and drugs and were raped in rooms above takeaways and taken in taxis to different flats where cash was paid for the girls’ use.
But while the force praised Operation Span as “a fantastic outcome for British justice”, the report says the police operation failed to tackle numerous other crimes and ignored children’s allegations, leaving their abusers free, such as alleged by both Mrs Oliver and Mrs Rowbotham.
GMP and Rochdale Council had presented the court convictions as a solution to the city’s care situation, but in reality this had merely ‘scraped the surface’, the report said.
And while the ‘public face of GMP’ reassured the public that it was a police priority to prosecute further child groomers, this was ‘far from the case’ in practice, the report said.
GMP has since launched further investigations, which have so far resulted in the conviction of 42 men involved in the abuse of 13 children.
The report concludes that the extent of abuse in Rochdale was known to senior and middle managers in the police and children’s services, but the problem was not given “sufficient priority”.
“We view this as a regrettable strategic failure by senior leaders in GMP and Rochdale Council,” the report continues. It said the failure to prioritise, detect, disrupt or prosecute “must be placed firmly on the shoulders of GMP’s senior officers during this period.”
Sir Peter Fahy was Chief Commissioner of GMP between 2008 and 2015. He was knighted in the 2012 Birthday Honors ‘for services to the Police’ and was appointed honorary professor of criminal justice at the University of Manchester on his retirement.
Maggie Oliver has since founded the Maggie Oliver Foundation, a charity that supports adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.