Police said Telford abuse victims had ‘consented to sex’
Police have been accused of blaming the victims of child sex crimes in Telford.
The accusation comes even though officers brought an Asian grooming gang to justice.
officers investigating child sexual exploitation (cSe) in the Shropshire town were sent an internal memo telling them that ‘in most cases the sex is consensual’.
The West Mercia Police memo was sent in 2013, months after the force’s operation chalice investigation resulted in the jailing of seven members of a gang that preyed on vulnerable children.
last night, as it emerged that council youth workers in a team set up to tackle child sex abuse in Telford were left overworked and underresourced, a specialist child abuse lawyer described the police memo as ‘victim blaming at its worst’.
Dino Nocivelli, of law firm Bolt Bur- don Kemp, said: ‘The authorities just don’t seem to get it. children cannot agree to sex.
‘Just because a child is not being physically forced to carry out sexual acts, it doesn’t mean they consented.’
At the weekend a Sunday newspaper investigation suggested up to 1,000 girls could have been abused in Telford – a town of 170,000 residents – since 1980. The chalice investigation identified up to 110 potential victims and 200 predators operating in the town between 2007 and 2009 alone.
Mr Nocivelli added: ‘ Many of these children will have been groomed and manipulated by their abusers and would have been threatened to keep silent. How can you say an 11-year-old is capable of consenting to sex with a 40year-old? This is rape.’
A person under 16 cannot be deemed in law to have consented to sex, but the word ‘consensual’ was used to describe offences involving children four times in the memo. The Daily Mirror claimed yesterday that in 2014 officers were also sent a similar memo and told that Telford remained a ‘hotspot’ for exploitation offences.
News of the memos emerged as police admitted that at least 46 youngsters still remained ‘at risk’ in the town.
A report of Telford and Wrekin council’s children and young people scrutiny committee yesterday laid bare the workload faced by youth workers in the aftermath of the chalice investigation.
The report, which took 18 months to compile before its publication in May 2016, found that they were unable to keep appointments with vulnerable girls due to facing ‘almost double’ the recommended caseload.
Team members raised concerns about the volume of high-risk cases in 2016.
The report found that specialist youth workers in the cATe (children abused through exploitation) team were spending a ‘disproportionate amount of time’ taking children to GP or sexual health clinic appointments.
The workload left them unable to meet targets to engage with girls considered at high risk of sexual exploitation at least twice a week. Specialist youth workers flagged concerns around ‘decreased capacity’ and said there was no time to train other organisations in how to tackle child sexual exploitation.
Police offered to pay for help from children’s charity Barnardo’s so its staff could take on lowerrisk cases but this had not happened, the report found.
The labour-run authority said it had spent an extra £200,000 last year on tackling abuse.
earlier this week, it called on the Government to commission an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitationin the town and the authority’s response to it.
Martin evans, Assistant chief constable at West Mercia Police, said: ‘Any incident that is reported to us as child sexual exploitation is investigated as such and is taken very seriously, regardless of any consent which may or may not have been given by the victim.’
The force was asked to elaborate on the nature of the memos and explain the content in which they were written and sent, but did not respond to the request yesterday.
‘Victim blaming at its worst’