A dark cloud cast over town’s proud history

‘BIRTHPLACE of cooperation’ proclaims a sign on a railway bridge as you enter Rochdale.

It’s a proud heritage; a key role in the Labour movement, testimony to the town’s industrial heyday.

But the town has developed a reputation for something it’s far less proud of.

Over the last forty years, the close-knit communities that make up Rochdale have been rocked by a string of child sexual abuse scandals.

‘Three Girls’. Satanic Abuse. Cyril Smith and Knowl View.

At times it seems abusers have had free rein in the town. Why? Has there been a series of conspiracies and cover-ups as some believe?

Or merely a perfect storm of disregard - the toxic mix of paedophile networks, self-serving politicians, small-town poverty and government neglect?

On Thursday a longawaited report lifted the lid on the widespread sexual abuse carried out by former Rochdale MP Cyril Smith and several other predatory paedophiles.

Monsters loomed in places where children were supposed to be protected - at Cambridge House, a boys’ hostel, and Knowl View, a residential school for boys with learning and behavioural difficulties, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Public places became playgrounds for perverts too; the bus station, the Smith Street public toilet - in view of council’s offices - where lads of primary school age were prostituted for just a few pence.

It’s a chilling precedent of the town’s most recent abuse scandal - in which young girls were molested by much older men under the nose of the authorities.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse did not look at that most recent child grooming scandal. But it made a damning assessment of institutional attitudes in the town, going back decades.

Based on the harrowing testimony of dozens of victims of abuse at Knowl View, Cambridge House and Smith Street toilets, plus evidence from social workers, teachers, politicians and council officers, the IICSA’s findings lay bare how young, often vulnerable victims were let down time and time again by the very people who were supposed to be protecting them.

But how was allowed to happen?

Certainly Cyril Smith has cast a shadow over the town. 29 stone at his heaviest, he was long celebrated as a political giant.

How distressing must that reputation have been to his victims, who knew what he was really capable of?

Stories have abounded in Rochdale that Smith had local police ‘in his pocket’ - using political influence to quash investigations that he was a serial molester of boys.

In 1970 a Lancashire constabulary probe into Smith was dropped on the advice of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who felt the allegations concerned - which dated from Cambridge House in the mid 60s - were ‘stale’, lacked corroboration, and the ‘character of the complainants would likely render their evidence suspect’.

But while Smith, then a councillor, did try to get some of the witnesses in the case to retract their statements, the IICSA report concludes that ‘at no point were the police improperly influenced’ this ●●The panel of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) listens to evidence during the Rochdale hearings in October 2017 by him or others on his behalf’.

Allegations Smith held some sort of sway over Rochdale police were ‘just plain wrong’, according to the inquiry, and available documents suggest in fact Smith was ‘not on good terms’ with the local force.

But did he have friends in higher places?

For years, rumours of a security services coverup, based on an allegation that MI5 officers removed files on Smith from Lancashire Constabulary in the late 70s, have swirled.

These have no substance, the report says. The documents in question were not destroyed in fact they’re still available today - and the report says there is ‘nothing to suggest a cover up’.

Rather, it’s thought the MI5 officers may have been investigating if there was any substance to 1979 allegations by the Rochdale Alternative Paper, that Smith had subjected boys at Cambridge House to sexualised punishment beatings.

What about the council then? Well, the inquiry didn’t find any evidence of a ‘deliberate cover-up’ of the abuse at Knowl View and Cambridge House either.

So if there was no big conspiracy, what does that leave? Was there something rotten in the political culture, over decades, that allowed people to get away with things, was it the cumulative effect of people in power simply not caring enough?

The inquiry does not make detailed findings on the report’s implications for Rochdale council as an institution, because it wants to hear evidence from similar scandals at Nottinghamshire county council and Lambeth council first.

But what is abundantly clear from the report is that allegations of sexual assault were simply not taken seriously by those in authority, a culture that permeated the council from top to bottom for years, and allowed Smith and others to repeatedly get away with their sickening crimes.

From social workers and education workers to former council leaders Richard Farnell - suspended by the Labour Party after the report concluded he lied about what he knew about Knowl View - and Paul Rowen, who has been accused of having ‘turned a blind eye’ to the problems at Knowl View, there was a ‘careless and wholly inadequate response’ to the issue.

In regards to Knowl View the inquiry found there was a ‘total lack of urgency on the part of the authorities to address the problem and treat the matters involved for what they were – serious sexual assaults’.

“One boy’s file recorded that he had contracted sexually transmitted hepatitis through ‘rent boy’ activities,” the reports adds.

“We concluded that no one in authority viewed any of this as an urgent child protection issue. Rather, boys as young as 11 were not seen as victims, but as authors of their own abuse.”

For many in Rochdale, the criticisms in the damning IICSA report will make for familiar reading.

Almost identical failures were uncovered during inquiries into the 2012 grooming scandal, when dozens of vulnerable girls, some as young as 14, were plied with vodka, threatened with violence and passed around men for sex, while their pleas for help were ignored by the authorities. It’s become known as the ‘Three Girls’ grooming scandal, after a harrowing BBC drama based on the case.

Eventually that led to nine men being convicted of sex trafficking and other offences including rape and trafficking girls for sex.

A string of inquiries that followed found those in authority ‘lacked human compassion’ and were ‘inexcusably slow’ in dealing with the victims, while girls were referred to as ‘making life choices’ rather than being rape victims.

Rewind a little more than 20 years and another lurid child abuse scandal was putting Rochdale in national headlines.

In 1990 a total of 20 children were taken from their homes on the Langley estate in Middleton and put in care by Rochdale council following allegations of ‘Satanic abuse’.

It was claimed they had