Abusers left free to exploit over 1,000 girls for decades
Police nervous about investigating Asian men, says Telford inquiry
FEAR of being accused of racism allowed the mass sexual abuse of young girls in Telford to go unchecked for more than 30 years, an inquiry found yesterday.
More than 1,000 children were victims of sexual exploitation, mainly by Asian men, in the Shropshire town.
Now an independent inquiry has slammed police, social workers, teachers and local politicians for failing girls – despite being aware of what was going on.
Inquiry chairman Tom Crowther, QC, concluded that a ‘nervousness about race’ was a key factor in the ‘abject failure’ of agencies to tackle the problem for so long.
He said: ‘I have no doubt that concern about racism and being seen to be racist permeated the mind of West Mercia Police and indeed of the council and the minds of its employees.’
He added that ‘this nervousness led to a reluctance to act’. The inquiry was commissioned by Telford and Wrekin Council after a newspaper report in 2018 estimated that 1,000 children could have been sexually exploited in the area going back decades. The 1,200 page report, published yesterday, backed the figure as ‘measured and reasonable’.
The scale of abuse in the borough with a population of about 170,000 was astonishing. Data for child sex crimes in the year to September 2015 showed it had the highest rate in the country at 15.1 per 10,000 residents.
From the 1970s until only a few years ago, hundreds of girls were left at the mercy of predominantly older men of Pakistani heritage, the report revealed.
The council scaled down funding of specialist teams to ‘virtually zero’ to save money and CSE (child sexual exploitation) was not seen as an essential service until 2016.
Lucy Lowe was 16 and pregnant with her second child in 2000 when she was murdered – alongside her sister Sarah, 17, and their mother Eileen, 49 – in a house fire set by Lucy’s ‘boyfriend’, Azhar Ali Mehmood, then 26. The Telford taxi driver was jailed for life – but was never charged over sex abuse.
Between 2012 and 2018 a total of 431 offences with the CSE marker were recorded in the council area.
Mr Crowther said: ‘The overwhelming theme of the evidence has been the appalling suffering of generations of children caused by the utter cruelty of those who committed child sexual exploitation.’
Men bought schoolgirls fast food, alcohol and cigarettes to groom them into becoming ‘girlfriends’, treating them as ‘sexual objects’.
He said: ‘Countless children were sexually assaulted and raped. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened.’ From the 1990s there was growing awareness among teachers, police officers, social and youth workers that ‘something was not right’.
But a lack of support to tackle the issue reflected ‘reluctance to acknowledge victims as anything other than badly behaved children on the margins of society’.
School staff failed to act, the report found, with teachers believing they were bound by confidentially when victims confided in them. In 1999 a police sergeant’s report about girls being used as prostitutes was filed as ‘no action’.
The same year a police report based on 28 intelligence reports over two years found that ‘Asian youths are giving girls drugs and having sex with them, the majority of whom are under age’.
Police ‘did turn a blind eye and chose not to see what was obvious’ the inquiry found. Yesterday Assistant Chief Constable Richard Cooper of West Mercia Police said: ‘I would like to say sorry. Sorry to the survivors and all those affected by child sexual exploitation in Telford.’
A statement from the council said it ‘apologises wholeheartedly’ to the victims and had now made ‘significant improvements’.
‘Concern about racism permeated’