Police put girls at mercy of Rochdale grooming gang

GIRLS were left at the mercy of paedophile grooming gangs in Rochdale for years because of failings by senior police and council bosses, a report has found.

The damning 173-page review, covering from 2004 to 2013, sets out multiple failed investigations by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and apparent local authority indifference to the plight of hundreds of youngsters, all identified as potential victims of abuse in Rochdale.

Among the details in the report include one victim claiming girls were forced into a cage and made to “bark like a dog or dress like a baby” by perpetrators she described as “perverts”. GMP also secretly took the aborted foetus of a 13-year-old victim to do a DNA test without telling her or her parents. Another victim was treated as a co-conspirator by the Crown Prosecution Service for “procuring children on behalf of the men who were abusing her” because she was “viewed as critical in their successful prosecution”.

The report, published yesterday, also concluded that when cases did eventually reach court, GMP left the young victims to be “harassed and intimidated by the men who had previously abused them”, sometimes at gunpoint.

Malcolm Newsam, the report’s co-author, said: “Successive police operations were launched over this period, but these were insufficiently resourced to match the scale of the widespread organised exploitation within the area.

“Consequently, children were left at risk and many of their abusers to this day have not been apprehended.”

The report identifies up to 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children, but this is “only a proportion” of the numbers involved in the abuse, and states there was “compelling evidence” of widespread, organised sexual abuse of children in Rochdale from as early as 2004. However, children’s unwillingness to make a formal complaint was repeatedly used as an excuse for not investigating.

To date, 42 men have been convicted for non-recent, multi-offender child sexual exploitation in Rochdale across six trials from 2012 to 2023.

GMP’S Chief Constable Stephen Watson said: “It remains a matter of profound regret that victims of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale in the early 2000s were failed by Greater Manchester Police – to them, I apologise.”