Pakistani network preys on troubled English girls
A child sex case involving nine men reveals a nation’s shame, Andrew Norfolk writes.
Hundreds of girls in children’s homes are being sexually abused by organised networks of men, Britain’s The Times has revealed.
England’s children’s homes, which care for 1800 girls, have recorded 631 incidents of girls being sold for sex during the past five years, including 187 in the past 10 months.
The Times has learnt that in recent years two girls from children’s homes in Manchester and Rochdale died in separate incidents linked to their sexual abuse by men of Pakistani heritage.
The scale of the abuse came to light as nine members of a sex-grooming network were convicted yesterday. Liverpool Crown Court was told during their trial that a 15-year-old girl from another Rochdale children’s home was used for sex by 25 Asian men in one night. She went missing from her residential home 19 times in three months, for periods ranging from a day to two weeks, during which she was subjected to repeated sexual abuse at various places, including a house a few doors from the home.
Two years earlier, in 2008, a children’s services director had warned MPS that local authorities across northern England were seeing ‘‘clear evidence of the organised, targeted sexual exploitation of girls in children’s homes’’.
In the same year, another 15-year-old girl from Rochdale, who was not in care, told police how she was passed around members of the British Pakistani community for sex. Police and care agencies took no action to protect her and during the next four months she was subjected to sustained sexual exploitation by at least 21 more men.
She was one of 47 younger teenagers, several of them known to social services, who fell victim to criminals who transported girls aged from 12 to 16 across northern England to be sexually abused in flats, houses, cars, taxis and kebab shops.
Children were befriended, plied with alcohol and drugs, then used for sex at various locations in Greater Manchester, Lancashire and West Yorkshire.
Fifty-six men were interviewed and 26 arrested when police reopened an earlier, aborted investigation into the grooming network.
The nine found guilty yesterday, aged 22 to 59, included eight British Pakistanis and an illegal asylum seeker from Afghanistan.
Their trial ended in controversy with claims that a rogue juror leaked some of the verdicts to a far-right group that posted them online before any were revealed in court. Six days ago Infidels of Britain, an English Defence League splinter group, published ‘‘100 per cent accurate’’ details of the guilty verdicts reached by that stage against seven of the 11 defendants.
Applications by the defence to discharge a jury whose ‘‘integrity has been compromised’’ were rejected and yesterday it found nine of the men guilty of 25 of the 35 charges that they faced.
They were convicted of offences including four rapes, 11 charges of conspiracy to engage children in sexual activity and six of trafficking children for sexual exploitation.
It is believed to be the first time that anyone has been found guilty of trafficking British children for sex within Britain. The men will be sentenced today. Greater Manchester Police, the Crown Prosecution Service and Rochdale social services apologised yesterday for failings that ‘‘led to children being put back in the hands of their abusers’’.
The original inquiry is under investigation by the force’s professional standards branch, supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
The chief crown prosecutor for northwest England, Nazir Afzal, said that ‘‘imported cultural baggage’’ played a role in the crimes, but what defined the convicted men was their attitude to women. ‘‘They think that women are some lesser being. The availability of vulnerable young white girls is what has drawn the men to them. That doesn’t excuse for one second their culpability.
‘‘Those girls were on the streets at midnight. It made them easy prey for evil men.’’
A care professional close to the case said it would be misleading to suggest that group-sex grooming involved only men of Pakistani heritage, but ‘‘on such a large scale the only investigations I know about have involved Asians’’.
The worker said: ‘‘We can’t say they haven’t got an issue within their community because we’ve now had so many cases.
‘‘What no-one is going to say publicly is that some of them may regard and treat white girls in a totally different way to their own girls.’’
Regulations require every children’s home in England to notify Ofsted of ‘‘the involvement or suspected involvement of a child accommodated at the home in prostitution’’.
The 631 cases reported in the past five years are thought likely to be a significant underestimate of the true scale of sexual exploitation of girls in children’s homes.