‘My abuser is still living here’ insists victim
Groomed at 13 – now she lives in fear
AMELIA was just a child when she met her abuser in Rochdale town centre in 2009. Still dressed in her uniform, the schoolgirl was flattered by the older boy who asked for her number.
Except he wasn’t a boy. The teenager who showered her with gifts was actually a man in his 30s. Amelia didn’t know it then, but a nightmare was about to unfold.
Last week, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police admitted the force were “borderline incompetent” in their handling of Rochdale’s notorious grooming scandal. It’s a view shared by 26-year-old Amelia, whose name we have changed to protect her identity. She was not among the 47 girls identified by police as victims, and her abuser was never prosecuted.
This week, after she told the Observer that she felt her case was never taken seriously, Greater Manchester Police said the force ‘apologises to all those vulnerable children who feel they were let down by police not thoroughly investigating child sexual offences in the past’.
But no apology can return Amelia’s innocence, or erase the trauma she endured. She was just 13 when she was targeted.
“I had finished school on a Friday,” she said, as she started to cry. “I was with my friend and we went into town - I can’t remember what we were going for.
“She introduced me to him and at the time he was working in the shopping centre. We got talking; we were talking for ages then he said, ‘Give me your number’.
“I went home and I was getting ready to go to my sisters and I had loads of texts.” I found it weird at the time. He was asking what I was doing and where I was going. He said he was 19 but he didn’t look 19.”
Amelia started meeting with the man regularly and their ‘relationship’ became sexual. “We were meeting up and we kept it secret,” she continued. “He was giving me gifts like bracelets, necklaces and scarves. I didn’t know I was being groomed until the police said I was being groomed.”
It wasn’t long before the man became abusive. “He would be ringing my mum’s house phone at 3am because I wasn’t answering the phone,” she added. He turned up at my mum’s house saying he was going to marry me and if I didn’t, he would take me away.
“There was a time when my mum tried taking my phone off me because I was speaking to him on it until 4am. He gave me a secret phone.
“My mum told me to stay away from him but I just carried on ignoring her. My friends were getting involved with his friends and it went from there.
“They were getting passed on to other people whereas I wasn’t. I know some of my friends were being taken to the Seven Sisters flats and being used there. I’m not sure if the police were aware of it. Not long after, I was coming home covered in bruises.”
Finally, after three years of abuse, Amelia found the courage to tell her family everything. Then aged 16, she reported her abuser to the police. A man in his 30s was arrested on suspicion of sexual activity with a child - but the case collapsed when the Crown Prosecution Service said there was insufficient evidence to proceed. It was at Oldham police station where Amelia learned she was being groomed.
Police wanted every gift she had ever received as evidence, and still have them to this day.
“There were loads of police involved at this point,” she said. “The social workers weren’t taking it seriously. I had to change my number a couple of times to get away from him.
“The police were telling me to delete all my social media.
“I had a message from him so I took it down to the police station and they said they couldn’t do anything about it because he wasn’t even in the country - but my friend had a baby with him a couple of years before.”
Then, in 2018, years after she had last seen him, Amelia woke up bruised with no clothes on, having left the door to her home unlocked after coming in from work.
She believes she had been assaulted by the man who had groomed her, and reported him to police.
The Observer has since learned that police closed the case after making attempts to arrest him, concluding he was abroad at the time of the attack after finding evidence he had left, but not returned, to the UK.
Nonetheless, Amelia is convinced her abuser is living in Rochdale. “It’s making me mad,” she added. “They’re not doing anything about it. I’m scared of going to Rochdale on my own. When I go I need to take someone with me. I even stopped working over there as well.
“He’s already followed me once and assaulted me. If he sees me again, what’s going to happen next?
“I no longer feel safe in Rochdale. (Police) are still not protecting victims,” she claimed.
“Now they’re making out like they’re saying sorry to everyone.
“I’m now wary about who I’m friends with and who I talk to, the people I meet. It still has an effect. I don’t trust anyone.”
Last week, the GMP Chief Constable acknowledged his predecessors had “failed” children in the past. He said that under his leadership, cases are dealt with very differently than they were in the 2000s.
Speaking on BBC Radio Manchester, Mr Watson said: “The bottom line is we’ve failed children in the past, we simply did, there’s no beating around the bush. I don’t think people did it out of a sense of badness, I don’t think people did it because they were incompetent. But I think organisationally we were borderline incompetent in the sense that we just didn’t do things then that we absolutely do now.”
His comments came after it emerged that GMP had agreed to pay substantial damages to three victims of Rochdale’s child sex grooming ring, to whom Mr Watson offered a personal apology. All were children when they were repeatedly raped and sexually abused.
The women, backed by lawyers from the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) charity, brought a legal claim against GMP that said, according to legal documents, that from the early 2000s there was growing evidence from multiple allegations that gangs of predominantly Asian men were grooming, trafficking and sexually abusing predominantly white workingclass girls in Rochdale.
Lawyers for the three successfully argued their human rights were breached by GMP failing to protect them by putting a stop to the abuse. This included failing to record crimes, investigate offenders, collect intelligence, or charge and prosecute abusers.
Instead of being treated as child victims of sexual abuse, the three were viewed by police as “bad” or “unreliable” witnesses and were sometimes arrested themselves while reporting abuse, the women said. Though the abuse was happening “in plain sight”, a police operation to tackle the gangs was closed down abruptly in 2004, despite police and social services having the names of the men involved and their victims.
Eight years later, following a second major police investigation, Operation Span, nine men were found guilty of 21 counts of sexual abuse over a two-year period. The victims were as young as 13 when the abuse happened.
The vulnerable girls, some of them runaways or in the care of social services, were groomed, plied with drink, raped and driven all over the north to have sex with other men. Now, a new police unit to investigate child sex grooming gangs in Greater Manchester has already identified more than 800 offenders and is running three major investigations into historic abuse of young girls.
In a statement about Amelia’s case, a spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said: “Whilst we cannot comment on individual cases, Greater Manchester Police apologises to all those vulnerable children who feel they were let down by police not thoroughly investigating child sexual offences in the past.
“Thankfully there is today a far better understanding of CSE, and we are committed to leaving no stone unturned to bring offenders to justice through our dedicated Force CSE unit. The learning from the investigations in Rochdale is integral to our way of working today and we work closely with partners across Greater Manchester to prevent the exploitation of young people.
“Our partnership approach provides a stronger footing for police to prevent, disrupt and investigate these crimes.
“We hope that our commitment to improving our responses to prevent such crimes will go some way to comforting those whom we have previously let down, and send a message to these abhorrent criminals that we will not stop until justice has been served.
“If anyone has any information, we absolutely encourage them to come forward and where there are lines of enquiry, we will absolutely pursue them.”
‘I’m scared of going to Rochdale on my own’