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Damning report slams police and council for not acting
ADAMNING new report has lifted the lid on the vast extent of historic child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rochdale - and reveals the repeated failings of those in power that allowed men to abuse vulnerable youngsters for years.
A review team said it found ‘compelling evidence’ of ‘widespread organised sexual exploitation’ of children in the town between 2004 and 2012.
The report identified ‘at least’ 96 individuals ‘who potentially’ posed a risk to children over the period, but chillingly they are described as being ‘only a proportion’ of those involved in CSE across the town.
The report’s authors said they found ‘successive’ police operations ‘failed to tackle the widespread exploitation of children by these men.’
Three major Greater Manchester Police initiatives were ‘consistently under-resourced in providing the necessary support to victims to disclose their abuse and for them to remain engaged with the investigation.’
And, despite numerous convictions, 68 further ‘remaining’ children believed to have been abused are still said to be waiting for justice.
The report said: “GMP and Rochdale Council failed throughout the period to consistently use disruption tactics to break up the activities of these men.
“There is only very limited evidence of GMP using child abduction warning notices and risk of sexual harm orders and very few examples of GMP liaising with the council’s licensing and environmental health departments to tackle the sexual exploitation of children within the taxi and restaurant industries.
“This was even though the prevalence of CSE in these industries was well known to GMP and Rochdale Council.
“In conclusion, the statutory agencies made insufficient progress in Rochdale to identify and respond effectively to those who posed a risk to children and we are not able to provide assurance that sufficient work was done to bring those individuals to justice or protect other children whom they may have had contact with.”
Damningly, the report goes on to find GMP and the council did have ‘a clear understanding of the prevalence of CSE within the borough’ at the time, but had failed to learn lessons from the death of a teenager and a failed CSE police operation in south Manchester.
A dedicated unit to tackle CSE - staffed by just one constable and a social worker with a large caseload - wasn’t established in the town until January 2011 ‘despite the clear evidence that organised crime gangs had been sexually exploiting children in Rochdale for many years,’ adds the report.
“We regard this as a lamentable strategic failure by senior leaders in GMP and Rochdale Council,” said the authors.
Nine men were jailed in 2012 for a catalogue of child sex offences, but the report identified three further children who weren’t part of the prosecution despite having ‘suffered sexual exploitation many years earlier.’
“Their abuse was known to both Greater Manchester Police and Rochdale Council, but no meaningful action was taken to protect the children, disrupt the activities of their abusers or bring their abusers to justice,” says the report, the third to be published addressing historic child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester.
Sara Rowbotham, then the coordinator of an NHS sexual health service in Rochdale known as the Crisis Intervention Team and her colleagues repeatedly shared ‘significant concerns’ with police and children’s social care services at the council.
The report says they had started to build ‘a wealth of information’ to suggest children were being sexually exploited by an organised crime gang ‘led by two professional criminals.’
But ‘statutory agencies failed to respond appropriately to these numerous concerns,’ adds the report, which ultimately allowed abuse to continue unchecked.
The BBC documentary ‘The Betrayed Girls’ aired in July 2017 and reported NHS leaders in Rochdale notified Greater Manchester Police and the council of ‘dozens’ of cases of CSE prior to 2008, but both agencies failed to protect the children.
The mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, commissioned a review team to evaluate the allegations as a result.
The report - authored by Malcolm Newsam, a renowned child care expert, and Gary Ridgeway, a former detective superintendent with Cambridgeshire Police - focuses on the sexual exploitation of children in Rochdale between 2004 and 2012 and specifically considers the allegations set out by Ms Rowbotham, now a councillor who was awarded an MBE after exposing the child sex ring, and Maggie Oliver, a former GMP detective turned whistleblower, in the 2017 documentary.
In January 2020, the mayor’s first commissioned report found children were raped and abused by up to 100 members of a south Manchester grooming gang around 20 years ago now, but despite police and social workers knowing what was happening they weren’t stopped.
It also considered the death in Rochdale of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, also known as Victoria Byrne, in 2003.
She died of a drugs overdose two months after claiming she had been raped and injected with heroin by an older man.
After her death a police investigation, Operation Augusta, was set up to see if there was a wider problem of child sexual exploitation in areas of south Manchester.
Officers identified a network of nearly 100 Asian men potentially involved in the abuse of scores of girls via takeaways in and around Rusholme but the operation was shut down shortly afterwards due to resources, ‘rather than a sound understanding’ of whether lines of inquiry had been exhausted, revealed the report.
“Regrettably, we have found that the lessons to be learned from the tragic death of Victoria Agoglia in 2003 were not followed through by the actions of GMP,” the report reads.
“We have found many examples of children who disclosed exploitation not being protected from significant harm.
“The child’s unwillingness to make a formal complaint was repeatedly used as an explanation for not pursuing these investigations. No disruptive or investigative action was taken to tackle these very dangerous individuals and children were left to be abused by them and subsequently by their associates.”