Whistleblowers slam GMP groom gang failings
FORMER detective turned child sex abuse campaigner Maggie Oliver slammed Greater Manchester Police and claimed ‘failures that happened then are still happening now’ after the publication of a damning new report which laid bare how those in power failed to protect young girls in Rochdale for years.
Police investigations were under-resourced and victims’ testimonies weren’t believed in a shameful failure to act despite a wealth of evidence being handed over to the force and Rochdale Council by those on the frontline.
Sara Rowbotham meanwhile – who worked tirelessly to compile names and addresses of suspected abusers and support girls – said it was ‘disgusting’ that her team were ‘disbelieved, scrutinised, misrepresented, scapegoated and then publicly and nationally discredited’.
At an emotive press conference after the report’s publication, Sara said fighting back tears: “Everything that is being done now should have been done then. All it would have taken was the right people actually giving a damn.”
●●‘OVER 371 victims say they are still being failed by GMP’
Ms Oliver – who quit GMP in disgust and turned whistleblower – said the issue had ‘almost destroyed her life’.
The report, she said, was commissioned in 2017 but GMP and the council didn’t share anything with the review team until the end of 2021. “Because they were pushing back and pretending that these things hadn’t happened,” she said. “They didn’t want the truth to come out.”
Girls were ‘left at the mercy’ of grooming gangs for years because of failings by senior police and council bosses, the report said. The damning 173page review covers 2004 to
2013 and sets out multiple failed investigations by GMP and apparent local authority indifference to the plight of hundreds of youngsters.
“Consequently, children were left at risk and many of their abusers to this day have not been apprehended,” said its author.
Ms Oliver, who runs the Maggie Oliver Foundation, said she speaks to girls in Rochdale to this day and as a result ‘has current information about what is going on today’. She said many victims still feel angry, but vindicated.
“I would say categorically, the failures that happened then are still happening now. We have more communication, but we do not have a system that supports victims and listens to their voices.
“When they do challenge the system, unfortunately the organisation closes ranks. It protects the organisation.
“Institutional protection and covering up what is really going on is what I am hearing today.”
She said the foundation was supporting ‘over 371 victims today who say they are still being failed by GMP’. “Their voices are being silenced,” she added.
Ms Oliver hit out at ‘police marking their own homework’ and complaints falling ‘on deaf ears’.
“I want change from this report,” she went on. “I don’t want the same things to happen again. This is very much about the past. We are now in the present and I am seeing what is going on today. Far too often we have the same things happening.”
Ms Oliver called for an overhaul in policing and sentencing. She referenced the Post Office scandal documentary and urged people to investigate CSE in Rochdale properly.
“The truth is a really uncomfortable truth,” she said. “There are still far, far too many victims who are not being heard, who are being criminalised, who are being intimidated, who are being silenced when they raise their heads above the parapet.
“For me the buck stops at the top. This needs to be addressed properly at Government level. We need a radical overhaul of the policing system. This is not just a report. This is the story of thousands of children whose lives have been blighted and a failure to listen.
“This is not a local problem – this is a national problem about the state of policing, about a system that doesn’t work. Without people listening we are never going to change.”
‘It’s disgusting that we were disbelieved’
Ms Rowbotham told how she met Victoria Agoglia – a 15-year-old girl who died in Rochdale in 2003 after she was injected with heroin by a man then aged 50. The teenager had disclosed to social workers she had been raped, but no one listened to her.
A former healthcare worker who worked for Rochdale’s Crisis Intervention Team at the time, Ms Rowbotham said Victoria was a ‘lovely girl’. A photograph of Victoria served as a haunting reminder to all those involved in child protection in Rochdale to always act.
Now a councillor in Rochdale who was awarded an MBE, Ms Rowbotham was portrayed by Maxine Peake in the BBC drama Three Girls.
She and her colleagues repeatedly shared ‘significant concerns’ with police and children’s social care services at the council.
“The report said 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’, added the report, which ultimately allowed abuse to continue unchecked.
She said: “When she died I cut out her picture from the paper and I put it on the office wall as a testament, but also as a reminder of the importance of what we were trying to do and the consequences for those young women we were working with if we failed to protect them.
“It’s often said survivors of child exploitation were children who weren’t loved. I want to acknowledge the trauma that parents, carers and other family members went through when they were doing their best to protect their children with little or no support when the devil at the door was too powerful.”
In a nod to the Post Office scandal, Ms Rowbotham asked how many more times would it take for a TV drama or documentary ‘to call people and organisations to account’. She said her team at the time were tenacious and committed to the girls.
“It’s disgusting that we were disbelieved, scrutinised, misrepresented, scapegoated and then publicly and nationally discredited by both the police and the local authority. We were blamed. They said it was my fault.”
Ms Rowbotham said her team heard ‘horrendous things’ from girls and worried about them. “We tried every strategy to try and change things, only then to have our professionalism and qualifications questions. All we were trying to do was to get protective services to do their jobs. That’s disgusting.” She said children were ‘being raped everyday’, but police and the council told her it was nothing to do with them. “Everything that is being done now should have been done then. All it would have taken was the right people actually giving a damn,” she went on.
Ms Rowbotham said they were told to ‘draw a line under it’ despite having a wealth of evidence.
“They weren’t numbers – they were real children,” she said. “Asking us to draw a line was beyond belief. We couldn’t believe no one wanted to protect the young children or track down the abusers. This made me ill. It made the whole team ill.”
Ms Rowbotham hit out at those who didn’t cooperate with the review.
“Shame on you. Clearly it was easier to discredit, diminish and dismiss the fact that children were being manipulated, poisoned and raped.
“The scale of abuse was known, but they failed to take action. Someone needs to ask why? I cannot applaud the fact that services are better now, because so they should be.”