Twenty years on, police are still failing grooming gang victims

Nothing has shocked me more in a long career in journalism than what i learned at the turn of the millennium about the abuse of girls in Rochdale, the horror of what had been done to them and the apparent indifference of greater Manchester Police. i spoke to one girl who described being groomed by an Asian man she thought was her boyfriend. She was 13 at the time. She was passed around endless men, plied with vodka until she was sick and suffered rape after rape.

She was not alone. We know this happened to scores of young girls. now a new damning report lays bare the failures of both oldham Council and greater Manchester Police to investigate such crimes properly.

it describes the case of a 12-yearold girl known as ‘Sophie’. She went to the police station in oldham to report being raped by an Asian man in october 2006.

She was told to come back when she wasn’t drunk. She was abducted from that police station and raped by two men, attacked by another, before being raped by five more men.

the incompetence on the part of councils and police revealed in the report is staggering. in 2005 the police received an allegation that a council welfare officer, Shabir Ahmed, was involved in child sex abuse, yet they failed to tell oldham Council and Shabir continued in his role with access to vulnerable adults and their children. he was not convicted until 2012.

Even more shocking on the part of the council was evidence that men convicted or accused of sexual offences were handed taxi licences. Why, when it was known taxis were used to pick up these poor girls?

it’s nearly 20 years since we began to uncover the shocking scale of the abuse and the appalling treatment of the victims in Rochdale and oldham and there have been more than six reviews and reports into the matter.

So what difference will this new one make? i put that question to my friend Maggie oliver. Maggie is one of the kindest, most courageous and determined women i’ve ever known. As a greater Manchester detective tasked with investigating the grooming and abuse of girls in Rochdale, she was appalled at the lack of support these girls were given.

So in 2012 she quit and blew the whistle on the failures of the force to protect girls and arrest the perpetrators. She went on to set up the Maggie oliver Foundation offering victims support, advice and legal help.

So have greater Manchester Police changed their working practices, as the chief constable claimed this week? have incidents of grooming gangs picking up and abusing children ended? Are the police now treating these girls with respect? Are perpetrators being caught and imprisoned?

What she told me was utterly depressing. From her work in the Maggie oliver Foundation, she knows it’s still going on and it makes her blood boil.

her foundation is inundated with survivors needing help who’ve been fobbed off by the police. Children, she says, are still being judged and told their abuse is their own fault.

She believes the problems are manifold. there are many good police officers but poor management and decision-making across the board — from Manchester, Yorkshire to the Met — often puts the wrong officers at the forefront of dealing with vulnerable victims, officers who lack the right skills to understand trauma or what abuse does to a person.

too often, girls make their complaint to young constables who haven’t been trained to deal with their pain and fear. the

victims feel they’ve been treated badly, shown no respect and are not important. As a result they often simply disengage from the police. She also believes the grooming gangs have become very sophisticated and know they are difficult to investigate.

then there’s the race question. it’s still predominantly men of Pakistani origin committing these crimes, says Maggie. We should be addressing this within those communities to find out why.

What’s needed, she insists, is a complete overhaul of the whole system. Root-and-branch changes from the top down.

Young officers need proper training. the girls need to be believed and respected, not blamed for their abuse, judged, pushed away and dismissed.

they are, she tells me, some of the most at-risk in our society, but too often, even when there is irrefutable evidence to prosecute offenders and safeguard children, the girls are being failed.