Girls were left “at the mercy” of paedophile grooming gangs for years in Rochdale because of an “inadequate” response by police and council bosses, a new report has found.
The damning 173-page report into Operation Span – Greater Manchester Police’s (GMP) much-criticised investigation into the grooming allegations – also identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children.
The report, the result of a six-year investigation commissioned by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, covered 2004 to 2013 and reviewed the cases of 111 children on police files during the period of Operation Span.
It found that there was evidence 74 of the children were being sexually exploited and in 48 cases there were “serious failures” to protect them.
The report detailed multiple failed investigations by police and an apparent indifference among local authorities to the plight of hundreds of youngsters, mainly white girls from poor backgrounds, all identified as potential victims of abuse by Asian men.
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The report states there was “compelling evidence” of widespread, organised sexual abuse of children in Rochdale from as early as 2004 onwards.
Three years later, in 2007, a crisis team led by Sara Rowbotham – who would become a whistleblower in the scandal – alerted GMP and Rochdale Council to the involvement of an organised crime group.
GMP identified the ringleaders of the gang but did not investigate further because the children were too frightened to assist.
That, the report says, was a “serious failure” to protect the children, because it ignored the coercion and control the groomers had over their victims and families.
Children as young as 12 gang-raped above takeaway shops
Another police investigation into two takeaway shops in Rochdale, involving 30 adult male suspects, was also aborted prematurely because police bosses failed to resource it and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) deemed the main child victim an unreliable witness.
In January 2010, following the launch of a specialist team in Rochdale, a child told a social worker of the wide-scale abuse of children by up to 60 men.
A detective inspector asked for more staff to investigate.
However, according to the report, police bosses denied the request.
“Once more, children were left at the mercy of their abusers because of an inadequate response by GMP and children’s social care to the serious exploitation of vulnerable children,” the report said.
It wasn’t until December – more than two years after first being told of abuse centred on two takeaway restaurants – that GMP finally acted, launching Operation Span.
The operation led to the conviction in May 2012 of nine men in a high-profile court case, which heard girls as young as 12 were plied with alcohol and drugs and gang raped in rooms above takeaway shops.
It was hailed at the time as a “fantastic result of British justice” by Greater Manchester Police.
But the report released today found the police operation failed to address numerous other crimes and ignored children’s allegations, letting their abusers off the hook.
Convictions ‘only scraped the surface’ of child abuse
While police and council bosses presented the court convictions as having “resolved” grooming in the town, the reality was that it had “only scraped the surface”, the report found.
In fact, the report concludes, the problem was not given “sufficient priority”, despite senior and middle managers in the police and children’s social care being aware of the scale of abuse involved.
“We regard this as a lamentable strategic failure by senior leaders in GMP and Rochdale Council,” the report continues.
It said the failure to prioritise, detect, disrupt or prosecute “should firmly be laid at the door of the senior officers in GMP throughout this period”.
Malcolm Newsam CBE, a renowned childcare expert who co-authored the report, said: “Successive police operations were launched, but these were insufficiently resourced to match the scale of the widespread organised exploitation within the area.
“Consequently, children were left at risk and many of their abusers to this day have not been apprehended.”
‘Lone voices’ raised alarm about ‘serial rape of countless children’
The Rochdale report follows reports by the same authors on grooming in Manchester and Oldham, which found authorities had again failed children – leaving them in the clutches of paedophile gangs.
Mr Newsam authored the report with Gary Ridgeway, a former detective superintendent, following allegations by whistleblowers Ms Rowbotham and Maggie Oliver, former GMP detective who resigned from the force in disgust, in a BBC TV documentary The Betrayed Girls, which aired in 2017.
The report found Ms Rowbotham and Ms Oliver were “lone voices” who had flagged the clear evidence of “prolific serial rape of countless children in Rochdale”.
Ms Oliver has since founded The Maggie Oliver Foundation, a charity supporting adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Former detective Maggie Oliver
GMP has since launched further investigations, which have so far resulted in the conviction of 42 men involved in the abuse of 13 children.
According to Rochdale Council, recent Ofsted inspections have found “the way children at risk of sexual exploitation are protected by Rochdale’s children’s services has improved”.