Child Sexual Exploitation ‘Thrived’ in Telford Because of ‘Nervousness About Race’

A general view of the car park at Telford Central Station in Shropshire, on June 21, 2022. (PA)

Child sexual exploitation “thrived” for 30 years in the English town of Telford because of a failure to investigate offenders, who were largely Asian, over the belief it would “inflame racial tensions,” a report has concluded.

The chairman of a public inquiry into what happened in Telford, Tom Crowther QC, said, “The overwhelming theme of the evidence has been the appalling suffering of generations of children caused by the utter cruelty of those who committed child sexual exploitation.”

But he also criticised those who failed to investigate the allegations for years “because of nervousness about race.”

Crowther said more than 1,000 children had been sexually exploited in Telford over a 30-year period.

Seven people were eventually convicted of sexually abusing, trafficking, and prostituting four teenagers between March 2008 and December 2009 in the so-called Operation Chalice trial.

In 2012 Ahdel Ali, 25, and his brother Mubarek Ali, 29, were jailed for 18 years and 14 years, respectively.

Crowther criticised West Mercia Police (WMP) and Telford and Wrekin Council for reducing their specialist teams down to “virtual zero” to save money when Operation Chalice was over.

The inquiry heard that the perpetrators would seek out vulnerable girls, often those in care or with foster parents, and would give them lifts, buy them food, alcohol, and cigarettes, and then expect sexual favours in return.

One girl, Lucy Lowe, became pregnant at the age of 14 to Azhar Ali Mehmood. Two years later, in 2000, Lucy died, along with her mother and 17-year-old sister, when Mehmood set fire to their home.

Police Failed to Do ‘Most Basic Job’

Crowther criticised West Mercia Police which he said had failed to do “its most basic job.”

Crowther said: “Victims and survivors repeatedly told the inquiry how, when they were children, adult men worked to gain their trust before ruthlessly betraying that trust, treating them as sexual objects or commodities. Countless children were sexually assaulted and raped. They were deliberately humiliated and degraded. They were shared and trafficked. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened. They lived in fear and their lives were forever changed.”

The Telford case, along with similar Asian grooming gangs in Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, and Huddersfield, led to accusations that politicians, social workers, and senior police officers turned a blind eye to the abuse for fear of being accused of being racist.

Crowther addressed this, saying: “So far as both the council and WMP were concerned, a number of features appear to have contributed to this shocking failure to address [child sexual exploitation]: a focus upon abuse within the family, at the expense of extra-familial exploitation; over-caution about acting in the absence of ‘hard evidence’—a formal complaint from a child—about exploitation; and a nervousness that investigating concerns against Asian men, in particular, would inflame racial tensions.”