Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council have said they are “deeply sorry” after a report said both failed to protect girls from grooming gangs between 2011 and 2014 and “missed opportunities” to protect a girl who tried to raise the alarm.
The girl, identified only by the pseudonym Sophie, was 12 when she first went into a police station in Oldham and reported having been raped by an Asian man in October 2006.
After police officers told her to come back when she was “not drunk” she was driven away, raped in the car and then gang-raped by five men in a house in the town.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said: “There were serious failings and victims were let down, particularly Sophie. I will also fully support any actions to prosecute those responsible for these abhorrent crimes and hold to account those whose behaviour fell short of what we require.”
Oldham is just one of a number of English towns—others include Rotherham, Rochdale, Huddersfield, and Oxford—where under-age girls were groomed and sexually assaulted by men of Pakistani origin over a number of years.
The report criticised the handling of Shabir Ahmed, the leader of the Rochdale grooming gang who was later jailed for 22 years, who was employed by Oldham Council as a welfare rights officer.
It said the police failed to tell the council about him despite serious concerns being raised about Ahmed.
The report concluded, “If this had happened, it may have potentially avoided the tragic abuse of other children.”
One particularly serious allegation, posted on social media in 2014 by a former worker in a children’s home, suggested “that in 2010 Pakistani men would drive round and round waiting for girls to come out from Rivendell children’s home.”
The social media post claimed staff were “not allowed to detain the girls,” but the Newsam report interviewed an independent consultant who was hired by Oldham Council to investigate these allegations and they agreed with the consultant’s findings that “the multi-agency child sexual exploitation plans were active and persistent in supporting the young women and there was no basis for saying that child sexual exploitation was not recognised or dealt with by the police in Oldham during this period.”
The report said there were “legitimate concerns” among the police and the council in Oldham, which has a large Asian population and faced race riots in 2001, that the issue of grooming by men of Pakistani origin would be exploited by far-right groups.
In 2018 the then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid told the BBC, “When it comes to gang-based child exploitation it is self-evident to anyone who cares to look that if you look at all the recent high-profile cases there is a high proportion of men that have Pakistani heritage.”
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