The Rochdale grooming scandal shames Britain – thank God for the whistleblowers who sacrificed everything to be heard

THIS year Britain has already gained a folk hero in Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster who doggedly sought to expose the wrongful prosecution of colleagues trapped by the Horizon computer system.

Now the report into Greater Manchester Police’s failure to stop a child abuse ring in operation in Rochdale between 2004 and 2013 brings to light two more individuals whose exceptional bravery deserves to be recognised.

They are Sara Rowbotham, a former social worker in the town, and Maggie Oliver, a former detective with Greater Manchester Police.

Without them, it is likely that teenage girls in Rochdale would still be being gang raped by the dozen.

Yesterday’s report by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority makes astonishing reading for the failures it exposes in both the police force and the local council to tackle a child grooming gang which was brazenly abusing girls in rooms above takeaway shops.

Serious failures

When Rowbotham, who worked with teenagers as part of Rochdale’s Crisis Intervention Team, raised her concerns, colleagues seemingly didn’t want to know.

This was no case of an isolated fantasist drumming up tall stories to gain attention — like the infamous “Nick”, whose allegations against Edward Heath and others led to millions being wasted on chasing false leads and reputations being smeared.

Rowbotham had identified 11 girls who were all telling a very similar story, of being plied with drink and drugs by a gang and raped.

Yet astonishingly, neither Rochdale Council nor Greater Manchester Police chose to undertake further investigation when the suspicions were first reported in 2007.

It wasn’t until the following year that an investigation began — and apparently only then because one of the girls who was being abused had been arrested for criminal damage at the takeaway where she had been raped.

Even then, no charges followed. Maggie Oliver had to resign from Greater Manchester Police in order to draw attention to what was going on, which eventually led to the prosecution of 42 men.

This week’s report reveals that 74 girls in Rochdale may have been abused, and that in “48 of those cases, there were serious failures to protect the child”.

The girls were seriously let down by the authorities who were supposed to be looking after them.

Astonishingly, one of the girls, “Amber”, was even named as a co-conspirator in the sexual exploitation of other children in one of the court cases against the men, as if she had facilitated her own rape and attacks on other girls.

This was apparently a procedural tactic supposed to ensure that her evidence was heard in court.

But she was never even told that she, a child herself, had been formally accused of being part of a child abuse ring and was never given the opportunity to refute the allegations.

The Rochdale scandal tells us a lot about where power and influence lies in modern Britain.

We’ve had a Me Too campaign which in some instances obsessed over the most minor cases of inappropriate behaviour.

Yet at the same time we have working-class teenage girls being gang raped and nothing being done about it for years.

It isn’t just Rochdale.

The same pattern of offending has been observed in Doncaster and Rotherham.

In the latter case, an astonishing 1,400 girls were abused between 1997 and 2013 before police finally started to get on top of it.

Some victims had been doused in petrol and threatened with guns.

As in Rochdale, for years police simply ignored the evidence.

As revealed by Alexis Jay, who led the inquiry into that scandal, a large part of the problem was that social workers and police officers feared being accused of racism if they pursued the gangs, whose members were mostly of Pakistani heritage.

Instead, the girls, who were mostly white, were treated with contempt.

Obviously, any case which has the potential to stir racial tension or violence has to be handled sensitively.

The crimes of individuals and gangs must not be projected on whole communities.

But sorry, if there are gangs abusing children it is a disgrace for authorities to turn a blind eye, whoever the perpetrators are.

All that police achieve when they ignore serious criminality is to hand the initiative to racists who will exploit it for all they can.

Shames Britain

I have to say that the first I ever heard of child grooming gangs in northern cities was when Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party, raised it as an issue in an election campaign.

Is that what police and others in authority wanted: For the BNP to be the only people who appeared to be taking the matter seriously?

It shouldn’t really need to be said, but anyone who rapes teenage girls deserves to spend the rest of their life behind bars, never mind what race or religion they are.

Police and social services need firmly to tackle such offending head on, without stopping to think about the ethnic or gender politics.

In Rochdale, Rotherham and other places, children were subjected to brutality and nothing was done for years to stop their attackers.

That is a record which shames Britain.

It is chilling to think that but for a handful of whistleblowers, who in some cases were prepared to sacrifice their own careers to get heard, the gangs could still be getting away with it.