Cops Alleged Backsliding over Sex Grooming

Industry of Child Exploitation in Rochdale

POLICE held back for six years after learning that Asian men were grooming young lassies in Rochdale a report has revealed. A Serious Case Review exploring the abuse of seven girls in Rochdale by mostly Asian men including some of the nine men grooming mob jailed for 77 years last May discovered:
i) Local police, Social workers,and the Crown Prosecution Service continually fell down the size of the child grooming abuse taking place in Rochdale.

ii) The authorities 'struggled to empathise' with the victims, to some extent because the lassies came from 'poor backgrounds', giving them a skewed picture of their behaviour'.

iii) Professional in the town 'repeatably' claimed the victims had it 'in their power' to stop the abuse 'suggesting this was something they could chose not to do'.

These lapses led to at least seven teenagers and possibly dozens more later identified by the police to be prayed upon by the gang of men and put through vicious sex abuse and exploitation.

The journalist Chris Jones in last Thursday's Heywood Advertiser, writes:
'And even when the authorities did recognise the problem, their slow reaction allowed the abusers to carry on exploiting their victims for years.'

The report shows that the police were tipped off that one of the victims was being sexually done over by older men as early as 2004, and that police were 'frequently contacted' by members of the victims' families and developed a 'sense of apathy' to the warnings because the lassies would eventually return home. The father of one girl said on Radio Four that, in desperation, he even turned to the British National Party (BNP). The Heywood Advertiser reports: 'In one shocking incident, police were told that one of the victims had been raped. Despite reporting a serious crime, the police failed to investigate.' According to the report 'the fact that she returned home appears to have been sufficient for the police purposes to treat the incident as having been concluded.' (Heywood Advertiser)

Four years after the alarm bell was first rung in 2004 two teenage lassies were found by police at a takeaway and they said they had been sexually abused, but even then, according to the report, the lassies were failed because the Crown Prosecution Service didn't think they would make reliable witnesses in court.  This failure was put right in 2011 and the vicious industrial gang of  sex groomers were convicted a year later the report says:
'the failure to progress criminal charges (in 2008/09) left the young people distrustful of the police and more vulnerable to being exploited.'

Sadly the report concludes:  'it should have been possible to have prevented a significant part of the abuse that took place' if the changes that the reports recommend had been implemented earlier.

Greater Manchester Police are at present conducting their own separate enquiry into the grooming scandal.  The Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk, has urged the police to give the Crown Prosecution Service more attention following this recent critical report.

The current printed issue of NORTHERN VOICES No.14, is now available for sale at all our usual outlets in the North of England and beyond - see below. This issue N.V.14 has a piece by John Walker, the former editor of RAP (the Rochdale Alternative Paper), on the Sir Cyril Smith scandal, and the political cover-up in Rochdale and beyond:  entitled 'Cyril Smith:  Our part in his Downfall'. 
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