Police took aborted foetus without telling Rochdale grooming victim, review finds
Rochdale #Rochdale
Greater Manchester police (GMP) secretly took the aborted foetus of a 13-year-old grooming victim in order to do a DNA test without telling the girl or her parents, a highly critical review of the police and council in Rochdale has found.
Officers collected the foetus from Rochdale hospital in March 2009 but took no immediate action when the DNA failed to match possible suspects in the investigation at the time.
The foetus was then placed in the freezer at Rochdale police station and forgotten about until a “routine property review” some time later. Meanwhile, the girl continued to be exploited for several years and at one point was at risk of being taken to Pakistan by her abusers.
The revelation is one of a series of “deplorable” failings detailed in the latest chapter of an independent assurance review into how GMP and other agencies responded to child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Greater Manchester. The review was commissioned by Andy Burnham when he was first elected as mayor in 2017.
It identified at least 96 individuals who potentially pose a risk to children, most of whom have yet to be prosecuted.
Other findings include:
When cases did eventually reach court, GMP left the young victims to be “harassed and intimidated by the men who had previously abused them”, sometimes at gunpoint.
GMP took no action in the case of a 15-year-old girl who gave birth to a child of her “pimp”.
One child told GMP that her abusers kept girls in cages and “made them bark like a dog or dress like a baby”, but took no action once she left Greater Manchester and was put in care elsewhere.
In an “incredible example of poor practice”, one victim, known as Amber, was herself arrested and then bailed to live with a man who had already been arrested on suspicion of child sexual exploitation.
The Crown Prosecution Service, in consultation with GMP, decided to name Amber as a co-conspirator in the sexual exploitation of other children in a trial of her abusers, in what the authors describe as “deplorable further abuse of a CSE survivor”.
The latest review, the third of four, found “compelling evidence” of widespread organised sexual exploitation of children within Rochdale from 2004 onwards.
The report’s authors, the child protection specialist Malcolm Newsam and the former senior police officer Gary Ridgway, concluded: “Children were left at the mercy of their abusers because of an inadequate response by GMP and [Rochdale council’s] children’s social care.” Many men were not brought to justice as a result, they added.
The authors were particularly critical of how police treated a girl known as Child 44. She had an abortion at 13 in 2009 and only found out in 2011 that the foetus had been taken by police, in the run-up to the trial of men who abused her and others. She told the report’s authors she thought it was “disgusting” that the baby’s remains had been taken without her consent, and that police had “robbed” her.
The girl ultimately gave evidence at a 2012 trial but was “particularly distressed” that the man who impregnated her at 13 was not charged with raping her. He was only found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment (to run concurrently) for trafficking for sexual exploitation, and was released on licence from prison less than four years after he was sentenced.
Child 44 described being threatened by a man with a gun before her trial and the total absence of any protection after the trial.
“Me and my friend went to the shop. I got abuse hurled at me in the street, saying: ‘Oh you got men done for rape.’ Loads of men chased us in the cars. I was also in the local Asda about four or five years after the trial and I bumped into my abuser who got me pregnant. I didn’t even know he was out of prison. Nobody had told me or asked me if I wanted to object to him being released. I see many of the men who abused me all the time, all around Rochdale all the time,” she said.
When the review authors asked Child 44 how the police responded, she replied: “They didn’t. They just said lock your door.” We asked whether there was any police protection or cameras and she said: “No, nothing.”
Another victim, Child Three, spoke of the devastating impact of giving evidence against her abusers.
She claimed that when pregnant with her second child she returned home to find “my house was trashed, with slag and grass written across the wall, they ripped the carpet, burnt the shed down, and killed the chickens”.
The police just told her to “get out” if it happened again, she claimed. She ended up with two young children in a homeless hostel after her windows were smashed and she received threatening messages.
“I told the police and all they kept doing was apologising and they told me the investigation was over and there was nothing more they could do and told me to go to my local councillor,” she said.
The review considered the allegations Sara Rowbotham, the coordinator of the crisis intervention team in Rochdale, and Maggie Oliver, a former GMP detective constable, made in the BBC documentary Betrayed Girls about child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester.
Newsam said the review found Oliver and Rowbotham’s allegations were substantiated and that “during the period covered by this review, GMP and Rochdale council failed to prioritise the protection of children who were being sexually exploited by a significant number of men within the Rochdale area”.
So far 42 men have been convicted for non-recent, multi-offender child sexual exploitation in Rochdale across six trials from 2012 to 2023.