Rochdale grooming gang report’s key findings

Greater Manchester Police has apologised for the failings but says it has “dramatically” changed

A damming report has found serious failings in efforts to protect children from sexual abuse by grooming gangs.

The review’s authors said Greater Manchester Police and Rochdale Council failed to properly investigate reports of abuse in Rochdale between 2004 to 2013 despite warnings from whistleblowers.

Here are the key findings from the 173-page document:

Girls were ‘left at the mercy’ of gangs

The review found there was a “significant probability” that 74 out of the 111 children on police records from the period were being sexually exploited.

In 48 of those cases there were serious failures by agencies to protect the children, the report concluded.

The report’s author Malcolm Newsam said many abusers had been left unpunished after the police and council failings.

He found investigations were not well enough resourced to match the “scale of the widespread organised exploitation” carried about by a “significant number”of predominantly Asian men in Rochdale.

Dozens of offenders still at large

The team found there were 96 men still judged to be a potential risk to children, which is “only a proportion of the individuals engaged in child sexual exploitation” over the period.

In 2012 nine men who ran a child sexual abuse ring were jailed as part of Operation Span.

Their trial heard girls as young as 12 were given alcohol and drugs and raped in rooms above takeway shops, and taken to different flats via taxis to be used in exchange for cash.

But the report said Operation Span was “limited” and addressed a “small number of perpetrators”, and though more convictions followed, only “a very small proportion” of the children known to be sexually exploited in Rochdale were included in later trials.

GMP failed to prioritise and resource its abuse investigations, Mr Newsam saidEmerging threat of exploitation not addressed between 2004 and 2007

In 2007, an NHS crisis intervention team warned GMP and the council of an alleged organised crime group who had been dealing in child sexual exploitation and using victims to deal class A drugs.

At the time the team where whistleblower Sara Rowbotham worked found at least 11 children they believed to have been abused.

But both the police and the council chose not to investigate the men in what the review concluded was a “serious failure to protect the children”.

One detective was tasked with looking at the case, but their efforts did not including examining organised crime groups suspected of abusing children, and ended in no charges of convictions.

Child sex exploitation was a low priority and under-resourced by GMP

A police investigation in 2008 and 2009 into at least 30 adults involved in child abuse was not given adequate resources which hampered efforts to prosecute, the review team found.

It began after a child who had been arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage at a takeaway told police she had been raped and sexually assaulted by the restaurant’s staff.

Another child also gave evidence she had been abused at the same venue, but officers “failed to focus on her disclosure and as a result insufficient effort was put into identifying the man who raped her”, the review found.

Statutory agencies failed to respond

The report found the NHS crisis intervention team in Rochdale had referred “potentially 260 victims” to children’s social care services that had “not been acted on over the years”.

It comes despite the council-run safeguarding board criticising the team in 2013 for not following “not following child protection procedures and for not communicating appropriately with other agencies”.

Mr Newsam said found the serious allegations made by team and other whisteblowers had been substantiated.

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