‘Telford child abuse victims went through trauma while authorities turned a blind eye’

Geraldine McKelvie, who exposed the Telford child abuse scandal in 2018, gives an insight into the investigation after a report found that more than 1,000 kids were sexually exploited over decades

Lucy Lowe was killed in a house fire alongside her mum and sister (

Image: Collect Unknown)

Seven years ago, I came across a blog by a very brave woman who had chronicled in excruciating detail the child sexual exploitation she’d suffered in the Shropshire town of Telford.

It was less than a year after an inquiry had exposed the horrific extent of grooming and abuse in Rotherham and I couldn’t fathom the idea that these horrors could have occurred on a similar scale anywhere else.

But over the next few months, I got to know Holly Archer and I was absolutely blindsided by what she and other girls in Telford had suffered.

They were raped, beaten and sold for sex – sometimes to nine men a night.

Yet it was when I asked her how they kept her quiet that my blood truly turned to ice.

She replied: “They threatened to burn down my house and kill my whole family. And in Telford, that was a very real threat.”

Azhar Ali Mehmood burned Lucy Lowe, her mother Eileen and sister Sarah to death in a fire at their home (

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Handout) Sarah Lowe also died in the blaze (

Image:

Press Association)

I listened, horrified, as she told me about Lucy Lowe, a schoolgirl who conceived a child when she was 14 to taxi driver Azhar Ali Mehmood – nine years her senior.

In 2000, when Lucy was 16 and pregnant again, he set her house on fire and she was burned alive, alongside her mum Eileen and 17-year-old sister Sarah.

Shockingly, Lucy wasn’t the only victim to die. Becky Round, 13, was killed in a road traffic collision described as a “prank” two years later.

And her friend Vicky Round died in a drugs incident aged 20 – after her abusers got her hooked on Class A drugs at the age of 12.

Thankfully, when I drove back to London and told my editors at the Mirror they were as horrified as I was and insisted we needed to do something about Telford.

My colleague Nick Sommerlad and I began digging – but the authorities did not want our readers to know about the horrifying scale of abuse in Telford.

Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd (

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Getty Images)

First, ten powerful men – from the police, the council and the health service – wrote to then Home Secretary Amber Rudd to say no inquiry was necessary.

We kept going.

We met girls who didn’t know each other but wept as they told us eerily similar stories of the men who had manipulated them and caused them unimaginable trauma while the authorities turned a blind eye.

The figures were astounding. All of the data we accessed suggested hundreds and hundreds of victims over decades.

We broke the story in 2018 and were told by the police that we had “sensationalised” the scale of abuse.

Andrew Mason – the head of the local safeguarding board – said we’d made it up “on the back of a fag packet”.

Yet our findings prompted a public inquiry which today has vindicated our reporting and found that more than 1,000 children were targeted by merciless predators.

I know that nothing can compensate the victims of abuse in Telford for what they have suffered but I hope this provides them with some answers.

And I’m in awe of Holly, who made huge personal sacrifices to help us break the story and hold those who failed generations of girls to account.

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