Grooming gangs ‘still at large, and the victims aren't believed'

Times

5 hours ago

Teenage girls are still being sexually abused by gangs of men across the country, according to a whistleblower who helped to expose the grooming scandal, and the crime is becoming harder to spot.
Maggie Oliver, who quit the police to expose the Rochdale grooming scandal, said that her warnings about the systemic abuse of young girls had been consistently ignored for 15 years by police, councils and other authorities.
'This isn't historical failing. It's still going on today. They still don't get believed,' Oliver said after a report by Baroness Casey of Blackstock concluded that disproportionate numbers of Asian men had been engaged in grooming but that successive governments and the authorities had turned a blind eye. It came 14 years after The Times revealed how predominantly Pakistani men were responsible for an organised campaign of abuse.
Casey said on Tuesday it was 'clear' that children were still being exploited. She said the crime was becoming harder to detect because children were being groomed on social media and exploited through drug 'county lines'.
Casey also said that the lack of complete ethnicity data for the perpetrators of grooming was a 'bloody disaster' and blamed officials at local authorities for 'a different level of irresponsibility' in their failure to record accurate information.
The Times can reveal that the number of child sex abusers whose ethnicity is not being recorded has risen fourfold despite warnings that the failure will fuel another grooming gang scandal.
The political fallout from Casey's devastating review escalated as Sir Keir Starmer accused Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, of destroying the cross-party consensus on tackling child sex abuse.
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
The prime minister revived his claims that his political opponents were jumping on a 'far-right bandwagon' and cited his own record in tackling grooming gangs.
Badenoch had renewed her attacks on Starmer for changing his mind about the need for a national inquiry. She also accused him of having politicised the issue earlier this year when he said that those calling for an inquiry were 'jumping on a far-right bandwagon'.
In a furious response, Starmer accused Badenoch of having said 'not one word' about the issue while she was women and equalities minister in the Tory government. He added that Chris Philp, formerly the policing minister and now shadow home secretary, also failed to raise the issue as a minister. He said voters should 'compare and contrast' the two leaders' records, pointing out he brought the first grooming prosecutions as director of public prosecutions 15 years ago.
At the G7 summit in Canada, Starmer said: 'I know there's some discussion of this far-right bandwagon. I was actually calling out politicians — nobody else, politicians — who in power had said and done nothing, who are now making the claims that they make.'
In other developments yesterday:
• The national grooming gangs inquiry is expected to oversee local inquiries into failings by local leaders and police in Rochdale, Bradford and Greater Manchester;
• The Conservatives warned that the record numbers of migrants arriving in small boats has heightened the grooming scandal to a border security issue;
• Sarah Champion, the Rotherham MP, said perpetrators had been operating with impunity since the 1960s and it was a 'national shame' that children had been blamed instead .
Casey thanked Oliver in her report for the support she had offered survivors, often at great personal cost.
Oliver, who was then a detective constable, resigned from Greater Manchester police in 2012 to expose the Rochdale grooming scandal. She said Casey had been the first person who properly listened to her and to victims of grooming and 'reported the truth in an official document'.
However, she said she had since lost faith in the system and said that children were still groomed and ignored. Oliver cited a recent case in which officers had been diverted from grooming cases to deal with other crimes. 'I still think there's been a determination to avoid investigating these cases wherever possible,' she said. She created the Maggie Oliver Foundation, which supports victims of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
Casey told the Commons home affairs select committee that although sexual grooming was 'thankfully still rare', it was still happening and becoming harder to detect.
'I am fairly sure that it is still happening today,' she said. 'I think people don't necessarily look hard enough to find these children in particular. I think that the world of crime is quite complicated.
'To quote colleagues in the police, they are awash with online harm and online exploitation. We've had the growth in the visibility of county lines and child criminal exploitation — at the same time, I do not think child abuse or, indeed, child sexual exploitation has gone away.
Casey told the Commons home affairs select committee that the government should implement her 12 recommendations within six months
HOUSE OF COMMONS/UK PARLIAMENT/PA
'Certainly, from the evidence that we saw during the audit and the visits we undertook to some police forces, it is clear that it is still happening.'
She called on ministers to act within six months on all 12 recommendations in her report, including the mandatory recording of ethnicity for the perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
Analysis of Ministry of Justice figures carried out by The Times has revealed that more than 1,000 offenders who were sentenced for child sex offences did not have their ethnicities recorded, This was a fourfold increase on the 248 recorded in 2017, the earliest figures available, and the increase happened despite warnings that a failing to record the data would fuel more grooming scandals.
Casey also told MPs that children were being put at risk because police data-sharing systems were outdated and different agencies were failing to share information sufficiently quickly. She has called for mandatory sharing of children's services records between all statutory safeguarding partners in cases of child sex abuse and exploitation.
This was particularly important to ensure the safety of children in care who go missing but do not have parents to check about their whereabouts as this cohort had been particularly preyed upon by grooming gangs, she added.
Casey said she had not realised the 'paucity of technology' available to support police investigations of missing children.
Casey said her recommendation for mandatory rape charges for all adults who have sex with 13-15 year-olds would be a 'clear, historic law change' and prevent the offence being downgraded to less serious crimes, which are often pursued by police and prosecutors to maximise their chances of a conviction.