The review into Operation Span and the investigation of non-recent child sexual exploitation in Rochdale

What really happened with grooming gangs in Rochdale?

Introduction

This month the third part of an investigation into child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester was published. The second part, on child sexual exploitation in Oldham, was previously covered by SW1 Forum. This new part covers child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, with a particular focus on Operation Span and the explosive allegations made by whistleblowers Maggie Oliver and Sara Rowbotham that the authorities had failed to stop grooming gangs preying on young girls for years and then lied about it.

Why was the report written?

In July 2017 the BBC broadcast The Betrayed Girls, a documentary about child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Greater Manchester. Maggie Oliver and Sara Rowbotham were both featured. The key allegations were that:

1. The Crisis Intervention Team run by Rowbotham had repeatedly alerted Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and Rochdale Borough Council to “dozens” of cases of CSE before 2008 but were ignored.

2. Lessons from Operation Augusta weren’t learned and similar mistakes were made during Operation Span.

3. While GMP praised the result of Operation Span, GMP had been aware of child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs since 2004 but had failed to act earlier.

4. During Operation Span GMP failed to record as crimes the abuse they were told about by one victim and left her abusers free.

As a result of the BBC documentary the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, ordered that the allegations it made be investigated.

What did the report discover?

The report found that there was evidence of widespread CSE in Rochdale from 2004 onwards. In 2007 the Crisis Intervention Team alerted GMP and Rochdale Council to a group led by career criminals who were abusing girls and using them to help them deal Class A drugs but nothing was done as the girls were said to be too frightened.

Between 2008 and 2009 there was an investigation focused around two restaurants in Rochdale but when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to prosecute over fears about the reliability of the victims it was abandoned by GMP.

In 2008 a multi-agency CSE team called Sunrise was approved but funding only began in April 2009 and then only for two years. There were further issues with providing all the staff initially agreed on but by 2010 they were aware they were dealing with a CSE network encompassing up to 60 men.

Finally in December 2010 Operation Span was initiated and would lead to convictions for nine men in 2012. However, despite claims by GMP that it was “comprehensive”, the operation was deliberately curtailed due to a lack of resources, with GMP failing to record crimes which would have forced them to go after additional suspects. It also left many of the victims who’d provided evidence at the mercy of the abusers who they had named but which had been excluded from the Op Span investigation.

One of those victims was “Amber”, who was initially part of Op Span but was then left out because her evidence pointed to more abusers, which the investigation lacked the resources to deal with. When it became clear that her evidence was needed to convict the abusers it was still targeting, the CPS took the decision to then charge her as a co-conspirator alongside her abusers, although without pressing charges.

That allowed them to use her prepared evidence in court without having to inform her, although it then led to children’s services trying to take away her baby the day after she gave birth as it meant she was no longer considered a fit mother.

Following media criticism that Op Span had not been as comprehensive as GMP was claiming, they launched Operation Doublet in 2012. It was soon dealing with 42 child victims but evidence seen by the report shows that there were more like 260 potential victims, of whom Op Doublet only approached 90, with the policy being not to include the others unless they came forward. This policy was reversed in 2013 but only after media reports criticised it.

Op Doublet had a very high drop-out rate of victims because it lacked the resources to support and keep in contact with vulnerable victims. Some victims claimed that they were offered only three opportunities to make a formal statement and if they failed to do so then they were pressured to sign a disclaimer. By the middle of 2013, only 5 of the victims were still proceeding. By this point 52 abusers had been identified.

Although the report’s authors only have a remit which extends to December 2013, they were provided with data by GMP on the outcomes of the three follow ups to Op Span, showing that Op Doublet, Operation Routh and Operation Lytton have led to 30 men being convicted, mostly with long sentences. However, these trials only included 13 victims, so only a very small proportion of the children abused in Rochdale have got the justice they deserve.

Similarly, the report identified 96 individuals who posed a risk to children, meaning that the majority of abusers have escaped justice so far (although there are additional operations underway, which will be covered in the fourth and final report once they are over). The report authors admit there may be some duplication in their list of 96 due to the use of nicknames but warn that the 96 represent “only a proportion” of the individuals involved in CSE in Rochdale.

The report finds that despite widespread awareness of CSE in Rochdale, GMP and the council failed to use disruption tactics such as child abduction warning notices or risk of sexual harm orders. They also failed to work with licensing departments to tackle abuse in the taxi and restaurant industries. In a sample of 59 victims, the report found a “significant probability” that 45 had been victims of CSE and of those only 3 were appropriately protected by the authorities. There were seriously failings in 37 cases.

What did the abuse involve?

From page 34 onwards, a sample of of victims are given. These are valuable both for the level of detail they provide and their humanising effect. They have largely been ignored in media coverage, perhaps for reasons of length. They are:

1. CHILD 1. In care, regularly absconded, substance misuse and sexual exploitation by older men. Began engaging with the Crisis Intervention Team in 2004. In 2005 she disclosed she’d had unprotected anal sex with an Asian man. There was more exploitation, including “profound sexual abuse” which was sometimes “against her will” but if she refused she would be hit. She was 14. One of her abusers was a married taxi driver who organised sex parties to which he invited friends. Both GMP and Rochdale Council failed to “disrupt or remove” the threat of these men.

2. CHILD 3. The Crisis Intervention Team flagged her in 2005 when she was 15. She was referred to social care because she was being “groomed for prostitution” by two older Asian men who gave her gifts, like a £400 necklace. Social care decided not to get involved because other professionals were working with her and they assessed that “concerns could not be evidenced”. So they closed the case rather than launch a formal child protection investigation with police.

3. CHILD 8. Abused by some of the same abusers and was also carrying packages across Yorkshire for one of them. She was “regularly used for sexual services” by this abuser and his “associates” but was too scared to tell the police. In 2004 she was reported missing and her mother said she was with “Asian males”. In 2005 a relative contacted the police to say she’d been to a hotel with an “Asian man” but she denied it and the police chose to take no further action, such as looking at CCTV in the hotel. Later in 2005 she got in a car with two Asian men who gave her vodka, drove her to a remote location, and raped her. The CPS decided not to proceed, despite the detective inspector leading the case appealing. In 2006 she turned up covered in “love bites and bruises”, reporting that she’d spent the night in a hotel with four Asian men and couldn’t remember what happened. A social worker visited her family but social care declined to intervene as she was “now 16 years of age”.

4. CHILD 37. When she was 13 she went to the police station to report that she’d met four Asian men in a park and consented to sex with one but had then been raped by one of the others. She was placed in police protection but as she didn’t consent to a medical or video interview, her case was marked for no further action. Weeks later she was found with an “Asian man” who she’d been having sex with but she refused to make a complaint so the police ceased action. More abuse was reported throughout 2004 and 2005 but her refusal to make a formal statement meant police did not investigate further. She later gave birth to the child of her “pimp” but no action was taken even though she was only 15.

5. CHILD 92. In 2005, as a 16 year old, she was in a “relationship” with a 19 year old Asian man and came “home with bruising and bleeding”. Taken to the hospital with “severe injuries”, the doctor said they were consistent with “signs of a sexual assault”. She denied the assault.

6. CHILD 6. In 2005 was raped by two known abusers after they gave her vodka until she passed out. She later withdrew her complaint. No record of the crime could be found on GMP records.

7. CHILD 2. In 2005 she was said to be “difficult” since meeting a man. She made an allegation of rape against an Asian man.

8. CHILD 5. In 2006 she was working as a street prostitute and had been kicked out of the house by her mother. She was staying with a known abuser and while over the age of consent was considered “vulnerable to sexual exploitation”.

The report concludes that the Crisis Intervention Team and GMP had identified an organised crime group sexually exploiting these children and whose leaders were “prolific career criminals”. Despite knowing of at least 11 victims by 2007, who were also being used to facilitate the gang dealing Class A drugs, GMP and Rochdale Council failed to progress any investigation against them because the victims were “too frightened to assist any inquiry”. They were aware the issue was “young English females who are seriously exploited by Asian males in this area”.

What was the scale of the abuse?

The report notes that Operation Doublet found 260 victims. Subsequently Operation Green Jacket had found 480 victims by 2020. The report also identified 96 abusers.

For context, Rochdale in the 2011 census (likely the most representative for the period covered) had a population of around 211,000 in around 90,000 households with 14.9% being some sort of Asian while 81.7% were some sort of White.

Although the report doesn’t examine the identity of the abusers and victims, details in the examples they give make it clear that the abusers were overwhelmingly Asian and the victims were white. There is one reference on page 77 to some victims also being abused by “Eastern European Males”.

There were 22,265 people of Pakistani origin in Rochdale. Some abusers were Afghan or from similar backgrounds but it seems unlikely the population the abusers were drawn from was larger than 25,000 people. 51% of the population were women and 49% men, so that reduces the number to around 12,500, of whom some would have been too young or too old to have been involved in any abuse. Nonetheless, 96 out of 12,500 means 0.76% of all Pakistani or similar ethnicity men in Rochdale could’ve been abusers. So in any gathering of 100 Pakistani or similar men it was more likely than not that one of them would be a grooming gang abuser.

The number of those aged between 10 and 17 in Rochdale in 2011 was 22,870, of whom around 11,500 were likely female. That would mean with 260 victims, that 2.2% of all girls 10-17 in Rochdale were victims. If the bigger figure of 480 from Op Green Jacket is used, then that rises to 4.17% of all girls 10-17. So in any gathering of 25 girls aged between 10 and 17 there would be 1 victim of the grooming gangs.

These are of course very rough numbers. Nonetheless they illustrate how widespread the abuse was, especially when you consider that the report considers the figure of 96 abusers to be “only a proportion” of the total number of abusers. The group who were abusing Amber were described in one official report as “in excess of forty males from mainly Asian ethnic backgrounds” alone. This behaviour was widely known within these circles at least, with one victim describing how girls would be taken into a room with “20 or 30 Asian men” where they would be “passed us around like a ball” after being given “pure” alcohol.

The abuse also took place over a wide geographic area, with one case involving links to Oldham, Bury, Central Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Blackpool. An official report described it as “an organised industry”. In the case of Amber, when she was pregnant, she was almost “coerced to leave the country for Pakistan” but it appears that ceased following the abortion.

Were the allegations correct?

The report concluded that allegations that the Crisis Intervention Team had failed to pass on details of victims correctly were false. A police source had claimed this in the media when Op Span was being concluded and these allegations were later repeated in two serious case reviews conducted in 2013. The report found that by the time the serious case reviews were published, there was clear evidence that this was untrue and says they found this “level of misrepresentation quite disturbing”.

The author of the overview reports and chair of the serious case review panel issued a written statement which failed to address these issues and declined to be interviewed about them.

Although Op Span was resourced as a “major investigation”, a police source claimed to the report author’s that much of this was driven by the Assistant Chief Constable’s need to visibly do something as he was being “beaten up” over Rochdale’s poor rape detection performance. Similarly, the source claims that it required a “gold meeting” of senior officers because “it was quite clear from the start that there was a lot of fairly senior people who were going to be asking, or being asked, some very difficult questions around what went on in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and they weren't going to be able to answer them very easily at all”. Press attention driven by whistleblowing was also an important driver behind the operation.

Nonetheless, although Op Span had “comprehensive” terms of reference, including to identify all the victims, it soon began to focus on a limited number of victims who could support the prosecution of the small number of abusers who’d been identified as suspects already. Many victims gave interviews to identify their abusers, only for GMP not to formally record or investigate many of them. The promises of support made to victims were not upheld, with left to be “harassed and intimidated by the men who had previously abused them”. Many of the victims, unsurprisingly, refused to engage with subsequent investigations.

In a review of the Home Office database covering Op Span, the report authors found 58 suspects, of whom only 3 were ruled out and 12 charged. The other abusers were simply ignored or never investigated. The report therefore found that, as both Sara Rowbotham and Maggie Oliver had alleged, during Op Span many victims had their testimony ignored and their abusers weren’t brought to justice. The report concludes that their allegations were accurate.

The report also found that the GMP IMR into Op Span failed to mention the victims who were ignored and their abusers who weren’t brought to justice. In an interview, one of the original co-authors said that neither he nor his colleague were authors on the final report as they’d “withdrawn” over disagreements with senior GMP officers “who they believed were attempting to unduly influence the content of the draft IMR report”.

Political correctness also played a part, with one police officer saying that he wanted to “go into it big style” and stop any taxi driven by a “Pakistani-looking taxi driver, carrying a female passenger, whose a child” but that none were ever stopped because “GMP patrols were frightened of being tarnished with a race brush for doing it”.

The role of the CPS also comes in for criticism. Despite grooming, sexually abusing and impregnating a 13 year old girl, her abuser was only found guilty of conspiracy and trafficking, with his sentences running concurrently so that he only received 8 years and was released after 4 years in prison. He was never charged with rape. Other abusers also got “relatively short sentences”, meaning that abusers were often quickly out of prison.

There was a general failure to support victims during the trials. One described being “threatened by a man with a gun prior to her trial” and said that after the trial “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.” When she contacted the police they told her to lock her door.

Another victim described her experience: “I gave evidence as a witness and then they weren’t interested in me anymore. I got a phone call to say it was going to be in the media and I had no protection at all. It was left a couple of months and where I live is a predominantly English area. An Asian male pulled up outside my house and hand gestured a gun sign. I was shaking, I rang the police and explained it to them, they came out and patrolled the area and no one was there. A week later I had been out and when I got home my house was trashed, with slag and grass written across the wall, they ripped the carpet, burnt the shed down, and killed the chickens. I rang the police, and they said if they come back, get out, I was pregnant at the time. Then after that, my windows were smashed and I had Facebook messages saying that they knew where I lived”. She fled to a homeless hostel.

The most egregious issue surrounding the trial was the treatment of Amber. She was charged as a co-conspirator, after the CPS consulted GMP, so that her evidence could be used in court. This tactical legal decision was made despite prior promises made to Amber, despite knowing that she’d been coerced by her abusers, and despite the CPS head of the North West Complex Case Unit confirming in early 2011, before the trial, that she was a victim.

The report calls the lack of concern demonstrated “unacceptable”, especially as she was never informed and was thus unable to defend herself. As a result, social services tried to take away her baby the day after she gave birth, there were threats to petrol bomb her house and her home was identified on social media as that of a “paedo”. In 2022 GMP apologised for the way they acted. To date the CPS has not. The CPS also refused to share information with the report authors from the meetings where the decision to charge Amber was taken, citing “legal professional privilege”.

The Chief Prosecutor for Northwest England, who is left unnamed but is well known as Nazir Afzal, was provided with a draft of the report and agreed there was no excuse for not informing Amber. However, the report also confirms that a CPS press release at the time, which said that Amber was involved in “conspiracy” with the abusers and which failed to mention the coercion or that she was also an abuse victim, had been “developed with the support of the Chief Prosecutor for Northwest England”. Maggie Oliver in her book Survivors is far more overt in her criticism of Afzal for his role in this injustice, although this seems to have attracted little press scrutiny despite his extensive media profile.

Comment

The report will make sadly familiar and anger-inducing reading to anyone who has studied the grooming gangs before. Political correctness and official failures meant that organised sexual abuse was allowed to carry on for years, even when it was widely known about. When investigations were launched, victims were betrayed and abusers allowed to go free. Under scrutiny, many in the authorities lied, refused to talk, or tried to hide their own failures. It is clear that many individual police officers were frustrated by the lack of resources and at senior officers making decisions they disagreed with but equally without the two whistleblowers, we wouldn’t know about any of this. Although apologies have been made, nobody has been punished at GMP, Rochdale Council or the CPS.

All too often the victims seem to have been dismissed because they “consented”, even though they were under the age of consent and sexual activity with them was a crime. It is shocking that so many in social care and the police seem to have decided not to enforce the age of consent. The focus on consent also ignored the strong element of violence to the abuse. Child 16 disclosed in 2007 that, “there’re some girls they’ve got who they put in a cage and make them bark like a dog or dress like a baby … they are perverts. I had to burn my sim card”. There was also a clear sectarian element, with abusers and victims drawn from different ethnic groups (although at least one abuser also abused a girl from his community, he did so alone, unlike the group abuse of his other victims).

The government has made a series of promises about tackling the grooming gangs, although that won’t necessarily prevent such measures being taken over by The Blob. This is welcome - and it is noticeable that Labour have, despite promises about an end to violence against women or girls, avoided recent comment on the issue - but there is much more to do. In particular, official figures who failed to act or betrayed victims should be punished through the loss of pensions, being blacklisted from public sector employment, or through the introduction of a new offence for dereliction of duty in a public office; abusers should face much stiffer sentences and where possible should be deported; and more work should be done on understanding the sectarian attitudes which underpinned much of the abuse. Until then, we will continue to be left reliant on whistleblowers to keep bringing these cases to national attention.