The Betrayed Girls

This programme contains scenes some viewers may find upsetting.

For decades in Britain, thousands of vulnerable children

were systematically abused by gangs of men,

and yet no one dared speak out.

We'd seen so many girls who'd experienced this situation.

We got to the point where we thought somebody's going to have to die

before anything is done.

The victims were groomed, drugged and raped,

and this was happening across vast parts of the country.

It was happening in Birmingham, it was happening in Bradford,

it was happening in Manchester.

How come every single aspect of the British establishment treated every

single case that had cropped up as an isolated, one-off case with no

pattern whatsoever to any of the other cases that were so similar?

But there was a pattern,

one that risked reigniting delicate race relations,

particularly in the north.

-NEWS REPORT:

-There have been violent clashes with white and Asian youths.

The troubles in the north-west are integrally linked with the success

of the British National Party in the last election.

There was absolutely no getting away from the facts that the victims were

young white children and that the offenders were older Pakistani men.

Once those facts became understood by the powers that be,

I think that they made a conscious decision that they weren't going to

open up that box.

It was allowed to slide away and it was buried.

The abuse took place in plain sight,

and yet professionals chose to look the other way and say nothing.

As the years passed, the silence grew deafening.

Inflammatory voices stepped in.

My blood has boiled.

The system's failed us.

They have not protected our daughters.

Social services failed, educators failed, health professionals failed,

police, prosecutors. There is none, there is no agency

I can think of that has got this right.

The trial has begun of 11 men accused of sexually abusing girls

as young as 13.

I don't care what faith or what colour somebody is.

These are perpetrators. These are abusers.

I don't care whether they damage community relations.

Bring them to justice.

This film uncovers why a wall of silence

surrounded the on-street grooming of young girls,

why these children's cries for help were ignored again and again,

and how, over a decade, this pattern of monstrous sexual abuse

was finally forced out into the open.

In 2003, with an alarming rise in teenage pregnancy

across the country, the Labour government of the day

created numerous outreach centres to offer sexual health advice

to the young and vulnerable.

-ON RADIO:

-'What's going wrong with sex education?'

One of the centres was on the outskirts of Rochdale,

a deprived borough of Greater Manchester.

'..about sex, drugs and alcohol.'

No sooner had it opened its doors than the staff of ten

began to hear stories far more worrying than they'd anticipated.

Very quickly we started to identify a number of young people

who were incredibly vulnerable,

who were engaging in sexual activity which wasn't necessarily by choice.

It was something that they felt they needed to do.

It became a situation where we would identify one girl who was vulnerable

and then she would come along with her other friends,

and they were equally vulnerable.

We got little snippets of information from each girl about,

you know, their life, really, and what they were experiencing.

They'd tell us that their boyfriend was a taxi driver,

or that they were enjoying getting really drunk at weekend,

at a party where there were lots of adult men.

From the age of 12 I moved from care home to care home.

You never actually got any love.

Life was just crap all the time.

When I first got involved, it was for fun.

They were my friends.

I could actually talk to them and they wouldn't judge me.

They'd be giving me drink and drugs.

I just thought, oh, free party, I don't mind.

I was 13.

Back then, drinking was this dead exciting thing.

So we'd have a drink and then we'd just go drive around on the moors

and stuff like that. It became like an everyday thing,

not just, like, a weekend thing.

I thought, oh, this is fun. You know when you're younger,

you hang around with someone a lot older, you think...

like, you get like a little buzz out of it.

I just threw myself out there and thought I was invincible.

I wasn't scared of nothing or no one.

She was full of life but had run away from council care

as many as 50 times. Today, Manchester Social Services

expressed their shock at the death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia

but said such tragedies were not always preventable.

Victoria died at the weekend from a suspected drugs overdose

after disappearing from a children's home in Rochdale.

Two men are being questioned in connection with her death.

Victoria was probably 13 or 14 when I first met her.

She'd found herself in a situation that was way beyond her control.

She just wanted us to help her.

She was really bright, funny, and engaging.

She made me want to work with her.

I met her about three times.

On the fourth occasion I was due to see her,

I read in the news that she'd...

That she was dead.

Victoria had a long and troubled history with the police

and social services. So, her death threw up a warning flag

within Greater Manchester Police.

They suspected that it might be more than a simple drug overdose.

DC Maggie Oliver, known for her sensitivity and delicate work

with vulnerable and grieving families was called in

by her superiors.

I saw a photo of this beautiful young girl

and this letter that was heartbreaking.

She was 13 years old and talking about having been abused

by so many men that she couldn't count.

"I'm only 13. I've got the rest of my life ahead of me."

She'd done things she was ashamed of, loved her family,

and felt she had let them down.

"I've slept with people older than me,

"half of them I don't even know their name."

It was really a cry for help.

"I'm a slag and that's nothing to be proud of.

"And they treated me like shit."

She died of a drugs overdose but we knew that she had been abused

on a massive scale.

Myself and the two officers that I was working with,

we were asked to undertake what was called at the time, and I quote,

"a scoping exercise", where we would really have free reign,

under the daily supervision of a detective inspector,

to go out and really find out whether we had a problem

with children being systematically groomed and sexually abused

by gangs in the Greater Manchester area.

That was the starting point for Operation Augusta.

It was not the first time such stories had echoed

around northern cities and towns.

Rumours of the sexual abuse of young girls by gangs

had circulated for years.

12 months earlier in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley,

the local Labour MP had been faced with more than just hearsay.

Some seven mothers came to see me and they had genuine concerns

about the way their daughters were abused by this gang.

It had all started from having a boyfriend at school,

a very handsome, attractive young man from the Pakistani community

who then handed them on to much older men.

The mothers had ganged up together in order to get the police

to be active on it.

The police kept saying to them that due to the fact

they felt fairly sure that the girls had been consenting...

..probably under the influence of drugs and drink,

but consenting, there was nothing they could do.

Nearly all of these girls were 12 and 13.

Whether it had been with consent or without consent,

it was a criminal offence. I've no doubts in my own mind about it.

I really wanted to help them and I wanted it to stop.

Within a couple of weeks of GMP starting the scoping exercise,

Maggie Oliver and her two colleagues had gathered the names

of 17 child victims and numerous alleged perpetrators.

They knew that the vast majority of sexual abuse is committed

by white men in the home.

But here something very different seemed to be taking place.

The deeper down we started to dig, the more it became

absolutely abundantly clear the children being targeted

were similar kinds of children.

Young, white, and from difficult backgrounds,

not all in care but had had difficult starts in life.

The make-up of the offenders was almost exclusively

of Pakistani origin.

And it isn't predominantly Asian men.

It's predominantly Pakistani men.

Every weekend we used to go.

It was a laugh and a joke.

And, you know, you used to get what you wanted out of it

because you used to get beer and your fags.

Then they changed and wanted more than just giving you free beer.

They just said, I bought you beer, now let's have sex.

Somebody else will come with a bottle of vodka

and that person would expect the same as the person before.

Then they bring another friend with another bottle of vodka

and some more fags and then he'd expect the same

as what the person before.

It just escalated from there.

It just kept going more, and more, and more.

I was 14.

My friend used to go out with Pakistani men.

One night she took me out as well.

I didn't know any Pakistani people.

I only saw them in takeaways and driving taxis.

They'd go on like they like you, they want to be your boyfriend.

I actually believed them.

I was 14 years old.

They bought us drinks.

I thought, "Oh, I'll have some of this."

It got to the point where I was really drunk.

One slept with my friend and after he's finished

another went in and slept with her. Then they done the same with me.

It's like they was passing us about.

There were often occasions when girls were there

outside our building at 8:30am, 8:15am in the morning.

They were waiting for us to arrive.

They'd been up all night.

They were really smelly, totally dishevelled, really frightened.

There was one girl who'd been dumped on the moors.

She'd walked about six miles to get to our building.

She'd been raped, she'd been thrown out of a car,

that there were a number of men who'd had intercourse with her.

I got myself in, like, some really bad states.

I used to always go there because they were someone to talk to.

I used to tell them everything.

I just felt safe there.

There was a woman who used to work in the clinic.

She was like a sister.

She was like, "What are you doing?"

She used to say to me, like, "These men, they don't love you."

"They're not going to marry you.

"They're not going to take you back home to their mum."

You're there to do stuff with them and then go.

That ain't love. Getting you drunk and then abusing you.

PHONE RINGS

We called the police every time.

We spoke to the police every time.

I kept being told the police can't do anything

unless you have a victim. OK. You only have a victim

if the victim is prepared to make a statement.

Now, often the children couldn't articulate that anyway.

They couldn't articulate...

Aside from that, I think they were really frightened.

They were really frightened of the consequences.

They'd been hit, threatened - "I know where you live,

"I know who your mum is, I'll kill members of your family."

I think they were frightened as well about - my parents might be

disappointed, or I might get in trouble at school, or...

..my friends might find out, you know?

All of which is a child's mind, it's a child way of thinking.

I knew that this problem of on-street grooming

was a real problem and it needed to be tackled.

The only way to progress the investigation

was to get children who were

prepared, or a child who was prepared to tell me, or one of us,

what was happening to them.

One of the children, I spent a considerable amount of time

talking to her and trying to gain her trust.

Once I'd started to gain her trust,

she agreed to take me on a drive-round of the area.

She was telling us that they were being taken to various premises

along, what we call in Manchester, the Curry Mile.

Many of the locations were, like, flats above the takeaway places.

On one of the drive-rounds we drove past a vehicle.

She ducked down in the front of the car and said that car

across the road with that man driving it,

that is one of the men that abuse me.

I met taxi drivers through, like, the people in the kebab houses.

They used to drive us to places...

..where takeaway people would tell them to take us...

..and we'd meet another taxi driver, then another one, and another one.

We'd just get out of one car and go in another car.

Then he'd tell you to trust that taxi driver.

Don't worry, trust him, it will be all right.

And then you'd go in that taxi driver's car

and you'd do sex with him and then you'd go on

to another taxi driver's car.

50 miles away in West Yorkshire the local MP was struggling

to get the attention she'd hoped for.

I probably went to see the police about once a month over a 12 to 18

months period and they always had a new excuse for not doing anything.

I followed it up with the head of social services at that time

and she told me, "Well, there's not a great deal we can do

"because these children are not in care.

"They're with their parents and, therefore,

"it's the responsibility of the parents,

"not of the local authority."

-NEWS REPORT:

-'Church leaders from across West Yorkshire

'have signed a statement calling on voters to reject

'the British National Party at the local and European elections.'

With little interest from the authorities, Ann Cryer decided to

appeal to community leaders who might be able to intervene.

As this was a particularly sensitive issue,

she turned to an intermediary.

I approached a local Muslim Labour councillor.

I had him come in and listen to the story of these women.

He was clearly very moved by their stories.

I asked him, would he be prepared to take this list of young men down to

the mosque after Friday prayers, and see the elders?

I'd wanted them to make it clear that in the view of the elders

they are behaving in a totally un-Islamic way

and it will bring shame on them, on their family

and on their religion if they continue to behave in this way.

He went down, he saw them, he gave them the list.

They all looked at these lists and they all agreed, yes,

they knew all the lads, they knew the families,

they knew where they lived, everything about them.

And then they said, "Really, it's got nothing to do with us."

End of story.

I was horrified and disappointed.

The BNP were becoming active and they were going to have a field day

on this. I didn't want that to happen.

From then on, I started to try to get the media involved.

-NEWS REPORT:

-'Despite a local petition asking voters

'to say no to racism, the BNP now has a toehold in Yorkshire

'with more seats being contested in the forthcoming May elections.'

The key point of the press release was that the men who were doing this

to these girls were, I think the word used was,

from the Asian community.

I spoke to Ann Cryer's researcher.

She'd told me that the scale of this was far greater

than they'd been able to say in the initial press release.

They'd identified over 30 men who were involved.

The idea of young girls, 13, 14, being befriended by lads

who weren't much older than them initially and then introduced

to a wider and wider circle of friends,

the idea that this was in some way a collective activity,

girls were being passed around men...

..I'd not encountered anything like that before.

I remember so clearly the feeling of how on earth do you report a story

that is a fantasy for the far right?

It's everything you could wish for if you're pushing

a particular agenda.

It's innocent, white girls and it's evil, dark-skinned men.

-NEWS REPORT:

-'The government's failure to control asylum

'and immigration was a force for bad.'

Norfolk's fears were not without foundation.

The BNP's vote in recent local elections had increased 300-fold

in only three years, winning them seats on councils

across northern towns.

With a general election looming, immigration,

race and asylum were key topics of the day.

-TONY BLAIR:

-Yes, it is true that we need to control immigration.

Yes, it is important we discuss it.

But it's an issue that should be dealt with, not exploited.

To my shame, I allowed my liberal fear about giving succour

and credence to the British National Party to act as a brake

on actually doing my job.

Norfolk decided not to write an article.

New in the job as The Times northern correspondent,

he turned his attention to less inflammatory issues

across the region, unaware that the phenomenon

wasn't limited to Keighley.

We phoned the police, we phoned children's social care.

They were stuck in that position of we're the police, we do this,

we're social services, we do this.

You know, I started to feel as though

I was facing a great big brick wall.

I started to send letters rather than making a phone call.

Because the police can't ignore a letter.

They can ignore or not record a phone call.

But if you send a letter, they can't ignore that.

So I would send duplicate letters to the police, to social services.

My child protection lead also had a copy of the information

that I was sharing. So it had gone everywhere, you know.

Enough people had detail around an event.

I kept hoping that at least somebody,

one of those professionals, would respond, or do or...

You know, help,

really.

12 months from opening its doors,

the staff at CIT had lodged more than a dozen cases with police

and social services.

As far as they knew, no action had been taken.

Yet the accounts of abuse continued.

I used to blame myself, but then the next weekend it would be the same.

They'll be ringing you saying, I've not seen you for ages,

I've missed you. That little bit of attention you get,

you get excited off it, feeling that you're wanted,

or somebody thinks you're really attractive,

makes you feel good about yourself.

He took me to London, Blackburn, Huddersfield, Bradford, Birmingham.

Places like that.

I woke up in, like, a house.

Like a derelict building.

Just, like, a bed there.

And I've woke up not knowing where I am, or how I got there.

I've had no clothes on.

Freezing cold. And they're nowhere to be seen.

At Greater Manchester Police headquarters,

after six months of investigation,

Maggie Oliver's scoping exercise was drawing to a close.

She was getting ready to make her case to her superiors.

I personally wrote the report.

I started it with the photograph of Victoria, and her letter.

Anybody who read that report had to see that picture

and had to read that letter.

I wanted a powerful message to go to senior officers

that the human consequences of not addressing this massive problem

of on-street grooming now professionally and properly,

could lead, and would lead, to other children

being in Victoria's position.

I wanted that abuse to stop.

Mr Speaker, may I begin by...

I had hoped that I would get on board

comrades in the Labour Party.

And many were. Many were genuinely sympathetic

to what I was talking about

and supported me in every way.

But there was a small number who either very openly,

or perhaps whisper, whisper, you know, sort of,

were saying things that perhaps I was something of a racist.

And that was very upsetting.

I'm absolutely convinced it was political correctitude gone mad.

You know, there was absolutely no reason for it.

I was rocking the multicultural boat,

but how do you get changes without talking about it?

In May 2004, Maggie Oliver and her colleagues

finished and presented the Augusta Report.

The Assistant Chief Constable accepted fully what we were saying.

He didn't dispute it at all.

He accepted that Greater Manchester Police area had a problem

with on-street grooming.

We had word back that Greater Manchester Police fully accepted

we had a problem, and they were going to resource

Operation Augusta with a full major incident team.

And the team I was working with, we were over the moon.

This problem was going to be addressed.

Erm...

You know, I've... We've got one child that's died, I'm thinking,

we can address this, we can stop it growing.

You know, we're going to do it.

My husband was terminally ill with cancer.

I was needed at home.

My husband needed me.

I've got four children.

And I went off work to...

erm, to...

to look after my husband through his final three months.

I'd kind of felt that I can walk away from this,

I can go and concentrate on my family.

All our hard work had paid off.

This problem was going to be addressed.

The British National Party is launching its election manifesto

this lunchtime. The party, which wants an end to all immigration,

is fielding more than 100 candidates.

Four times as many as at the 2001 election.

This was all timed to coincide with St George's Day celebrations.

At last year's European elections,

the BNP received almost a million votes, proof, they say,

that they're moving forward.

In May 2005, the BNP stood in larger numbers than ever before

in a UK general election.

They called for withdrawal from the EU,

an end to immigration and multiculturalism,

and warned of the creeping power of Islam.

Their message found support across northern cities and towns,

particularly when they added the grooming of white working-class

children to their campaign.

Griffin made this announcement.

He was coming to take on Ann Cryer as the BNP candidate for Keighley,

to protect these vulnerable white girls.

What Ann Cryer dismisses as grooming,

and what is really racist paedophilia,

has been going on in Keighley for at least ten years.

But most of that time Ann Cryer's been in charge

and she's turned a blind eye to the problem.

All they wanted to do was to have confrontation...

..and to demonstrate how virtuous they, the BNP, were.

They did nothing.

They did nothing to help.

And nothing to assist either the white girls, or any other girl.

It was just dreadful.

-NEWS REPORT:

-The leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin,

'has been arrested on suspicion of incitement to commit racial hatred.

'He was recorded on tape saying that Islam was a vicious, wicked faith,

'and warning supporters to stand up to Muslims.

'Police insist it is a coincidence that the BNP leader had to come here

'to be charged the day after a general election was called.

'The British National Party, though,

'were determined to make the most of the timing.'

One of the speeches for which I'm accused of inciting racial hatred

was talking about the endemic problem of heroin

and grooming of young girls.

I think it's very important that these issues are got out and are

discussed. I will keep on telling the truth.

My colleagues in the British National Party

will keep on telling the truth.

And however many of us they jail, however long they jail us,

we will keep on telling the truth until the truth prevails.

I never thought he would win,

but I felt that it was going to do a great deal of damage

to race relations. Working-class people on a small estate

were being indoctrinated by these racist lies.

Knocking on a door near you, the British National Party,

branded extremists by their opponents,

the party says it's gathering support, nonetheless.

The senior police officer in charge said the parents of girls

who are being groomed for illegal underage sex

by Muslim paedophiles...

He said, get used to it, there's nothing we can do.

It's a fact of life.

The police knew about it, but nothing ever, ever got done.

You know, a few times the police have turned up at a house

where we've all been drinking. And, you know, I've been upset,

saying things have happened.

They don't really listen. I'm crying to the police,

but you've got all the men stood there and they're all just saying,

ignore her, she's drunk.

I'm crying, I'm screaming, I was upset, I was hurt,

and the police are like...

'Oi, enough is enough.'

Then you're the one who gets arrested when all you're doing

is crying out for a bit of help.

The BNP didn't win in Keighley or anywhere else across the country.

But their vote increased fourfold.

The party had exploited an underlying anxiety

about multicultural Britain,

an anxiety that was to boil over in the summer of 2005.

There were four explosions bringing chaos to parts of the capital.

Terror bombs explode across London.

And inside, page after page of harrowing personal stories.

While the first bomb was on a tube train

between Liverpool Street and Moorgate...

Within days, three of the four bombers were identified

as British-born Muslims.

In the Asian community,

there were fears that the entire community would be made scapegoats.

As a white male in this country, have you ever felt under suspicion?

Have you ever been made to feel uncomfortable in your own country?

Have you ever been made to feel uncomfortable in your own skin?

Rising Islamophobia, which the far right was helping to stoke,

meant the police faced a difficult challenge.

They carried out raids and increased surveillance to try and root out

terror cells. At the same time,

they had to maintain social cohesion and make sure any action they took

wasn't perceived as racist.

Operation Augusta was a full on major incident team investigation

when I went off work. I came back to work in September,

and the job had died a death.

It had just gone.

Fizzled out, shut down.

I couldn't believe it.

I was incredulous.

This was systematic, organised sexual abuse.

They weren't just picking one child out of the ether,

these were groups of children that they were being targeted,

and it was like a production line.

You know, one and then another.

So what was happening to all these children now?

Who was dealing with this kind of crime?

Nobody. It was being buried.

With the authorities' attention elsewhere,

most of the world remained oblivious to the abuse.

But rumblings about it continued,

and reached at least one prominent member

of the local Pakistani community.

It was a month of fasting, Ramadan.

I'd gone to a friend's for prayers and breaking our fast.

He was a taxi driver.

He told me about rumours that were going on of taxi drivers

who were sharing young teenage girls in Rochdale.

That's all he told me.

I heard those rumours again and again

and I was trying to understand,

what were the implications if this had been going on?

I'm a Muslim, proud British Muslim.

I came up and grew up in this country.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in my faith, Islam,

that justifies these type of despicable and evil crimes.

I wanted to talk to people and try to find out what was going on.

Nobody in the Pakistani community wanted to talk about these issues.

Nobody seemed to want to help.

Many people were coming to me and saying to me, "Oh yes, well,

"this is what the BNP were doing in Bradford,

"this is what the BNP were doing in Keighley,

"this is all a far-right conspiracy

"about demonising minority communities."

In my mind, it was our silence that was allowing the BNP

to campaign on this issue.

I felt totally alone.

There was no one to help me.

No one who would listen.

So it just went on.

One time I was at a house in Oldham.

I was drinking. I was doing speed.

I was just getting off my trolley.

I didn't think anything of it.

I was just generally having a good time.

When I came round I didn't know where I was.

I just couldn't move.

I was on a single bed.

There was a double bed next to me.

There were just men coming in and out.

Just seemed like one after another.

They were all laughing and joking,

pleasing themselves with my useless body that I couldn't move.

It kept getting light and then dark.

I could see what was going on, I could feel what was going on.

There was a couple of guys that came in with another girl.

She done it willingly.

She just turned round and looked at me and went,

"You'll get used to it.

"We all do."

In August 2008, Greater Manchester Police received a call

from a kebab shop.

A drunk teenage girl had kicked off and was smashing the glass counter.

Standard fare for a Friday night.

Known as Girl A, her case would, in time, become a crucial step

in bringing on-street grooming out into the open.

We got a phone call from the police.

Asked us as a responsible adult, or parent, or whatever,

to come down to the police station.

I thought to myself, "Oh no, not again."

"What's she done this time?"

"What hell has she raised today?"

I went to the police station. She was agitated and very upset.

She also seemed to be withdrawn at the same time.

She, you could see that she was clearly... was hiding something.

She didn't want to say something.

But, you know, after I spoke to her and said,

"Look, what's going on, what's the matter?",

she told them that she'd been raped several times.

The policeman, he took it down and said, "For what it's worth,

"I believe you.

"We've heard of this before, and I believe you."

I was totally, totally in shock.

There's no other way to describe it.

You're a father, you're supposed to look after your children.

You know, it's your job,

it's your duty to look after your children and protect them.

I tried, and I failed.

Girl A was one of the dozens of girls the CIT team had identified

as victims of abuse in the four years it had been open.

Details of all the assaults had been passed to police

and social services.

Yet it seemed no action had been taken.

We wrote everything down, everything down that a girl had said to us.

It was just a very practical work situation,

but eventually we had two filing cabinets full

of case files of young people who, at some point,

we had identified as being abused.

Different girls were naming different people

they were involved with, different abusers.

Often girls would say, that's a friend of somebody.

Or he hangs around with that person.

The easiest way to collate that information was to write those names

into a book. In the office, we just called it the boyfriend book.

If there was a name beginning with A, we would write A.

Ahmed. Age.

Any detail about a car, any detail about who they were associated with.

And then at any point in the future, if another girl talked about Ahmed,

we were able to see, there was Ahmed and he was cross-referenced

in somebody else's notes.

What became really clear was that the abuse went in waves.

There was a big group of girls really early on around 2003, 2004.

And we realised that one was associated with that one,

who was associated with another one,

and then names of boyfriends started to be really familiar.

And then suddenly there was a totally separate,

younger group of girls, all of them interconnected,

all of them experiencing the same kind of abuse.

We were then able to do a kind of spider diagram.

That girl was associated with that girl,

who was associated with that boy, who all knew this other person.

They'd all been associated with a blue Volkswagen.

They'd all been to a warehouse somewhere.

It was really naive,

but we were able to map out who had been associated with who

at different points.

I put my faith and my trust in the police.

And I said to my mates at the time, look, the police have arrested them,

the police have charged them, justice will take its course.

You know. Basically, and hopefully, they'll go to jail.

A few months down the line,

they decided that they weren't going to pursue it any more.

I knew that knickers had been recovered,

and I knew that DNA evidence had been recovered,

and that basically the semen of one of these animals...

..was in her knickers.

It's a smoking gun. That's red-handed.

Simple as that. And I don't think that any sane human being

could disagree with me.

How can, you know, how did your semen get there?

It was the Crown Prosecution Service who dropped it,

who said my daughter, she probably wouldn't be believed in court.

She wasn't a credible witness.

It's just ridiculous.

You know, I know very well that there was an excellent case there.

I was totally devastated.

You can't be anything else.

How... How on earth could this be allowed to happen?

About three or four days after, a leaflet come through the door

from the BNP. It said things that just made sense, really.

I gave them a ring.

A gentleman come out and, you know,

I mean, I've said what happened to my daughter.

And they, basically, said to me right away, you know,

we know about this.

They were listening to me.

No one else had listened to me.

But they even knew that was on about,

and they knew entirely about the whole problem.

Everyone else had said there isn't a problem.

Or just denying it existed.

Or, you can't say that, that's racist.

I joined on the spot.

I knew I was going to ruffle a few feathers and upset a few people.

We live in a time of rising Islamophobia,

rising bigotry towards immigrant communities in this country,

and there were a lot of people saying,

it's best to just leave this particular issue alone.

I got told I was bringing, you know, the community down,

by talking about these issues.

And they didn't want me to talk about this.

Erase these issues.

But, you know, let's change those white girls

and replace them with Asian girls, Pakistani girls,

what would our reaction be then?

Would our imams remain silent?

Would our community leaders bury their head in the sand,

as we often did? I don't think they would.

I live in a community, I have family in the community,

so for me it was a real struggle,

because I was somebody who championed the British Pakistani

community, and suddenly I was then the person who was engaged

in pointing the finger at my own community.

I think all of us, either in the Pakistani community,

the authorities, the council all turned a blind eye to it,

complete silence.

I was with these men in a house in Rochdale.

I was already drunk, I was always drunk.

There was, like, a lock on the door.

And they locked it.

They were just laughing at me because I was throwing up

over the side of the bed.

They thought it was highly hilarious.

There was a guy with a razor blade come up to me and said,

"I'm going to cut you. You want me to cut you?"

The other guy came up to me and said, "Just lay down, lay down."

And I did, thinking nothing of it.

I was crying because I was being sick, and I hate being sick.

The guy with the razor blade, he kept coming up to me with it,

holding it by my throat, telling me he was going to slit my throat.

He was laughing.

One of them pulled my trousers down

while I was in the middle of being sick and inserted himself

while the guy with a razor blade had the razor up to my throat.

The other guy was just stood there watching.

And he said to the one with the razor blade,

he said, "Just hold it there,"

and he kept trying to put himself in my mouth.

The whole time I had the guy at the bottom of the bed raping me.

I actually thought I was going to get my throat slit.

Seven years after shelving a potentially explosive story,

journalist Andrew Norfolk found his conscience calling him.

As the years went by, I had this very uncomfortable feeling

I hadn't done my job.

I was on a long weekend, I was driving up to Scotland.

I had the radio on, a news item came on the BBC.

-NEWS REPORT:

-'Greater Manchester Police have been describing

'how a 14-year-old girl was forced to endure an absolutely horrifying

'ordeal after being forced into prostitution.

'The vulnerable teenager was targeted with vodka and cigarettes

'after she was spotted wandering the streets,

'before she was made to have sex with a string of men.'

At no stage in the report

had the names of the defendants been read out.

I'm sitting in my car in the middle of nowhere and I'm thinking...

..you've not heard a word about this case, until five minutes ago,

and yet, with every fibre of my being...

..I bet I do know something about those men, because I bet

when I check it out, they're going to be Muslim names.

So I got back, I looked it up, they were all Muslim names, Muslim men.

I sat down that night and I wrote a very long e-mail to the news editor

of The Times saying that I thought there was something

really troubling going on here, that it wasn't being acknowledged,

and that I needed some time to look into the story

to see whether what I thought was a pattern was, indeed, a pattern.

As Andrew set to work,

demonstrations were sweeping across the country.

Led by the emerging face of the far right, the English Defence League.

CHANTING AND SHOUTING

Its members were young, organised, and growing in numbers.

And its marches often descended into violence.

Gas grenades were thrown, police vehicles were vandalised.

And the police themselves were attacked.

The EDL's goal was to stem the growth of a faith

that it believed was corrupting the country.

And in the grooming of white children they saw not just a crime,

but evidence of a broader Islamic agenda.

Militant Muslim gangs taking liberties in our towns and cities.

Taking liberties with non-Muslim youth, non-Muslim girls,

raping, pimping, beating, abusing our whole system.

As you can see behind me,

there's a massive police presence in Bradford today.

The squeamishness of the liberal establishment,

and that includes the media, national politicians, police forces,

social services, in actually confronting what was going on,

left a void, and into that void marched the EDL

to spread a completely poisoned, divisive agenda.

It had become quite personal for me.

There was a sense of actually reclaiming this story

from the wrong agenda, the far-right agenda,

and putting it squarely where it should have been all along.

We used every bit of software we had to try to look back

at every criminal court case that there had been in recent years

in which two or more men had been convicted of sexual offences

against girls who were aged 12-15,

where the initial point of contact had been in a public place.

Shopping mall, outside a bus station, train station, city centre,

outside school gates.

We needed to build that picture of all such cases,

because if we were going to say what...

..I sensed we might be going to say,

which is that there is a specific pattern here involving men

largely of the British Pakistani community committing offences

against young white girls, we needed a rock-solid evidential base.

That trawling process produced cases involving the conviction of 56 men.

Of those 56 men, three of them were white British men.

53 were Asian names.

50 of the 53 were Muslim names.

The vast majority were British Pakistani.

This was a process being repeated.

It was happening in Birmingham, it was happening in Bradford,

it was happening in Manchester, it was happening in Burnley.

How had this pattern developed?

How had it developed apparently completely unseen

by the authorities?

How come every single aspect of the British establishment treated every

single case that had cropped up as an isolated one-off case

with no pattern whatsoever to any of the other cases

that were so similar?

The statistics were there.

We needed to start talking to people about it

and asking what's going on here.

What do you think? What are you doing about it?

What are you not doing about it?

We went to police forces, we approached local authorities,

we went to specialist charities, government departments.

Nobody would speak about this.

Unbeknownst to Andrew Norfolk,

in December 2010, Greater Manchester Police had acted.

They had launched an investigation, Operation Span,

and had arrested nine men from Rochdale

on suspicion of child sexual exploitation.

DC Maggie Oliver, who, years earlier,

had spent months investigating grooming was once again asked

to play a key role to persuade child victims to provide evidence.

My first response was, well, thanks very much but no thanks.

I've been here before in Operation Augusta.

I do not want to be in that position again.

They produced various policy documents that I had never seen

in my 16 years of service. 'Please look at these documents,

'this is what we intend to do but we need you to, you know,

'to bring these kids on board'.

They documented in great detail

how we were going to treat these victims.

It was completely different from Augusta.

That would never happen again.

It was recognised that we'd failed and that shouldn't have happened.

I thought, well, maybe Greater Manchester Police have learnt

from what they failed to do back in 2004 and 2005.

Maybe this is a chance to address this...

erm, this crime, this on-street grooming, once and for all.

And eventually I agreed that I would do my best.

Four months into his investigation, and after countless dead ends,

Andrew Norfolk finally found someone willing to talk to him

on the record.

A senior police officer heading a major investigation.

He talked about having arrived in a new division and it was almost,

he said, as though there was a box underneath the desk into which every

case that was too difficult went.

And there in that box was clear evidence over a period of years

of what had been happening to girls in that town.

And that was a town where basically the Pakistani community

was four streets. It was tiny.

And yet it was even a generational thing there,

where you had fathers who had been doing this to the mothers

of young girls who were now being groomed and abused

by these men's sons.

He spoke, he told me, to colleagues in the north-west of England.

And he said a senior police officer in Lancashire said, "Listen,

"don't turn that stone.

"If you turn that stone, you have no idea what's going to come out."

-NEWS REPORT:

-Nine men were arrested just before Christmas

over allegations of the sexual exploitation

of teenage girls here in Rochdale.

We understand that all the men are Asian,

that they're aged between 20 and 40.

We also understand that all the girls concerned are white.

Now police are saying that these arrests were made

on suspicion of rape...

As the investigation continued,

Maggie Oliver was charged with winning the trust of two sisters

with a long history of abuse.

Both had had repeated contacts with the police and social services

over the years. She quickly discovered their abuse

was not only well know, but well-documented.

From reading social services' records,

it was abundantly clear that mum had been asking for help

from social services over a long period of time.

These children were on the child protection register to be protected.

The case conference notes themselves documented what mum was saying was

happening to the children at the hands of these men.

There were comments informing social workers that the children were being

threatened at gunpoint,

somebody had threatened to kill them if they went to the police.

Mum, she got really irate, stood up and shouted,

"What are you doing about these Pakis?"

Now, that's not my language, that's her language.

But they saw fit to throw her out of the meeting and at the same time did

nothing about the abuse that she suspected was happening.

The reality was, she was telling them the truth.

There's part of that reading,

it became apparent to me that there was another team

employed by Rochdale social services called Crisis Intervention Team.

And they were the team that the children were visiting regularly.

Until that time, nobody had been aware that they'd existed.

We needed those files.

The Crisis Intervention Team handed the police thousands of documents,

detailing over 100 assaults from the eight years they'd been open.

It would have been easy for those who make the decisions on The Times

to decide that, no matter how horrific,

this is a story that needed to be put somewhere

other than the front page.

But in the end, the reverse was decided.

It was that this was a story so horrific and so controversial

in terms of what we were going to be saying that the only place

to put it was on the front page.

And the lead in the Times, says,

there's a culture of silence that has facilitated

the sexual exploitation of hundreds of young British girls

by criminal pimping gangs, a pattern of abuse across the north...

Sexually exploited in every British city and town.

We had a huge graphic inside showing different areas of the country where

such crimes had been committed.

There are calls for a nationwide investigation into the grooming and

sexual abuse of vulnerable teenage girls.

Within a couple of days, the government had ordered the first

of what turned out to be two national inquiries.

These young men are in a western society,

they are fizzing and popping with testosterone,

they want some outlet for that and they see these young women,

white girls who are vulnerable, who they think are easy meat.

'Jack Straw's comments on the racial background of men

'found guilty of grooming young girls for sex...

'..controversy surrounding the former Home Secretary Jack Straw...

'..held up as evidence that Asian gangs, specifically Pakistani men,

'represent a particular threat to young British girls today,

'which is not being confronted...'

It's much more comfortable in a society which,

most of the people living there, like, for example me,

all we want to do is be able to have people rubbing along together and

communities rubbing along together, and...

..raising an issue like this doesn't make it easy

because it asks hard questions.

'If you really want sex, there's prostitutes who are doing it.

'Why target vulnerable girls?

'They haven't got no morals, they're monsters.

'It's just, it's just terrible.

'If you're like for Pakistani or something like

'you should be ashamed.'

Andrew had the statistics, this was hard facts about court cases,

people who'd been convicted of crimes.

Not people accused of crimes, but people convicted.

The evidence is compelling.

There is a very small minority of people within

the Pakistani community who are engaged in the phenomenon

of on-street gang grooming.

There's an overrepresentation of British Pakistanis in those types of

crimes and we've got to confront it.

I did a piece for the times, I wanted a reaction.

I wanted people in the Pakistani community,

I wanted people in wider society,

whether it's the police, the politicians,

to actually debate this issue.

'The vast majority of paedophiles and people who are abusing children

'are not of Pakistani origin.'

'They should be respected, no matter what background they come from

'or what religion, you have to respect each other.'

'Bringing culture and race into these issues,

it plays into the hands of extremists who are looking

for an opportunity to stoke the fires

'of discordance between communities'.

Talking about these girls like they're statistics.

They're not statistics. These girls are, well,

whose daughters do you think these are? Whose sisters? They're ours.

In working-class towns and communities.

And people are fed up of what's going on.

And it is being ignored. They're 15-year-old girls that you know,

that you've grown up with, that have been raped or pimped, you don't,

so I don't expect you to understand...

These are all personal issues of yours?

Personal issues in towns and cities like mine.

'Can't sweep things under the carpet in Britain

'just because we don't like them.

'I'd rather talk about 2010 than talk about

'what has been going on in 2003.

'And, actually, you should be commending the communities...'

In May 2011, a new chief prosecutor for the north west of England

took office.

He was Muslim, British Pakistani,

and had a track record of taking on culturally sensitive cases.

Having read the Times' expose,

he asked his staff if there were any potential grooming cases.

Among the files he was presented was one on Girl A,

the teenager from the takeaway two years earlier

whom the Crown Prosecution had deemed an unreliable witness.

The thing that struck me most, these are still children.

You know, I have children of my own,

and just because you're 14 or 15, you can't make informed choices.

And the perpetrators were in their 40s, 50s, you know, my age,

who clearly knew better.

When I read the prosecutor's advice to the officers

in the earlier investigation, things like,

"She has made a choice about her life,"

you know, "she has agreed to be, in effect, a prostitute for these men."

Everything about it shocked me, to be blunt.

Because what groomers do, what perpetrators do, is manipulate.

And the fact that she was chaotic and troubled was actually the reason

why she was targeted.

Because the perpetrator knew that nobody would believe her.

I was absolutely certain in my mind that the decision taken in this case

was wrong. It wasn't just unreasonable,

which is the legal test, it was wrong.

And if it was wrong, to maintain public confidence,

I had to reverse that decision and so I did.

Nazir Afzal instructed Greater Manchester Police

to build a case around Girl A.

Officers began by focusing on other girls abused by the same men,

and invited Sara Rowbotham and her team to police headquarters to help.

The room was set up with images of victims down one side of the room

and images of perpetrators down the other side of the room.

Me and my staff had not really ever seen the perpetrators

and yet there they were, the nicknames associated with an image.

And, of course, we knew the crimes that they'd committed.

We knew what they'd done.

There is no one size fits all when it comes to a perpetrator.

However, all of these men either worked in the night-time economies

as taxi drivers, takeaway restaurants,

or they were solid members of the community.

Pretty much all employed, well-known to each other.

They all had marriages, they were all in relationships,

many of them had children.

Outwardly were family men.

They worked hard. They worked long hours,

and they broke that up with the sexual abuse of children,

which, to them, was downtime.

Most of the victims were traumatised from years of abuse by numerous men.

They knew their accounts had been passed to authorities

but been met with total silence.

Now the police were asking them to co-operate

and to drag up their painful past.

The police come round.

They was asking me a lot of difficult questions.

I remember thinking, why are they asking me this now,

why couldn't they ask me years ago?

I'd been arrested with Asians.

My dad has reported me missing.

Why did they never ask me questions or anything?

Back then they could have had loads of evidence.

They could have got a file together.

I stopped and said, I can't do it, and just walked.

I thought, you didn't help me in the past, well,

I'm not going to help you now.

There was a lot of pressure from the police.

It was like, you'll help us so much.

I trusted them. Gave them the names of the people that had done stuff to

me and I told them all about me.

It was like a sigh of relief.

Like, thinking, at least something is going to happen now.

At first I said no.

I didn't want to talk to the police.

They just kept saying, "Look, it's not your fault,

"it's not your fault".

In the end I started a load of interviews.

I told the police about when I got locked in the flat,

the razor blade incident.

I gave the police names.

Any clothes that I could remember that I'd worn.

I gave, like, as much detail as I possibly could.

In the end, I'd done something like 29 hours' worth of interviews.

As dozens of officers worked to build a case,

one of the sisters who Maggie Oliver worked with remained tight-lipped.

It took months before she finally opened up.

She told me what had happened to them.

Tiny details of her worst nightmares.

She took me on a drive around,

showed me locations where the abuse had happened, onto the moors,

into really remote places.

There were no houses around, there were no lights.

Children up there would not be seen by anybody.

To think of being up there, drunk,

on your own with a man who is three times your age,

was actually really scary.

When one of those children tells me what's happened,

they're putting their faith in you.

They are reliving all that abuse.

They are talking about it in the most horrific detail.

I was 14 when the abuse started.

It went on between three and four years.

I was raped by about 50 men.

Maybe more, I've lost count, it happened that many times.

I felt ashamed that I'd had sex with so many older men.

Disgusted in myself, really.

I kept it in a box, you know, locked away in my head.

To open that box and tell Maggie everything that happened

was really hard.

Her account was added to what was countless hours of evidence

from other victims.

As prosecutors pored through multiple ID parades,

drive-throughs and physical evidence,

it became clear how difficult the case would be to win,

and that not all the victims could be called as witnesses.

I was told at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon that the police

were no longer, and I quote, going to "use" this girl.

And I...was... I couldn't believe it.

I had put my heart and soul into bringing these children on board,

on absolute guarantees and assurances

that there would not be a repeat of what happened in Operation Augusta.

And here I was back in the same place, but on this occasion,

it wasn't just one interview that this child had given,

it was six months of her life.

I felt it was immoral, inhuman, unprofessional.

I couldn't believe it.

I thought the defence's strategy was going to be,

say these girls are lying,

how can you believe them because of their drug-taking

and their criminal records, or whatever.

I had to select the strongest victims to ensure

that the one opportunity that we had to try this case was taken.

I knew that they were going to be cross-examined in the courtroom

up to 11 times, each of them.

Being cross examined once is extremely traumatic and 11 times,

about some of the most intimate things that could happen to you,

or have happened to you, I knew that they had to be really strong.

I had to make a judgment about how many of them

we were going to rely upon.

Six girls were chosen to testify.

Their graphic accounts of assault under the noses of the authorities

would finally push the grooming story onto the front pages.

-NEWS REPORT:

-Even before it started, this case attracted

hundreds of protesters.

With 11 men on trial, most of them taxi drivers...

There was a huge policing operation to try to protect

the integrity of the case.

Police officers on horses, protesters from the far right,

massed ranks of police officers,

almost every media organisation in the country

that has a national focus was there for the opening of that trial.

11 men have gone on trial charged with grooming

and sexually exploiting girls as young as 13.

The Asian men, described as being predatory sex offenders...

These are some of the 11 men

who are facing trial at Liverpool Crown Court.

All the defendants are of Asian heritage

and aged between 22 and 59.

They face a total of 22 counts including sexual assault,

rape and trafficking.

They are said to have passed girls between themselves,

then passed them on to friends and associates.

And if they think it's OK in Pakistan,

they can go back to Pakistan.

If it's OK in Albania, go back to Albania.

But don't do it here in our country.

Everyone was talking about it.

It was all over social media,

and I was like slap, bang, right in the middle of it.

I was so scared. And now I've got to go and stand up in court

in front of all these people.

PROTESTER: Off our streets! Paedophile scum!

Off our streets! Paedo scum! Off our streets!

It was hard, I was young.

I'd just had a kid and I had no family to come with me.

I had my daughter in a car seat in the court.

One of the ushers looked after my daughter,

so it was literally me, in the middle of the court, on my own.

As I was telling what happened to Girl A

I was just reliving the stories that I'd been through as well.

As I was telling it, I was kind of breaking down

and I started crying in court.

And I had the whole of the jury sat there crying with me.

What else can you tell us about the victims?

Well, there were five of them,

the youngest was aged just 13 and she in fact became pregnant.

These are girls from troubled backgrounds.

They were initially flattered by the compliments of these men,

then she became scared, and then in her words,

after that it just didn't bother her any more.

Some lines that those girls used, chilling.

The girl who had first met her boyfriend, as she called him,

he was a married man in his 40s when she was 12, she'd got pregnant,

she'd had an abortion at 13.

"You'd meet one..." she used the adjective 'Paki' to describe...

the men,

"meet one Paki, within ten days,

"you'd got ten...Pakis in your phone book."

"Within a few weeks, you've got a whole phone book full of Pakis."

And she would be rung up by randomers,

men she didn't know at all.

She would go and stand in a car park in the middle of Haywood

and wait to be collected, taken to an address she didn't know,

plied with alcohol, and then passed around for sex.

And she thought these guys were kind

because they took an interest in her.

-CHANTING:

-Paedo scum!

One of these men is alleged to have told the girl,

"It's part of the deal.

"Because I bought you vodka, you have to give me something."

But she refused to have sex with him, and at that point

the court was told, he raped her and told her,

"Don't cry, I love you."

I refused to go to the court.

Said I'm only doing it through a video link.

Hearing their names alone is enough.

I wouldn't have been able to go to a courtroom.

When it came to getting asked questions by the barristers,

that was when I didn't want to be there.

The names that they called me were worse than I was pre-warned.

I was called a slut, that I had whored myself out for

£10 per session.

And they'd keep digging.

I was screaming at them.

Crying tears and then they'd carry on.

Even the judge, I think it was on two occasions, had to say, "OK,

"you need to tone it down a little bit," because it was disgusting.

I certainly became aware of the cross examination

of the main ringleader the moment when he decided to pull open

his shirt and throw his hair into the courtroom to suggest that

of course the victim would know that he had a hairy chest because all men

have a hairy chest.

Then he moved on to abuse white people, generally,

to say that the reason why he had taken her in and, in effect,

that she was accompanying him is because the white communities

of this country had let her down.

You, the white communities of this country, have neglected these girls.

Is it no wonder that they come to us?

It made it very clear to the jury that this was much more complicated

than a straightforward he did or he didn't do it.

He may have done it, as he suggested,

but he seemed to have a reason for doing it,

and, somehow, he wanted to blame the whole of British white community

for allowing these young girls to be so vulnerable

that they became available to him.

It became very uncomfortable because he was absolutely right.

Social services have let down these young girls.

Police and prosecutors and every other justice agency

have let down these young girls. Schools, health,

every agency in this country has let down victims of sexual abuse,

and particularly child victims of sexual abuse, over generations.

And so he was saying something that was absolutely true,

but it did not justify his abuse of her,

which was what he was trying to do.

He went on to describe one 15-year-old

who he is accused of raping on a number of occasions

as being loud and aggressive.

He said she was a racist, even a prostitute.

He said that she was like a bone in a kebab...

It was, at times, unrelenting in terms of the sheer grimness of it.

These were treated as consenting kids who were choosing

to make money or have a bit of fun, as in, you know,

somewhere to stay warm, somewhere to have free food, free booze.

Choosing this lifestyle, and, you know...

..who are we to stop them getting on with it?

Tonight, after 11 weeks, the case which centres on Rochdale,

involving the grooming and abuse of teenage girls has finally ended.

..including rape and trafficking.

The victims were girls, aged just 13...

..said the victims chosen by these defendants, quote, were chosen

because they were not of your community...

I remember vividly the day the verdict came in and I remember

sitting in my front room on my own...

..watching Steve Heywood walk out onto the steps

at Liverpool Crown Court

and give a statement on behalf of Greater Manchester Police.

OK. This has been a fantastic result for British justice.

These victims have been through the most horrendous of crimes

and I just want to commend their bravery in relation

to the ordeal they've had to go through.

These are the most vulnerable in our society and they've been preyed upon

by adults who should know better.

There were so many feelings going through me when I saw him on those

steps, and it crystallised everything I was feeling

about the whole on-street grooming.

I would also like to thank my officers for the professionalism...

He had been in charge of child protection

at the time of Operation Augusta.

He was the man I had face-to-face meetings with.

He knew full well what on-street grooming was.

You saw Victoria's photograph, you saw her letter,

you knew that Operation Augusta was a live and running job,

you knew what the offender profile was, you read my report,

you were part of the officers who authorised it

to go to the major incident team and you were one of the ones

who dropped that job.

Thank you very much.

A statement by the police that they believe there may be dozens more

victims in this particular case.

That day, the news media were covering it 24-7.

This is the most striking front page, a nation's shame.

I've not known anything like it in my life.

There was real shock at what this case had uncovered.

There was a sense of how... where else is it happening?

How many other perpetrators are there? How much abuse is going on?

Why is this happening?

What's our responsibility?

This is about power and about sexual exploitation.

All but one of the men was from Pakistan.

The ninth was from Afghanistan.

Right-wing groups...

Two questions they wanted to know, one was, why hadn't it been

prosecuted before? What does it say about the justice system?

Two, was this a race issue?

We cannot use this as a tool to generalise and castigate

every person who happens to be brown, whether they're Asian...

In all communities, all ethnicities, all religions...

A vile, degenerate person that will prey on young innocent girls

does not take race into account.

They go after girls, simple.

-APPLAUSE

-And I think that by saying...

In the days and weeks after the Rochdale verdict,

the issue of race wouldn't go away.

'The police are wrong to say that race isn't a key factor in this.

'This is an issue within the Asian community,

'a small group of Asian men...'

These nine men did not commit this abuse because they are all Pakistani

and Afghan in origin, they did it because they are vile scum

and vile scum exists in all...

Every community and every race has its sex abusers.

I'm a Muslim myself and we are...

alcohol is forbidden, drugs is forbidden,

sexual abuse is forbidden.

All of these things, these men were surrounded by.

So it's not as if the Koran was their handbook