What was the Rochdale grooming scandal? Hundreds of vulnerable children were targeted by mainly Pakistani men and lured into abusive sexual relationships while police were accused of failing to protect them

For more than a decade, the former mill town of Rochdale has been notorious for the scourge of gangs of men grooming underage girls for sex.

Hundreds of vulnerable children as young as 13 faced being targeted by mainly Pakistani men, lured into abusive sexual relationships through being plied with drink and drugs, or flattered with gifts and attention.

Despite a handful of successful, high-profile prosecutions, whistleblowers and campaigners have long accused police chiefs and council staff of failing to do their jobs and protect the victims.

Their claims are vindicated by today’s hard-hitting review which concludes that unknown numbers of paedophiles are still walking the streets of the Greater Manchester borough.

Police launched their first investigation in 2007 after girls bravely reported abuse centred around takeaways, arresting suspects including Shabir Ahmed, known to the girls as ‘Daddy’.

However the Crown Prosecution Service recommended no action after branding the main accuser ‘unreliable’, a decision reversed two years later by senior prosecutor Nazir Afzal.

His move was vindicated in 2012 when ringleader Ahmed – then 59 – and eight other men were jailed for a total of 77 years for raping and abusing up to 47 girls aged as young as 13.

Their convictions sparked a heated debate over the predominantly Pakistani make-up of the gang and whether political correctness had played a part in the reluctance to tackle grooming in Rochdale and other towns and cities across the North of England.

At the time, Martin Narey, former chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, pointed to ‘very troubling evidence that Asians are overwhelmingly represented in prosecutions for such offences.’

He highlighted how – by contrast – their victims were largely white girls.

Ann Cryer, a former Labour MP for Keighley, West Yorkshire, claimed police and prosecutors had been ‘petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness’.

Only Ahmed – who was later jailed for a further 22 years for 30 child rapes after a separate trial – remains behind bars.

Their high-profile convictions prompted another abuse survivor to come forward and tell detectives about her ordeal at the hands of a second gang when she was aged 14 and 15.

That led to a second set of convictions, with another nine men given sentences of up to 25 years in 2016.

The sentences were hailed as concrete evidence that after years of having their accounts of abuse ignored, the victims of Rochdale’s grooming gangs were finally being listened to.

However a BBC documentary in 2017 entitled The Betrayed Girls revealed a starkly different narrative.

It featured whistleblowers Sara Rowbotham, who ran an NHS sexual health service in Rochdale known as the Crisis Intervention Team, and ex-detective Maggie Oliver, who resigned in disgust from Greater Manchester Police over its handling of child sexual exploitation cases.

Ms Rowbotham told how her team had notified the force and Rochdale council’s children’s services of ‘dozens’ of grooming gang victims before 2008, only for nothing meaningful to be done.

Meanwhile Mrs Oliver alleged that police had been aware of the problem blighting children’s lives in 2004 but had failed to tackle the abusers.

Both claimed that the reality was that multiple known abusers had been left free to prey on another generation of girls, with the grooming culture remaining embedded in dark corners of the town.

However their decision to speak out was met with vilification and efforts to discredit them.

In 2017 Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham ordered a series of reports into what was done to protect grooming gang victims up until 2013.

Today’s review – the first to focus on Rochdale – is the third.

Meanwhile GMP pledged to ramp up its efforts to bring more historic abusers to justice, launching Operation Lytton, with a 100-strong dedicated investigative team.

Last October five men were given sentences totalling more than 70 years after being found guilty of abusing two girls in Rochdale between 2002 and 2006.

Two further trials are in the pipeline involving a total of 34 defendants, with seven further live investigations into child sexual exploitation in Rochdale.

Police chiefs have pledged that they are determined to ‘learn lessons’ from their predecessors’ failures.

But campaigners argue that far more needs to be done if they are to convince victims that they are doing any more than paying lip service in response to public outrage.

‘It is only by shining a bright light into the dark, hidden corners of all of these scandals and cover-ups that we can find the real truth and so demand the changes so desperately needed to our so-called criminal justice system, which as the public know all too well is currently unfit for purpose,’ Mrs Oliver said today.