Recent victims of child sexual exploitation by Muslim gangs in Telford have accused authorities of failing to properly investigate their cases, with one father being told by the Crown Prosecution Service that his underage daughter had ‘consented’ to sex with her abuser.
In one letter sent in 2016, a father was told the CPS would not be pursuing a case against his daughter’s abusers who raped her when she was 13 to 15 years old, according to documents seen by Sky News.
The letter read: “The defence that was put forward in this case was that she willingly met the suspect and had consensual sexual intercourse with him.
“Also at the time this took place the suspect held a reasonable belief that she was over the age of 16.”
“In her statements to the police she was clear that although she may not have wanted sexual intercourse with the suspect, she agreed to do so,” the letter continued.
The broadcaster contacted the CPS which responded that the case “did not meet the evidential test as set out in the Code for Crown Prosecutors and hence we decided not to prosecute the suspect”.
In another instance, Sky News was informed that a case of child abuse was reported four times across several years in Telford before being investigated.
These pieces of evidence, part of a bundle of documents sent to the Home Office, demonstrates that even after 40 years of historic child abuse by Muslim grooming gangs, authorities are still failing to punish rapists to this day, according to Telford MP Lucy Allan.
With respect to the case of the father and his underage daughter, Mrs. Allan said: “This is a grooming case. This is where a gang, a network is involved. There are multiple perpetrators.
“And to use that defence in that type of case suggests to me that people in authority are not fully understanding the nature of grooming and not fully understanding the way in which a young person of 13 or 14 does not have the capacity to consent in a situation like that.”
In March, an investigation by the Sunday Mirror revealed another historic Muslim grooming gang scandal, where an estimated 1,000 underaged girls were groomed, raped, and trafficked for sex in the small West Midlands town — the biggest scandal of its kind since Rotherham and Rochdale.
The striking similarities between the latest case and the Rotherham and Rochdale cases revealed not only were the victims mostly white, working-class English girls and the perpetrators overwhelmingly of Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Telford authorities were accused of operating within a culture of political correctness and failed to act for fear of being labelled racist; the victims were allegedly ignored and were even considered complicit in their abuse, and whistleblowers said they were silenced.
And like with the historic abuse in Rotherham and Rochdale, it is alleged that perpetrators are walking free and abuse is still going on, despite inquiries, government attention, and media prominence.
The BBC, which was accused of ignoring news of the grooming scandal when it was broken by The Mirror, ran the headline “Telford Abuse: Victim Numbers ‘Sensationalised’ Says Police Chief” two days after the exposé, after Police Superintendent Tom Harding tweeted that headlines about Telford were “unhelpful”.