Three former Telford lawmakers, including one who oversaw the social services department during the town’s Muslim rape gang epidemic, have been exposed as paedophiles.
Graham Bould, 60, was convicted in 2001 for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in Telford during the early 1980s. He served as chairman of Shropshire County Council’s social services department from 1993 to 1998 – when the issue of mainly white girls being groom by Pakistani Muslim men began to grow.
The same victim was also sexually assaulted by Anglican vicar and county councillor Michael Keen, 78, who sat on a Police Authority board. He was found guilty of the historic abuse in 2001.
Keen was imprisoned for 15 months but Bould avoided a prison term because he admitted to sexually assaulting the child.
In a separate case, Graham White, 75, was convicted of taking indecent images of a 14-year-old girl in 2004. The former parish councillor for Madeley, near Telford, was instructed to remain on the sex offenders’ register for just five years.
The uncle of grooming gang victim Lucy Lowe called the revelations, exposed by The Mirror on Sunday, as “mindblowing” and “disgraceful”.
“We always wanted to know why social services didn’t get involved in dealing with Lucy’s abuse. Now we have even more questions,” Ed Lowe, 50, said.
Mr. Lowe’s niece was one of an estimated 1,000 girls who were raped, trafficked for sex, and killed over a 40-year period by Muslim grooming gangs in the small West Midlands town — the biggest scandal of its kind since Rotherham and Rochdale.
Lucy was groomed and raped by Azhar Ali Mehmood; at the age of 14, gave birth to his child. At 16, again pregnant, Lucy, her sister, and her mother were killed in a house fire started by then-26-year-old Mehmood in August 2000.
At the time of Mehmood’s conviction for murder, the BBC referred to Lucy as his “girlfriend“.
Conservative Telford MP Lucy Allan said of the revelations of the three paedophile councillors: “I hope that as part of its work the inquiry will examine the culture of the council.
“We have seen in other towns, where child sexual exploitation has been prevalent, that the culture of the council led to inaction and silence over many years,” she told The Mirror.
Telford authorities had allegedly dropped cases because they were “too much trouble” and blamed the victims for their own abuse. Whistleblowers also alleged they were forced out of their jobs and silenced for attempting to raise the alarm.
Earlier this month, Telford authorities were forced to reverse their position and voted to commission an independent inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation. However, victims in cases of CSE from as recently as 2016 have accused Telford authorities of still failing to tackle the crime.
The Mirror saw documents from the 1990s that said that council social workers were aware of the growing abuse scandal but claimed to not “understand” the problem.
The culture of political correctness and alleged cover-up in the small town echoes that of the Rotherham and Rochdale grooming gang scandals, where authorities were accused of operating within a culture of political correctness and failed to act for fear of being labelled racist.
Victims in the other towns also said they were ignored and were even considered complicit in their abuse, and whistleblowers claim they were silenced.
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