A new child sexual exploitation unit in Manchester, England, has been launched after years of failure on so-called “grooming” rape gangs.
The Greater Machester Police (GMP) Force Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) Unit, according to an official statement released on March 18th to mark National CSE Awareness Day, will be comprised of of 54 police officers and staff with “dedicated specialist skills and resources [for] investigating large scale and complex CSE investigations.”
“It is not a gimmick. This has been in the planning since last year,” insisted Deputy Chief Constable Mabs Hussain, in comments reported by the Manchester Evening News.
“If you want to make a difference you have got to have people who are passionate and care. If it means knocking someone’s door for something they did 20 years ago we are going to do it,” Hussain promised.
“What I don’t want is a repeat of the past. I am not saying we will never make mistakes, we will because we are human. But when we make a mistake, we will apologise and do all we can to put it right.
“What I want to make sure of is that we are not intentionally because of our lack of focus making mistakes.”
The senior officer was referring to the many failures of police forces, social services, and other authorities over decades with respect to so-called “grooming gangs”, comprised predominantly of Muslims of South Asian heritage who targeted mostly non-Muslim and often white working-class victims.
Successive probes and investigations have found that police were terrified of being branded racist if they tackled the abuse, with officers saying their superiors told them to “try and get other ethnicities” and dismissing victims as making “lifestyle choices” to “prostitute” themselves, or as participants in consensual sexual relations — a legal nonsense, given minors cannot give informed consent under British law, still less consent to being pimped out to dozens of men.
According to the Manchester Evening News, the number of victims discovered across 70 investigations by Greater Manchester Police now stands at some 468, 332 of whom have been identified, with the number of predators standing at an astonishing 809, 540 of whom “are known”.
The force area, in which grooming gangs once operated in “plain sight”, according to a report into the death of 15-year-old victim Victoria Agoglia, who died after being injected with heroin by a 50-year-old man while in the care of Manchester City Council, does not only cover Manchester proper, but also the infamous rape gang epicentre of Rochdale, where the new CSE unit is overseeing three units involving victims as young as nine.
Mainstream media, despite the huge focus it is currently putting on the issue of “male violence” against women in the wake of Sarah Everard’s apparent murder in London, has published very few reports on the grooming gang developments as of the time of this article’s publication.
One of the few outlets to run the story somewhat prominently is the Metro — despite having previously published an article complaining that “bleating” about grooming gangs was “being used to shut down important discussions about islamophobia [sic]”.
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