Greater Manchester Police have, after years of delay, apologised and paid damages to three victims of “grooming gang” rapists who they repeatedly failed.
Three women, two aged 12 and one aged 14 at the time their abuse began, received personal apologies from the new Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), Stephen Watson, as part of the settlement.
Copies of the letters have been published by Maggie Oliver, an anti-child sexual exploitation campaigner and former GMP detective who turned whistleblower while her force was ignoring the long-running scandal of mostly Muslim, South Asian heritage men grooming, raping, and pimping mostly white, working-class girls and young women in its area of responsibility.
Chief Constable Watson acknowledged the “failings of Greater Manchester Police” with respect to each victim, which included not even recording many of their complaints — or not retaining their records of them — and even pursuing criminal charges against them.
Meanwhile, one of the victims, named as ‘Daisy’ by Oliver, never saw “[any] of her many abusers ever arrested or charged”, while another, named as ‘Ruby’, saw her terminated baby seized by police “without consent” after becoming pregnant by one of her abusers.
The abuser identified as a result of this distressing seizure was not even charged with rape and ‘Ruby’, Oliver reports, “literally bumped into [him] in a shop” after he was released from prison — without her being informed — after his very short sentence was completed.
Both ‘Ruby’ and ‘Amber’, the third victim, had to wait a full decade for their apologies, with ‘Daisy’ facing a similarly interminable wait.
“The bottom line is we’ve failed children in the past, we simply did, there’s no beating around the bush,” Chief Constable Watson said of the apologies in comments to BBC Radio Manchester, implying that it is not failing children presently.
“I don’t think people did it out of a sense of badness, I don’t think people did it because they were incompetent, but I think organisationally we were borderline incompetent in the sense that we just didn’t do things then that we absolutely do now,” he added, conveniently avoiding having to lay the blame for his force’s “borderline” incompetence in failing to tackle grooming gangs at the feet of any individual officers who might have to face actual punishment for their failure.
The BBC’s article on Chief Constable Watson’s comments studiously avoided mentioning the racial and religious aspects of the grooming gangs scandal — his letters to ‘Daisy’, ‘Ruby’, and ‘Amber’ are similarly silent on this issue — although a report commissioned by the Mayor of Greater Manchester included clear evidence that fear of racism accusations and so-called community tensions played a very large role in GMP’s failure to deal with the abuse.
“What had a massive input was the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities,” it quoted an unnamed GMP detective constable as revealing.
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