An independent inquiry into grooming gangs has found that over a thousand girls were sexually abused and raped by “Asian” men in a small English town as police looked the other way over politically correct concerns.
A three year investigation into the sexual exploitation of children over the course of the past three decades in Telford, Shropshire found that police “turned a blind eye” and that if the West Mercia Police had “done its most basic job” the suffering inflicted upon many children could have been avoided.
As with previous reports in other regions of the country, the actions of mostly “Asian” grooming gangs were allowed to run roughshod throughout areas of the town as police, local officials, and others feared inflaming “racial tensions” in the town.
Describing the atmosphere when the issue of Asian males abusing children arose during multiagency meetings in the early 2000s, one witness told the inquiry: “It seemed to be … it was because of the ethnicity of the people involved they felt as if the police were frightened to question or challenge because they didn’t want to have the finger pointed at them, saying they were being racist.”
Even a task force established in Telford to deal with Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) crimes was found to actively avoided suspects based on racial lines, one witness describing an instance in which evidence was brought to the team: “I said no, and that was because of the Asian element, you know, we’re going to be on to a loser.”
The report went on to describe how certain areas were perceived by police up until around 2010 as “no go zones” controlled by Pakistani and Indian youths with officers facing abuse, threats, intimidation, and even police vehicles being torched.
One officer who served in the Wellington area of Telford in the 1990s said:“You would not walk down Regent Street.., it was mainly being taken over by Pakistanis and Indians… you wouldn’t walk down there in daylight, on your own, as a uniformed policeman… they bloody hated us.”
The issue of political correctness failing child victims was not contained to the police according to the inquiry, with the report citing evidence that teachers were afraid of raising inappropriate activity of an older Asian ‘boyfriend’ over fear of being tabled as racist. This fear may have been in fact justified, as the report notes that one local Council officer had indeed accused a teacher of being racist for noting that there was a “problem in this authority with Pakistani youths”.
“You had got to be careful what you say. It was, it was just the time wasn’t it, it was how things were at that time. It was just that you shouldn’t … be saying it, you know, you should know better than that,” one witness said.
There were also fears of targeting Asian taxi drivers, with the industry serving as a key means of predators to abuse young girls, with one witness saying: “I wouldn’t point any fingers at the local authority or anyone in particular, but there were definitely eggshells about saying that the taxi drivers are Asian.”
The chairman of the inquiry, Tom Crowther QC said: “The overwhelming theme of the evidence has been the appalling suffering of generations of children caused by the utter cruelty of those who committed child sexual exploitation. Victims and survivors repeatedly told the inquiry how, when they were children, adult men worked to gain their trust before ruthlessly betraying that trust, treating them as sexual objects or commodities.
“Countless children were sexually assaulted and raped. They were deliberately humiliated and degraded. They were shared and trafficked. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened. They lived in fear and their lives were for ever changed.”
One of the survivors of the grooming gangs in Telford, writer and journalist Samantha Smith — who waived her anonymity to speak on the case — claimed that following an appearance on GB News earlier this week, she was interrogated by police, suggesting that local authorities are not keen on people highlighting the “industrial scale” of their failings to protect children from grooming gangs.
“They hunted me down, they tracked me, banged on my door, not too different to when they’re knocking on the door of a perpetrator of a potential criminal. I was on facetime to my friend at the time who said to me afterwards ‘I genuinely thought you were going to get arrested from the way that they that they were talking to you’.”
“They told me that when you go on GB News and talk about grooming gangs in Telford it’s our duty to follow up with you,” she told host Mark Steyn.
Commenting on the findings of the latest report, former detective turned grooming gang whistleblower, Maggie Oliver said: “We still have no senior officers having been held accountable we have the same recommendations which are just recommendations they are not obliged to carry through these recommendations and that is why we are stuck in groundhog day, time and time again. I am just sick of the same excuses and pretends that these are problems of the past when they are not.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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