More than 1,000 children were sexually exploited in Telford for at least 30 years amid “shocking” failures by the police and council, an investigation has concluded.
Unnecessary suffering and even the death of children could have been avoided if the West Mercia Police Department (WMP) had “done their most basic job” by acting on reports of such crime, according to findings published Tuesday.
Child sexual exploitation (CSE) ‘thrived’ for decades in the town of Shropshire, going ‘unchecked’ through a failure to investigate perpetrators and protect children amid fears that probes on Asian men would ‘fuel racial tensions’.
Research Chair Tom Crowther QC said: “The overwhelming theme of the evidence is the horrific suffering of generations of children caused by the utter brutality of those who have committed the sexual exploitation of children.
Victims and survivors repeatedly told the study how adult men, when they were children, tried to gain their trust before ruthlessly betraying that trust and treating them as sexual objects or commodities.
“Numerous children were sexually abused and raped. They were deliberately humiliated and humiliated. They were shared and trafficked. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened.
“They lived in fear and their lives were changed forever.”
He said that “CSE has thrived unchecked in Telford for decades” and that agencies, including the council and WMP, “were aware of it in great detail”, adding: “The failure of agencies to investigate emboldened offenders; protecting put children at risk.
“A number of features appear to have contributed to this shocking failure to address CSE at both the municipality and WMP: a focus on abuse within the family at the expense of extra-familial exploitation; acting too cautiously in the absence of ‘hard evidence’ ‘ – a formal complaint from a child – about exploitation; and a nervousness that examining concerns about Asian men in particular would fuel racial tensions.”
The chairman described a “culture of not investigating what was considered ‘child prostitution'” and said the police “turned a blind eye and chose not to see the obvious”.
He said the lack of police action had encouraged the offenders, adding: “It is impossible not to wonder how different the lives of those early 2000 victims of child sexual exploitation – and indeed many others who are unknown were in this investigation – would have been if WMP had been done his most basic job and acted on these reports of crime.
“I also think it is impossible not to conclude that there was a real chance that unnecessary suffering and even death of children could have been avoided.”
He also criticized the “splendid failure of a generation of Telford politicians” not to consider a response to child sexual exploitation prior to 2016 an “essential service”.
Mr Crowther found:
- More than a thousand Telford children were exploited “for decades”;
- Clear signs of child sexual exploitation were “ignored”;
- Exploitation was “not investigated due to nervousness about race”;
- Information was not properly shared between agencies, with some agencies denouncing child exploitation as “child prostitution” and even blaming the children rather than the perpetrators;
- Teachers and youth workers were “discouraged from reporting sexual exploitation of children”;
- Violators were “encouraged” and exploitation “went on for years without concerted response”;
- The police and the municipality have reduced specialized teams to “virtual zero – to save money”.
Seven men were jailed in 2013 after Operation Chalicea police investigation into child prostitution in the Telford area.
In 2018, a Sunday Mirror investigation concluded that around 1,000 children could have been sexually exploited in the town of Shropshire over a 40-year period, prompting calls for a public inquiry to be commissioned later that year by Telford and Wrekin Council.
In 2019, one of the seven prosecuted six years earlier, along with three other men, was convicted of abusing a “helpless” young girl who was “passed on like a piece of meat”, sold for sex and raped.
The victim, 13 years old when the abuse began in 2001, told how she was forced to perform sexual acts in a graveyard, raped on a filthy mattress above a shop and violently assaulted when she tried to refuse their advances.
The investigation, which took three years to complete, looked at allegations from 1989 to the present, but Mr Crowther said he had also spoken with victims whose experiences date back to the 1970s.