More than 1,000 children were raped and sexually exploited for 30 years in Telford, where police and city officials are “ignoring” the abuse for fear that examining Asian men “would fuel racial tensions,” a study has concluded.
West Mercia police have apologized to children who have been sexually exploited in Telford for the past 30 years, saying their actions are “far short of the help and protection you should have received from us”.
Assistant Chief Commissioner Richard Cooper said on behalf of the police, “I’m sorry. I am sorry to the survivors and everyone affected by child sexual exploitation in Telford.
“While there were no findings of corruption, our actions fell far short of the help and protection you should have received from us, it was unacceptable, we disappointed you.
“It is important that we now take the time to think critically and carefully about the context of the report and the recommendations that have been made.”
Becky Watson suffered two years of sexual abuse at the hands of a grooming gang, which started when she was 11 and she died in a car accident when she was 13. Vicky Round (right), a friend of Becky’s, was killed by the same gang. She was just 20 when she died of a suspected overdose.
Lucy Lowe was 16 and pregnant with her second child when she was killed along with her sister Sarah, 17, and their mother Eileen, 49, in a house fire in Telford, set on by Lucy’s boyfriend, Azhar Ali Mehmood.
More than 1,000 children were sexually exploited in Telford for at least 30 years amid ‘shocking’ failings by the police and council, an investigation has concluded.
Unnecessary suffering and even the deaths of children could have been avoided if the West Mercia Police (WMP) had “done their most basic job” by acting on reports of such crime, according to findings published today.
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, worked to gain their trust before ruthlessly betraying that trust by treating them as sexual objects or commodities.
Countless children have been sexually abused and raped.
“They have been deliberately humiliated and humiliated.
“They were shared and traded. They were victims of violence and their families were threatened.
“They lived in fear and their lives were changed forever.”
He said that “the CSE has flourished unchecked in Telford for decades” and that agencies, including the council and WMP, “were aware of it in great detail”, adding: “Failures by agencies to investigate emboldened violators; endangers the failure to protect children.
“Both the municipality and the WMP appear to have contributed a number of features to this shocking failure to address CSE: a focus on abuse within the family, at the expense of extra-familial exploitation; excessive caution in acting 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.”
Azhar Ali Mehmood was sentenced to life in prison for three murders – but was never arrested or charged with sexual assault
In 2018, West Mercia Police Supt Tom Harding disputed that more than 1,000 children and young women had been cared for in the city of Shropshire over four decades.
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 2000s victims of child sexual exploitation – and indeed many others who did not were known in this study – could have been if WMP had been done. his most basic duty and acted upon 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 in the pre-2016 period as an “essential service”.
Seven men were jailed in 2013 following Operation Chalice, a 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.
Girls in the town of Telford in Shropshire were drugged, beaten and raped at the hands of the violent groom gang that had been active since the 1980s.
Three people were murdered and two others died after incidents related to the sickening scandal.
Lucy Lowe, 16, died along with her mother and sister after the man who abused her, 26-year-old Azhar Ali Mehmood, set their house on fire.
The taxi driver first targeted Lucy in 1997. She gave birth to his child when she was only 14.
Mehmood was jailed for the murders of Lucy, her mother Eileen and her sister Sarah, 17.
However, he was never arrested or charged with sexual abuse for his involvement with the young girl.
Becky Watson, 13, was killed after a car she was in crashed. At the time, the incident was reported as a “joke.”
However, it was revealed that she had suffered sexual abuse for two years at the hands of a grooming gang, which started when she was 11.
Vicky Round, a friend of Becky, was abused by the same gang.
At age 12, they forced her into a crack cocaine addiction. When she was 14, she regularly took heroin.
She died at the age of 20 from a suspected drug overdose.
In 2019, one of 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.
West Mercia Police have apologized to children who have been sexually exploited in Telford for the past 30 years. file image