Mick Hartley

This Telegraph report from Sam Ashworth-Hayes and Charlie Peters on the rape-gang scandal makes desperately grim reading.

Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.

The following paragraph makes for difficult reading. But you should read it, if you can. It’s drawn from Judge Peter Rook’s 2013 sentencing of Mohammed Karrar in Oxford.

Mohammed prepared his victim “for gang anal rape by using a pump… You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.”

Her story is horrific. It is also far from unique.

Take “Anna”, from Bradford. Vulnerable and in residential care, at the age of 14 had made repeated reports of rape, abuse, and coercion. When she “married” her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding, her social worker attended the ceremony. The authorities then arranged for her to be fostered by her “husband’s” parents.

In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was pregnant when she was killed.

Her death was subsequently used to threaten other children. The Telford Inquiry found particularly brutal threats. When one victim aged 12 told her mother, and the mother called the police, “there was about six or seven Asian men who came to my house. They threatened my mum saying they’ll petrol bomb my house if we don’t drop the charges.”

Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”. […]

This resistance to an obvious truth repeated itself across the country. By 2010, a West Midlands Police report showed that authorities were aware that grooming gangs were approaching children at school gates.

But as the report stated, “the predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males… combined with the predominant victim profile of white females has the potential to cause significant community tensions”. As a result, the report remained unpublished until released in response to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests five years later.

In Manchester, a 2019 report concluded gangs were left to roam the streets in part because officers were told to look elsewhere. One detective constable was quoted by a report as saying “the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities”.

It's a long article: there's plenty more. Grim, grim, grim.