Girls as young as 11 were drugged, beaten and raped in Telford, with up to 1,000 children estimated to have suffered abuse in the town, a new investigation has found.
An investigation by the Sunday Mirror uncovered the shocking grooming scandal, believed to have been taking place over a 40 year period.
As a result of the findings, Telford MP Lucy Allan has called for an inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town.
Allegations reported to date back to the 1980s are said to have been mishandled by authorities, with many perpetrators going unpunished, while it is claimed similar abuse is continuing in the area.
The Tory MP previously called for a Rotherham-style inquiry into the allegations and called the latest reports ‘extremely serious and shocking’.
An estimate of the number of victims was calculated with the help of Professor Liz Kelly, from the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, who reviewed the Mirror’s figures.
Dino Nocivelli, a specialist child abuse solicitor, told the Mirror: ‘These children were treated as sexual commodities by men who inflicted despicable acts of abuse.
‘The survivors deserve an inquiry. They need to know how abuse took place for so long and why so many perpetrators have never been brought to justice.’
Seven men were jailed in 2013 following Operation Chalice, a police inquiry into child prostitution in the Telford area.
The paper says authorities were warned of the abuse a decade before Operation Chalice.
Despite similar high-profile cases in Rochdale and Rotherham, authorities in Telford repeatedly failed to stamp out a network of abusers.
The Mirror’s 18-month investigation reveals abuse on unprecedented levels. We found:
Social workers knew of abuse in the 1990s but police took a decade to launch a probe
Council staff viewed abused and trafficked children as “prostitutes” instead of victims, according to previously unseen files
Authorities failed to keep details of abusers from Asian communities for fear of “racism”
Police failed to investigate one recent case five times until an MP intervened
One victim said cops tried to stop her finding out why her abusers had not been prosecuted because they feared she would talk to us
http://metro.co.uk/2018/03/11/1000-children-drugged-beaten-raped-telford-grooming-scandal-7377736/
According to twitter (which I was unaware of) this was May's brief before she 'lost' the dossier, then when she became PM it all got swept under the carpet. And the fact that abused children got neglected and left to be abused at least partially out of fear that police thought they would be labelled as 'racist' is so ****ing disgusting I can't bear it.