Investigation reveals fears were raised more than 500 children were being sexually abused in one year

Police officers and social workers raised fears that more than 500 children from Oldham were being sexually abused last year - the highest in nearly a decade, an investigation has found.

A Freedom of Information request has revealed that referrals made by Greater Manchester Police and Oldham’s social services with concerns young people under the age of 16 were being sexually exploited has risen by more than 580 percent in eight years.

Leaders say that the substantial increase reflects a more ‘sophisticated’ understanding of abuse and child sexual exploitation (CSE), which means red flags are raised earlier, and more often, by agencies.

This includes concerns over sexual abuse within the home and within families, as well as exploitation happening online, peer-on-peer abuse and grooming by older individuals, or connected to criminal exploitation and county lines.

However Sam, a sexual assault survivor who as a child was raped by multiple men in Oldham in 2006, said she believes the figures show children are being failed by authorities.

And whistleblowing former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver, who now heads a charity supporting survivors of sexual abuse, said that their workload increases daily as more victims whose cases have not been properly investigated seek support and justice.

Oldham’s director of children’s services, Gerard Jones, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service he does not believe there is evidence demonstrating ‘mass’ grooming gangs are operating in Oldham. 

Rather, he said the numbers reflect a rising awareness of different forms of abuse, and more reporting by residents and professionals.

But Mr Jones admitted that the numbers of people charged for sexual abuse and rape nationally is ‘concerningly low’.

The government said it had launched its new Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce in April with £4.5m of funding over three years to provide ‘vital support’ to victims, and has invested in a range of work to strengthen law enforcement capacity and capability to bring perpetrators to justice.

Concerns raised over 522 children being sexually abused

The LDRS asked Oldham council how many referrals which specifically raised concerns of sexual abuse against children in the borough had been recorded by social services, and flagged to social workers by the police, in the last 20 years.

But the local authority said that it could only provide data back to 2014, when current recording systems began. 
It confirmed that the total referrals made relating to sexual abuse against young people under the age of 16 stood at 76 for the year 2014.

But this has since soared to 522 in 2022.

While figures fluctuated across the eight years in which data was available, they rose substantially in 2021 and to the highest point on record last year.

The majority of referrals in 2022 came through social services professionals working in Oldham, who made 251 referrals, compared to 189 concerns lodged by Greater Manchester Police (GMP). 

Police referrals had been generally lower than those raised by Oldham council and social work partners in the borough, with annual referrals not exceeding 78 until 2021, the response to the FOI request shows. 

Just 21 concerns were officially recorded by the force in 2014.

Seven years later they rose to 164, and further increased to 189 last year.

Gerard Jones, who joined Oldham council as head of children’s services at the end of 2019, rebutted suggestions that the extent of the referrals made last year meant it was possible networks of grooming gangs were operating in the borough.

“We’re not aware of any mass grooming. We’re aware of the risks that happen to young people in our community through online exploitation and through the different forms of exploitation and the relationships between them,” he told the LDRS.

“There are individuals, some of which we will know, some of which we will work together with our colleagues to identify.

"We’re constantly vigilant about the risk to young people.

“But if you said to me – do I honestly think there is mass grooming in Oldham – I don’t think there is.

"If that was there I’d imagine I’d be aware of it because we’d see the evidence of that, and we don’t. 

“But what we do see is there are dangerous individuals and there are risks that apply to young people.

"Not only in Oldham, because a lot of our young people are travelling into Manchester, into Rochdale.

“So my position is not complacent, I’m determined to do even better than we are at the moment and do everything we can to keep children safe.”

He added that the most ‘serious forms of abuse’ are ‘fortunately quite rare’.

There are around 50 children currently being seen as part of Oldham’s Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) which deals with the most severe cases.

Looking forward he expects the numbers of referrals to ‘move again’ – likely upwards as they become better at identifying abuse, and new risks emerge.

During the pandemic Mr Jones said they saw the extent of online exploitation surge as children were confined to their homes during lockdowns and spent much more time on social media and the internet.

The council says that the most common type of child sexual exploitation in Oldham now begins online, rather than in the community.

“It’s been an evolving picture and that’s why the numbers look so different I suppose, because we’re counting different things than we used to because we’re bringing new groups of people into our system that weren’t there before,” Mr Jones said.

Children going missing repeatedly from home or school are often symptomatic of hidden abuse occurring, Mr Jones said, and creating trusted relationships with children through the complex safeguarding hub is crucial to detecting risks and helping them stay safe.

The MASH is also able to link up with the police when a child is believed to be associating with a known offender, or other young people who are being subject to exploitation.

‘Professional curiosity’ is key in understanding the picture of how abuse is being perpetrated, Mr Jones said. “It’s about putting the full picture together in relation to a young person to fully understand and quantify the risks to them,” he added.

However, this level of ‘sophistication’ is a new phenomenon within social work, the director said.

Previously systems lacked the ‘language and the mechanisms and the structure to interpret’ more complex forms of abuse. 

“If you think about where we are now in terms of level of sophistication, it [child sexual exploitation] wasn’t even a category under the original safeguarding arrangements which were really about physical abuse,” he added.

“One of the issues for us is to explain why, what seems obvious now, wasn’t obvious then – it’s because we didn’t see things with that level of sophistication that we now do.

“And the other sophistication that has arrived is the connecting up of criminal exploitation with sexual exploitation, connecting children going missing. Putting the full picture together,” Mr Jones said.

“Some of these children have complex presentations where they’re not just victims of one thing, and sometimes they may be perpetrators of exploitation and abuse on other young people, and be victims themselves.  

“Which is one of the things that means that building a relationship of trust with them is problematic.

"We’ve just got a lot better I think in terms of a profession and a partnership in understanding the patterns of behaviour compared to where we would have been."

“It’s still just as risky on the corners. It’s still rife, it’s still bad.”  

However, the rising numbers of referrals over child sexual abuse in Oldham are a cause of concern for Sam, a survivor who has partially waived her lifelong right to anonymity.

Sam’s case was investigated as part of a review published last June looking at Oldham council and the police’s handling of a number of child sexual exploitation cases in the early to mid-2000s.

Among its findings were that children were exploited and let down by services which tried and failed to protect them, and girls who were being drugged and violently raped were said by social workers to be ‘putting themselves at risk’.

In Sam’s case, the review team concluded that authorities failed to investigate sexual offences and rapes committed against her in the borough when she was 12-years-old.

She fell into the hands of predators after trying to report a sexual assault at Oldham police station, which led to a further 24 hours of torment in which she was raped repeatedly by different men in three separate attacks. 

But of the perpetrators, only two were ever arrested.

One fled while on bail, and is still at large.

In May of 2007, Shakil Chowdhury was found guilty in court and sentenced to six years in prison for his part in the multiple rapes.

During his trial Chowdhury, from Attock Close in Chadderton, named two other men involved in the rapes as part of his mitigation, but these were not followed up by GMP at the time, the report stated, which was branded as ‘another serious failure’.

Both the council and Greater Manchester Police were ordered to apologise for their failings to her.

Sam is worried that despite promises by both organisations that the response has improved, the figures show young people are still not being protected.

“They’re trying to say those figures were low because a lot of those children who were vulnerable weren’t recognised in the first place,” she said.

“The issue with that is that they haven’t learnt anything because those numbers are still increasing.

“All these safeguarding referrals wouldn’t be made if there was safeguarding in these schools, if they had learnt from the mistakes of how it was happening. 

“The way I feel with GMP is that they are being seen to be doing something.

"If you drove around Oldham in the evenings and saw the areas, it’s still just as risky on the corners.

"It’s still rife, it’s still bad.”  

She said that raising awareness of sexual exploitation needed to be given a greater focus in education settings to prevent more children being exposed to abuse.

“Grooming needs to be taught about from such a young age, from four, five years old. How they speak to you, how they try and persuade you, buy you stuff,” Sam added.

“They are having more kids coming through those doors because they are not being protected beforehand.

"So nothing’s been learnt, nothing’s been changed to protect kids in our schools.”

Mr Jones said awareness is better than it was previously, and the council works closely with schools and colleges through its Safeguarding Partnership to promote awareness of the risks of exploitation.

“I think we are better at preventing it because we do an awful lot more now as a partnership in promoting awareness in schools and through our youth work activity and community information and through the media,” he added.

“There is much greater awareness and awareness provides protection. I do think that is important.

“We’re much more sensitive to identifying the early signs of exploitation and stepping in early to address and resolve those issues.

“Prevention applies at all levels so that if we can reduce harm or further abuse of children from coming back into that system then that’s part of the package of work with them, which is not just to deal with offences against them but to help them to be protected in future.”

For Maggie Oliver, the founder and chair of the Maggie Oliver Foundation, her reaction was one of being ‘enraged seeing the same thing again and again and again’ when presented with the picture of rising sexual abuse referrals in Oldham.

Ms Oliver resigned from GMP in 2012 to turn whistleblower on the force’s failings in the cases of vulnerable girls from Rochdale who were being abused 

She later also revealed the force’s Operation Augusta investigation in Manchester had been dropped despite uncovering a gang of a hundred suspected paedophiles.

It was reopened as Operation Green Jacket in 2019 following the publication of a damning review into the failures.

“It’s really difficult to prove why there is an increase,” Ms Oliver said of the Oldham figures.

“All I know is that at the Foundation we are seeing so many cases of survivors who have reported and their cases aren’t being thoroughly investigated.

“Our workload is increasing. We are banging on doors that really don’t want to open and there really is a reluctance to listen to what victims are telling them and telling us.

"It still is an uphill struggle with every single case that we are dealing with.

“We’ve still got the same position that social workers can refer cases through to the police but whether or not that case gets investigated thoroughly really is a lottery.”

Since May 2021 Greater Manchester Police has been under new leadership, with Chief Constable Stephen Watson replacing former chief Ian Hopkins.

GMP has now launched Operation Sherwood in Oldham, which is investigating ‘non-recent’ cases of child sexual exploitation highlighted in last year’s assurance review – initially beginning with ten cases.

Across the region the force has invested more than £2.3m into its new CSE unit, which is made up of 106 officers investigating historic or ‘non-recent’ crimes.

A GMP spokesperson said: “We have an excellent joint approach with Oldham Children’s Social Care and have developed the joint Complex Safeguarding team, made up of specialist detectives and social workers.

"This partnership work supports children at risk of child criminal exploitation and child sexual exploitation.  

“A recent example of this was a case where the team identified a number of victims and a male was convicted of six offences and received four years, ten months and sign the sex offender register for life.

“GMP supports victims through the referral process and remains driven to obtain positive outcomes for tackling offenders.”

“Sexual offences have virtually become decriminalised.”

Raising awareness of the early warning signs of grooming and inappropriate relationships, as well as on how to educate people against perpetrating abuse themselves is only one part of the battle of tackling child sexual abuse.

The other – more stringent – tool of deterrence broadly lies with the criminal justice system which dictates that should you carry out a sexual offence; you are committing a crime for which you can be sent to prison.

But the statistics show that for sexual offences across all ages, many offenders go unpunished with prosecutions failing to keep pace with the numbers of rape and sexual offences being recorded.

Dame Vera Baird, the former Victims’ Commissioner until September 2022, made headlines when she said that low prosecution numbers meant the UK was witnessing the ‘effective decriminalisation of rape’.

In its annual report for 2022/23, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said that improving the handling of rape and serious sexual offences cases was a ‘fundamental priority’.

“There clearly is an issue in the way the criminal justice system is dealing with that, it isn’t dealing with it well,” Mr Jones said.

“Our role is to help bring offenders to justice. We help with the identification of individuals we believe need to be dealt with by the criminal justice system.

“We’ve supported the national campaigns around bringing offenders to justice more effectively than they are at the moment.

"GMP are working really hard.

“Part of the problem has no doubt been a whole system issue, and we’ve all got to bring the evidence forward to the CPS to give them confidence they can sustain a prosecution.

“We do want to improve making sure offenders are brought to justice and the numbers are worryingly low.”

Former GMP detective Ms Oliver said that in her experience, cases being investigated properly in a way that could be successfully prosecuted were a rarity.

“Sexual offences have virtually become decriminalised,” she added.

“The prosecutions are at an all-time low.

"In the rare event that someone is convicted the sentences in my opinion are pathetic.

“If I was raped, unless it was down a back alley and there was CCTV, I just feel that’s virtually a waste of time to report a rape to the police.

"I don’t say that lightly, I do truly believe that.

“I just find it a really depressing picture overall.

"I don’t know how we can turn this around.

"The whole so-called justice system is really not fit for purpose, on any level, for dealing with sexual violence. 

“The way the victim is treated by the system is often worse than the abuse itself and that really is a shocking state of affairs.

“I’m blaming a lack of resources, a lack of leadership, a lack of prioritising serious crime.

"Perhaps two decades of neglect, that is where these failures lie.”

A spokesperson for GMP said: “We continue to work closely with Saint Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre and Survivors Manchester, who have helped GMP on Operation Soteria and welcome any developments to improve the support we offer for victims of rape and sexual assault.”

Operation Soteria is a police and CPS programme to develop new operating models for the investigation and prosecution of rape.

Deep dives into five police forces carried out by a group of academics – not including Greater Manchester Police – between January 2021 and August 2022 have produced tailored improvement plans that aim to tackle weaknesses and failings.

The resulting report by Professor Betsy Stanko found that investigators and other police staff ‘lack sufficient specialist knowledge’ about rape and other sexual offending, and a ‘disproportionate effort ‘has been put into testing the credibility of a victim’s account.

The Home Office says that Operation Soteria is one of many pieces of work underway which supports its ambition to more than double the number of cases reaching court.

Protection for children ‘in a different place’ now

Mr Jones said that interventions locally also take place in the justice system through family courts to protect children who are assessed as being in circumstances where they are at risk of harm.

Family courts make judgements on a ‘balance of probabilities’, rather than the ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ test applied in criminal prosecutions, meaning the standard of proof is met if the court is satisfied that an event was ‘more likely than not’ to have occurred.

“We do litigate those cases actively if we don’t think children are safe,” Mr Jones said.

“So although we would like to see more people charged and dealt with through the criminal justice system formally and sentenced right through the end of it, that’s not to say that protective action isn’t taking place in the way those potential offenders are being managed by the police and ourselves.

“It would be wrong for us to completely rely on a criminal outcome to help protect children and we do what we need to do and work with families and with our community to achieve that.

"We don’t just rely on that as a sole outcome.

“Because there are other things we can do to reduce that risk. It would be complacent just to say that if they’re found not guilty or if they’re not charged then there isn’t an issue to be worried about.”

In terms of how they continue to tackle sexual exploitation of children in the borough Mr Jones said that greater investment in social workers, and at GMP was having a positive impact.

But they now also recognise that the council or police isn’t the right first form of contact for some people, which has resulted in the local authority investing £150k over three years with charity Keep Our Girls Safe.

The organisation is a local voluntary sector group run by and for victims of child sexual exploitation.

Mr Jones said: “We keep saying we’re in a different place now than we were then, which is actually true. 

“Awareness is much greater now and we’re much clearer around the risks and how that impacts on young people’s behaviour.

“We’re much more sensitive to identifying the early signs of exploitation and stepping in early to address and resolve those issues.

“And what we see as the symptoms and the sort of the arrangements we need to have in place to analyse that information and do all that intelligence work which we do very closely with the police to understand and respond to identifying perpetrators but also protecting and supporting victims. 

“We’ve got a team and we’ve increased the number of our social workers in that so we can be even clearer and invest even more time.

"We’ve got specialist nurses and a number of police officers who are dedicated, which has been one of the positive responses from GMP and following the new leadership in GMP. they have invested in additional officers around those vulnerable groups. 

“And that’s why all that preventative work is going on.

"What we can do is work as hard as we possibly can to make sure that we are sensitive to those referrals, identifying them and responding quickly to those risks when we see them and they emerge.”

A government spokesperson said: “Child sexual abuse is a heinous crime and all parts of government are taking action to protect children and bring perpetrators to justice.

“In April the Prime Minister and Home Secretary announced a new Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce.

"We have provided £4.5 million of funding over three years to charities that provide vital support to victims and survivors, and continue to invest in a range of work to strengthen law enforcement capacity and capability to tackle child sexual abuse and exploitation.”

They added the government was putting funding in place to have dedicated child sexual abuse and exploitation analysts in every policing region, to improve data quality, analysis, intelligence and tasking.

The CSE Taskforce aims to improve the detection and disruption of exploitation at local, regional and national level through collaboration with the Tackling Organised Exploitation programme.

It will have a particular focus on complex and organised exploitation, including ‘grooming gangs’.

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