Greater Manchester's Rape Gang Scandal Continues

Another report, another cover-up. The same cowardice that enabled these crimes now tries to sanitises the truth

Greater Manchester Police are investigating 1,099 suspects linked to the group-based sexual abuse of 714 children. These numbers should shock you. They should demand answers. They should trigger a reckoning that finally confronts the institutional rot that allowed gangs to rape working-class girls while those in power looked away.

Instead, we get another 76-page exercise in damage limitation from His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS). Another carefully crafted document that praises police reform, speaks of lessons learned, and wraps systemic failure in the language of progress. Another betrayal of the girls who screamed and were ignored.

This is not accountability. This is containment. And it follows the same playbook that has protected perpetrators and silenced victims for decades.

The Arithmetic of Injustice

Let's be clear about what these numbers actually mean. We have 1,099 suspects. That's more than a thousand men who allegedly participated in the systematic sexual abuse of children. We have 714 victims. Little girls whose childhoods were stolen, whose trust was shattered, whose voices were silenced. We have 59 active investigations and 13 cases handled by the specialist task force.

And we have 42 convictions. Forty-two. Out of more than a thousand suspects that they have been forced to admit to. The real number will be at least 10x this.

This is not justice failing. This is justice being strangled by the same institutional cowardice that enabled these crimes in the first place. When the conviction rate for such systematic abuse is barely four per cent, we are not witnessing progressing at pace.

The Silence That Speaks Volumes

The most telling aspect of this latest report is not what it reveals, but what it conceals. Greater Manchester Police possess breakdown data by local authority and demographic data on both victims and perpetrators, including ethnicity. They refuse to publish it.

This is moral cowardice of the highest order. Everyone knows the pattern that emerges from these cases. The Baroness Casey Review explicitly identified "significant over-representation of Pakistani and Asian men as grooming gang suspects." Yet still our institutions tiptoe around this truth, more afraid of accusations of racism than of justice denied.

The refusal to publish ethnicity data is not sensitivity - it is complicity. It is the same fear of causing offence that allowed these crimes to flourish unchecked. When we refuse to name the problem, we guarantee it will continue.

Political Theatre and Moral Void

Watch Andy Burnham perform his role as the concerned reformer. See how he positions himself as the man cleaning up the mess, the progressive politician who cares about victims. Notice how survivors remain excluded from the process, their voices absent from this report, their testimony deemed too dangerous for public consumption.

This is not reform. This is public relations.

Where is Afzal Khan, MP for Manchester Gorton? A man who takes to social media to express his fury about international conflicts, who speaks passionately about injustice abroad. But when it comes to the gang rape of working-class White girls in his own back yard, his voice disappears. His moral outrage suddenly finds its limits.

Where is Angela Rayner, who built her career on championing the working class? Where is Jim McMahon, who speaks of representing forgotten communities? All silent. All hoping the headlines move on. All complicit in a political culture that protects power instead of people.

This selective outrage reveals everything about our political class. They will weep for victims on other continents while ignoring the screams in their own towns. They will condemn injustice in abstract terms while perpetuating it through their silence.

The Council's Continuing Lies

Manchester City Council blocked me on social media the moment I started calling out this scandal nearly 7 years ago. Their response to accountability has been to silence critics and obstruct transparency. When finally forced to hand over documents to investigators, they provided materials so heavily redacted that some pages contained only a few words.

This is not the behaviour of an institution committed to learning from its failures. This is the conduct of an organisation still more concerned with protecting its reputation than confronting the truth. They would rather black out the evidence than face the consequences of their complicity.

The Familiar Betrayal

We have seen this before. Rochdale. Oldham. Rotherham. Telford. The pattern never changes: scandal breaks, report commissioned, apologies offered, silence descends. The victims are forgotten, the perpetrators often escape justice, and the institutions that failed them carry on largely unchanged.

This latest report is another instalment in this cycle of managed disclosure. It provides enough information to suggest action while withholding the data that might enable genuine understanding. It thanks survivors for their courage while excluding them from decision-making. It promises reform while protecting the very systems that enabled these crimes.

The Price of Moral Cowardice

Behind every redacted document and every refused freedom of information request lies a simple truth: our institutions are more afraid of being called racist than of being called complicit in child rape. They would rather manage the optics than confront the reality.

The 714 victims identified in this report are not statistics to be managed or problems to be contained. They are girls whose lives were shattered by institutional failure. They are children who were betrayed by every adult who should have protected them - police officers who ignored their pleas, social workers who dismissed their testimony, politicians who feared the electoral consequences of speaking truth.

This betrayal continues every day that we refuse to name the problem, every time we sanitise the truth, every moment we prioritise the comfort of perpetrators over the justice owed to victims.

The Reckoning That Cannot Be Stopped

The Manchester grooming scandal represents a fundamental moral test for our society. Do we have the courage to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of these crimes and the communities in which they occurred? Or will we continue to protect the sensibilities of those who enabled them?

For too long, the answer has been clear. But something is changing.

The National Inquiry that we forced represents an opportunity for the reckoning that our institutions have spent decades trying to avoid. Unlike the managed reports we have seen before, this inquiry will not accept redacted documents with pages containing only a few words. It will not allow the accused to investigate themselves and present sanitised findings. It will not exclude the testimony of victims who have been silenced for too long.

This is what genuine accountability looks like. No more carefully managed disclosure. No more institutional self-investigation. No more protection for those who failed in their duty to protect children.

The victims of Gtr Manchester's rape gangs deserved protection. They deserved justice. They deserved truth. Instead, they got institutional betrayal, political cowardice, and carefully managed silence. But that silence is breaking.

The machinery of denial is vast and well-funded. It has protected perpetrators, silenced victims, and sanitised scandals for decades. But it is not invincible. The National Inquiry represents the first real threat to this system of managed accountability. As long as we maintain the pressure, it will result in a process that cannot be controlled by those who enabled these crimes.

Andy Burnham cannot stage-manage this inquiry. Manchester City Council cannot redact its findings. The politicians who chose silence cannot exclude the voices they have ignored. The survivors who have been betrayed by every institution will finally have their day.

The world is watching. History will remember. And those who chose silence over justice will finally face the consequences of their choice. The reckoning they have avoided for so long is coming. And this time, they cannot control it.

I'm Raja Miah. I spent six years leading a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs. I am responsible for leading the work that forced the national inquiry into the cover up of the Pakistani Rape Gangs.

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