They Call It Grooming. This Is What The Word Was Built To Hide.

THE GIRLS

The first girls were not hunted. Their lives put them in front of the men.

Girls of thirteen and fourteen, already adrift, out at midnight, hungry, unsupervised, in the only places open to them. The taxi rank. The takeaway. The kebab shop at 2am. The men were already there, working the counters and driving the cars. The girls kept coming back because there was food, warmth, cigarettes, somewhere to sit. The alcohol and abuse followed. The man behind the counter first, then his friends. Then the clan. And finally, the trafficking across the country.

She is sometimes as young as eleven. She is not one girl. She is tens of thousands, some argue more, and everything that happens to her in this story comes from the record.

Nobody at home notices what time she comes in. He is thirty-seven and he is kind. He answers the phone when she calls. He buys her gifts. He tells her she is his girlfriend, that he loves her, and nobody has ever said that to her before. A man older than her father, and for a few weeks she is happier than she has ever been. These men understood what love meant to a child who had none. And they knew how to use that to their advantage. The manipulation was child's play because that was what it was. As was the methods they used to separate their prey from any support networks the girls had left.

Then, when the men worked out where these girls came from and how little anyone cared what they did with them, and went looking for more.

The cars began circling the children's homes. Staff logged the registrations night after night while girls climbed in. The homes were full of children the state had already written off as damaged, unreliable, troublesome, and the men grasped what that meant faster than the professionals did. These were girls nobody would believe, and the men knew it. Some of these men even took over the homes. They bribed the staff or put their own in to run them. That is a story for another day.

Then the men wanted more than the homes could give them. And they wanted girls that were less problematic, less damaged and more appealing to their growing customer base. So they went after girls with families. Girls with attendance records and packed lunches. Girls worth more.

Those girls could not be approached by a middle-aged man, so the approach came at the school gates instead, from boys the same age or a year or two above. A boyfriend nobody would think twice about. The Telford inquiry recorded exactly this. A schoolboy who passed a girl to his cousin, who passed her to his friend. Rotherham's inquiry recorded girls collected from school at lunchtime and driven to men. The parents saw nothing to fear in a boy their daughter's age. And the doctrine this series will dismantle made sure of something worse. Any parent who did fear it, and said so, knew what they would be called.

Two models for two kinds of girl. The older man offering love to the child who had none at home. The young boyfriend the child from a stable home would never be warned about. The outcome was the same.

This was never one man and his mates. The official record puts brothers and cousins at the centre of network after network. Rotherham's inquiry named four brothers as a focus of concern the authorities failed to act on. And the survivors I have sat with over eight years describe how much further it went. Girls passed to uncles. Men of fifty taking their turn after men of twenty and thirty had their fill. Households where everyone knew and nobody asked. Survivors have described to me being handed to old men flown in from Pakistan, men they had never seen before and never saw again, men who spoke no English and were on a plane home before the week was out. Those men appear in no British records. Nobody wrote them down. They are beyond the reach of courts that were never asked to look.

The abuse began at first contact or close behind it. The boyfriend himself, or the man at the flat on the first visit. Then his circle. The brother, the cousins, the man from the taxi rank, men whose names she never learns, queuing on a staircase. Then the trade, because girls made money. Collected by taxi, driven to flats and hotel rooms in towns she does not know, handed between men, between families, between cities. Rotherham's inquiry documented children trafficked to other towns and cities across the north. Jess Phillips has recently admitted to Birmingham being used as a route to traffic children.

These girls was moved through the same takeaways, in the same taxis, by the same men who moved everything else they sold. They were heroin dealers, human traffickers with hijab wearing wives at home

The tools were the same at every stage. Alcohol and drugs to soften her. Violence when they stopped working. Girls who resisted were beaten. Rotherham's inquiry records girls threatened with guns, subjected to rape the inquiry itself described as brutally violent, and one child doused in petrol while a man made her believe she was about to be set alight. And blackmail, which outlasted everything else. The photographs. The films. What your family will be shown. Tell anyone, and we know where your little sister goes to school. We will do the same to her as we do to you. Sometimes, they did anyway.

The independent inquiry in Rotherham conservatively estimated at least 1,400 children in that one town over sixteen years. Fourteen hundred, in a town of a quarter of a million people, while schools across Rotherham marked the girls absent. Telford's inquiry put its number above a thousand. Rochdale. Oldham. Bradford. Keighley. Oxford. Derby. Huddersfield. Halifax. Birmingham. Newcastle. And so many other places, the same models, the same tools, prosecuted or documented in every one. Nobody knows the true national total, because to this day nobody in the British state has ever counted.

SHE TOLD

Then she did the bravest thing a child can do. She told.

Battered, threatened, ashamed, fifteen now, she walked into a police station on her own or with her mum. Or a social worker took her after the third positive test at the clinic. Or an officer found her drunk at 2am in a car park and, for once, asked the right question. She sat in an interview room across from adults with warrant cards and notebooks, and she told them everything.

She named the men. First names, nicknames, and for the ones she had known longest, full names. She could name the brothers and say which was which. She described the flat above the takeaway, and named the takeaway, and the street. She gave the colour, make and registration of the taxi that collected her, because she had sat in it a hundred times. She named the towns. She named the other girls. The ones from her home, the ones from the school across town, the one who stopped coming. A fourteen-year-old who has lived inside an operation for a year carries more intelligence about it than a surveillance unit could gather in six months, and she handed all of it over, in a recorded interview, to the people whose job was to act on it.

She left that room believing what any child would believe. Now it stops. Now they go and get him.

WHAT THE STATE DID

The interview was filed. In case notes across these towns, professionals wrote that girls like her were child prostitutes. That word, about children, in official files, and the law of the time allowed prostitution offences to attach to a child of ten. Her rapes became her relationships. Her abuse became her lifestyle choice. The men she named were not arrested. Some were spoken to and released once it became clear who they were. Most were never contacted at all. And then there were those the police warned. Not in the way we expected. But in a way where they were tipped off. Even the BBC have been forced to report on it.

Pakistani police officers were members of the rape gangs. They were involved in the trafficking. Some even raped the girls in the back seats of marked police cars. Go ask the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood if a word of this is a lie.

The inquiries we forced record what happened instead. Girls were arrested for being drunk and disorderly while the men they were found with faced nothing. Fathers traced their daughters to the houses where they were being abused and tried to bring them home. In two documented Rotherham cases, it was the fathers who were arrested. The daughters stayed inside, with the men.

The men carried on. Same takeaway, same taxi rank, same staircase, new girls. The names she gave sat in police intelligence, in case notes, in council files, and they did not sit alone. They sat next to the same names given by other girls, girls she had never met, in interviews she knew nothing about. Officers knew the men, the flats, the registrations, which children's homes the cars circled after dark. Politicians were warned in writing. They knew the cost at the ballot box dare they speak out. Nearly every one of them remained silent. Or worse, saw it as a way to secure more power. The files grew for years. In some towns, for decades.

She told again the second year. A different officer, the same result. By sixteen she had stopped telling, and files across these towns recorded girls like her as uncooperative, as making lifestyle choices, while the men they had named twice found new thirteen-year-olds.

The petrol never silenced these girls. The beatings and the threats against their sisters never silenced them. They kept telling, year after year, in police stations across England. What silenced them was the reaction of those supposed to protect them. The men only ever managed to frighten them. The state convinced them what happened to them was what they deserved.

In Rotherham, and only in Rotherham, the state was eventually forced to count. The National Crime Agency's Operation Stovewood is the largest investigation into this crime ever conducted in Britain. After a decade, it has identified around 1,150 victims in that one town, named some 300 suspects, and convicted 39 men. Three hundred identified. Thirty-nine convicted. One town. Nobody can tell you the national version of those numbers, because no police force, no council and no government ever built the count. The gap between the men the children named and the men who ever saw a courtroom is the subject of this series.

A crime this size, this visible, this identified, does not run for thirty years in a hundred towns and cities because nobody noticed. It runs because a choice was made, and the same choice was made everywhere, by officers and officials, by politicians and the journalists in the mainstream press, decades apart, who never met each other. Incompetence is random. This was not random. This was the industrial scale gang rape of the nation's children. They like to call it grooming.

She named the men. Tomorrow, we will meet them.

For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.

Now the harder fight begins.

Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.

As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.

Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.

Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.
At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.

The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.

That is why this campaign cannot slow down now.

For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:

• A professional website capable of reaching far larger audiences.
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• The resources to investigate, travel and expose institutional failure wherever it is found.

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Raja Miah MBE