The Second City's Dirty Secret
The West Midlands rape gang scandal is still waiting for its reckoning
Rotherham got an inquiry. Birmingham had the same intelligence, the same patterns, the same mapped locations and named suspects. It got a decade of silence.
The people who maintained that silence are still in their positions.
West Midlands Police Compared Birmingham to Rotherham. Then Said Nothing.
Around 2010, West Midlands Police produced an intelligence profile identifying organised networks of Pakistani men sexually exploiting children in Birmingham. Girls groomed. Girls moved between men. The scale of it documented inside a police file.
The profile compared Birmingham directly to Rotherham.
They knew what they were looking at. They had a name for it. They had the numbers and the locations and the patterns in writing.
They did not tell the public.
700 Children at Risk. The Parents Were Never Told.
In 2015, West Midlands Police produced a confidential problem profile. Three months of data. More than 700 children identified as potential victims of sexual exploitation in Birmingham, 113 of them classified as high risk, 372 suspects under investigation. Children's homes and hotels named. Locations where rape gangs were operating, mapped inside a document the public was never shown.
No politician demanded an inquiry.
No council leader held a press conference and told the parents of Birmingham what was in that file. No police chief was ever asked to explain how 700 children could be at risk and the people of this city told nothing.
Rotherham got its inquiry. Birmingham got silence.
Ask yourself why.
They Knew Enough to Go to the High Court. Not Enough to Tell the Truth.
In 2014, Birmingham City Council obtained anti-grooming injunctions from the High Court against six men targeting a teenage girl. Banned from contacting girls under 18. Banned from certain areas.
A city does not go to the High Court like that because it has seen nothing.
They knew enough to act. What they would not do was make a public statement, hold a press conference, or give an honest account of what those injunctions were responding to.
Managed. Contained. Hidden.
Birmingham City Council Commissioned This Report in 1990. Then Destroyed It.
Birmingham did not discover this problem in 2010.
In 1990, Birmingham City Council commissioned a research report into the rape of girls in its own care. The researcher documented the ethnic profile of the networks. Documented the extent of the abuse.
The council destroyed the report.
They had it in writing. They read it. They got rid of it.
Now look at the terms of reference for the national inquiry. Shabana Mahmood and Jess Phillips helped design a time limit into those terms that will prevent what happened in 1990 from being investigated.
What is in that report that they do not want the inquiry to reach?
Dudley, 2024. Children as Young as 11. Police Say They Lack Intelligence.
The BBC is now reporting that in Dudley, safeguarding structures were discussing children as young as 11 being sexually exploited in high street mini-marts. Internal council documents and intelligence briefings from 2019 to 2024 describe children lured with cigarettes and vapes, taken from pop-up shops by vehicle to unknown locations. One report describes a Stourbridge mini-mart where workers were trading illegal goods to children in return for sexual access.
These warnings went into official briefings. They were circulated to people whose job was to act on them. They were raised inside a safeguarding group that included police, council officers and charities.
In December 2024, police told that same group there was "a lack of intelligence and information around CSE."
That is what they said. After years of documented warnings. Passed through official channels. To the police themselves.
Who Looked at This and Did Nothing?
Shabana Mahmood
Shabana Mahmood has been MP for Birmingham Ladywood since 2010. West Midlands Police were already mapping Pakistani rape gang networks across her constituency that same year.
She is now the Home Secretary. She helped design the terms of the national inquiry. She made sure those terms will not reach back to 1990.
Why?
What is in that destroyed report that Shabana Mahmood does not want investigated?
Jess Phillips
Jess Phillips became MP for Birmingham Yardley in 2015. That same year, West Midlands Police had a confidential profile sitting in a file identifying 700 children at risk of sexual exploitation in her city.
She did not just hold a Birmingham seat. In opposition she held the shadow safeguarding brief. When Labour won the election she was appointed Safeguarding Minister on day one. The portfolio she had spent years preparing for in opposition became hers in government the moment the votes were counted.
She was the shadow minister for the exact problem she was doing nothing about.
In Parliament she said she would be lying if she denied that over the years, girls had told her police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration of abuse in Birmingham.
Read that again. The Minister for Safeguarding Girls. A Birmingham MP since 2015. Shadow minister for safeguarding throughout the years of opposition. Victims coming to her with allegations of police involvement in rape gang abuse across her own city.
When Labour took power she did not call a national inquiry. She offered councils a £5 million fund to investigate themselves. The same councils that had presided over the abuse. Marking their own homework.
She was forced into a U-turn in June 2025 and a statutory inquiry was announced. Within weeks survivors on the panel began resigning. They said the scope was being quietly widened away from grooming gangs and toward general child sexual abuse. Phillips told Parliament their claims were categorically untrue. Evidence then emerged that they were telling the truth.
Five survivors made her resignation a condition of their return to the panel. Both prospective chairs withdrew. The inquiry she had spent a decade in position to lead was described by a survivor as feeling like a cover-up, scripted and predetermined.
The girls who came to her as victims did not get a decade to prepare. They did not get a U-turn when the pressure mounted. They got told their accounts were untrue by the woman whose job title said she was there to protect them.
Andy Street
Andy Street was Mayor of the West Midlands from 2017 to 2024. The Birmingham intelligence history, the 700-child problem profile and the High Court case all predated his first day in office. Safeguarding concerns about Dudley mini-marts were being logged throughout his mayoralty.
What was escalated to his office? What did he do with it?
Seven years. No public account of what he knew.
They Called Them Lifestyle Choices. The Rape Gangs Called Them Kuffar.
The girls targeted in the West Midlands were written off before the rape gangs got near them.
Pakistani rape gang networks selected them because they were White. Their faith told them these girls were morally inferior and sexually available. They called them kuffar during the rapes and repeated it in court, as though the accusation of racism would do more damage than the evidence against them.
The professional classes paid to protect these children had their own language. Lifestyle choices. Child prostitutes. Those were official terms, used in official records, about children as young as twelve. Social workers who raised concerns were told to reframe their findings. Police officers who named the ethnic profile of the networks were sent on diversity training. A mother who tried to report her daughter missing was referred to a parenting course.
Neither set of people thought these girls were worth protecting.
The rape gangs were at least honest about why.
What Happened to the Knowledge
The council commissioned a report in 1990, read it, and destroyed it. The 2010 intelligence profile was never published. The 700-child problem profile of 2015 never triggered an inquiry. The Dudley mini-mart warnings circulated for years inside official meetings while police claimed they lacked intelligence.
The people responsible are still in their positions, still drawing their salaries, being interviewed on national radio as though they witnessed something rather than enabled it.
Not one chief constable has been asked to explain why the public was not told. No council official has been required to answer for 1990.
That is not an accident. That is the point. When it comes to the Pakistani Rape Gangs, the evidence is conclusive. They were protected.
I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.
You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.
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