THEY CALLED THEM GROOMING GANGS. THEY WERE WRONG.

For forty years, the state prosecuted groups of men. The evidence points to something larger that kept surviving every trial.

PART 1.

Twenty-five men were charged over the rape and sexual exploitation of one Halifax schoolgirl. They came from Halifax and Bradford, from Huddersfield, Derby, Shipley and Nantwich, and from Newport in Gwent. Reports suggest she was thirteen when the rapes started. The charges ran from July 2009 to July 2011.

Seven towns, three counties and another country, over a child who never left West Yorkshire. The charge sheet put a man from Gwent alongside men from six Yorkshire towns.

Fifteen were jailed after three trials at Leeds Crown Court in 2016. The longest sentence was 25 years. The Court of Appeal, hearing six of them challenge those sentences, called her a "serial sexual plaything" used by the appellants and many others.

Many others. Fifteen men went to prison. The court record itself acknowledged there were more.

By 2011, Barnardo's had 21 of its 22 local services reporting children being taken around the country to be raped by groups of men. In 2014, Alexis Jay wrote that Rotherham's children were "trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England", and described girls as young as eleven raped by large numbers of men.

Rochdale became a Rochdale scandal, Rotherham a Rotherham scandal, Telford a Telford scandal. Each town got its own trial, its own report and its own apology, and the children were being driven between them the entire time.

This is how it worked for forty years, as a supply chain that ignored every boundary the police observed. The places named here are where I cut in to document it, not where it began or ended.

THE REGISTRATION NUMBERS

The girls all describe the same.

Fiona Goddard was fourteen, in a children's home in Bradford, when it started. Nine men were convicted in February 2019 of twenty-two offences against her and one other girl. She puts the number of men who took part at between fifty and a hundred, and says she was trafficked around the country with other girls. She does not describe a gang. She describes one thing with many parts: "we were all linked together, these grooming networks". Every survivor she has met anywhere in the country was either trafficked into Bradford or had men travel from it.

The children's home wrote it down while it was happening. Staff knew she was at high risk from unknown males. They recorded her being collected in the early hours by unknown cars. The policy was not to call the police unless somebody actually saw her being "dragged into a car". The agreed action was to write down the registration numbers.

They logged the vehicles of a network and filed the log.

Samantha Walker-Roberts went into Oldham police station to report a sexual assault and was turned away for being drunk. Outside, two men offered her a lift. Over the night that followed she was passed between as many as nine men, in three separate gangs, in three different houses. Only one man has ever been convicted of it.

Three gangs is what the paperwork calls them. She was handed through all three before morning.

A Rochdale complainant described being driven to houses and flats where other men were already waiting. Another told the jury she had been made to have sex with twenty men in one night. Twenty men, one night, one child. Somebody booked that.

IN SOME WAY

In February 2004, Greater Manchester Police wrote down what it looks like from above.

Operation Augusta's scoping team identified 26 potential victims and 97 people potentially involved. The girls were aged 11 to 17 and every one of them was in the care of Manchester City Council. By the time the operation ended, at least 57 children had been identified as potential victims. Intelligence said the men were predominantly Asian and worked in the restaurant trade.

The police wrote their own definition of the 97. They were "in the region of 97 persons of interest" identified as involved in some way in the sexual exploitation of the victims.

In some way. Ninety-seven people, and the police had already begun separating the functions they performed. A perpetrator commits the act. A facilitator makes it possible. An associate is connected to both and need never touch anything.

This is a description of a division of labour.

Three functions, 97 men, children drawn from a single source.

Augusta produced two criminal justice outcomes relating to the children it was set up to protect. Eight across the whole operation. Then it closed. Fifteen years later, reviewers working from the paperwork it left behind put names to 68 of the 97. The state could still identify them. It had stopped pursuing them. I'll let you decide why.

A DECADE BEHIND

It was already old when it was first written down.

In 1990, Birmingham City Council commissioned research into the prostitution of girls in its own care. Dr Jill Jesson reported the following year, identifying twenty girls. The report was suppressed and copies were ordered destroyed. In 1995, the council voted down a motion for a full enquiry into what had happened to it. I have published that record. The Rochdale men convicted in 2012 were still children themselves.

It ran in Telford through the 1980s and 1990s, in Rusholme in Manchester through the 1990s, in Huddersfield from 1995, in Rochdale, Oldham and Rotherham from 1997, in Calderdale from 2001. In Rotherham alone, at least 1,400 children between 1997 and 2013. It was running in all of them at once, while each force watched its own patch and called what it found new.

The trials arrive a decade behind the offences. Nine men were convicted in Rochdale in 2012, drawn from two boroughs. Fifteen were convicted at Leeds Crown Court in 2016 for offences in Halifax committed from 2009. Twenty went down in Huddersfield in October 2018, and Operation Tendersea has since produced 42 convictions and more than 505 years. West Yorkshire Police say its offences span 1995 to 2013. Between 2021 and 2024, in a separate set of investigations at Bradford Crown Court, twenty more men received more than 219 years for the rape of four girls aged twelve to sixteen in Calderdale between 2001 and 2010.

And it has not ended. Casey recorded in June 2025 that Rotherham's Operation Stovewood had passed 39 convictions and around 470 years of sentences, against Jay's 1,400 children. She records that Greater Manchester Police supplied data covering 35 group-based child sexual exploitation investigations between January 2022 and May 2025. Across those investigations there were 317 known victims.

[267 female and 50 male. The 317 figure belongs to the 35-operation group-based dataset matching the Hydrant and COCAD definition, not to all GMP child sexual exploitation investigations; a wider audit dataset covers 61 multi-victim, multi-offender investigations.]

In October 2024, the force told inspectors it was running 59 live multi-victim, multi-offender child sexual exploitation investigations, involving 714 victims and survivors and 1,099 suspects.

1,099 suspects, in one police force area, on a single day.

A gang has members, and when you jail them it dies. This was jailed in Rochdale in 2012, in Halifax in 2016, in Huddersfield in 2018, in Calderdale in 2024, and the same practice is under investigation in 59 strands in one county now. Whatever keeps replacing the men has never been touched.

SIXTY-EIGHT NAMES

The counts sit side by side in the state's own documents.

Rotherham. At least 1,400 children. Thirty-nine convictions through Operation Stovewood.

Telford. Seven men jailed through Operation Chalice, an operation that identified a potential hundred child victims. Victims handed police at least 267 names. Across a decade, 37 investigations into abuse involving more than one attacker produced no convictions at all. One girl gave the names of 68 men and backed much of it with her own diaries, and the Crown Prosecution Service found no realistic prospect of conviction. None of the sixty-eight was charged. Her case alone held more offenders than the town has ever seen convicted.

Manchester. Ninety-seven men, sorted by the police themselves into perpetrators, facilitators and associates. Two outcomes for the children the operation existed to protect. Sixty-eight left at large with the state holding their names.

Birmingham. A police problem profile counting 75 suspects, and almost 500 children identified as victims of exploitation or at risk of it. The response was ten civil injunctions.

Different towns, different forces, different decades, different governments, and one ratio throughout. The men in the hundreds, the children in the thousands, the convictions in double figures.

A law built to charge acts can only convict the man it can prove committed the act. The drivers, the spotters, the flat-holders, the men waiting their turn. That layer is what the indictments keep missing, and it is what turns one man with a car into twenty-five men from seven towns around one child.

That is not a gap in enforcement. It is the shape of the offence we chose to write.

WHAT I FIND

None of it was hidden. It sat in the police category for the man involved in some way, and in a care home's list of number plates, and in a court's acknowledgement of many others, and in a charity's own caseload, in twenty-one places out of twenty-two, in 2011, three years before Rotherham broke. It sat in the accounts of girls who described being handed on, disbelieved by every professional paid to listen and then believed by juries a decade too late.

And it sat in a research report a city council commissioned, read, and destroyed, four years before it voted against asking itself why.

The girls counted the men. Sixty-eight names from one child in Telford. Between fifty and a hundred by Fiona Goddard's account. Nine men in three houses in one night in Oldham. Twenty in a night in Rochdale. Every count came from a child, and every count was larger than anything the state did with it. To throw that evidence out now is to call the girls liars, after jailing men on their word.

The arrests came years late and counties away, as though you could cut a supply chain by nicking a few of its drivers. And after every trial there were more men. Different men, doing the same jobs in the same order, arriving from the next town along.

Taken together, that is what the evidence points to. An organisation capable of replacing its losses.

The question is what that organisation was. I named it in the introduction to this series. The biraderi.

Part 1 does not prove that proposition on its own. It proves why the proposition has to be tested.

Twenty-five men from seven towns around one girl. Ninety-seven people divided into roles around children in Manchester's care. Sixty-eight names from one child in Telford. Networks surviving trial after trial, decade after decade.

The police have repeatedly named the men. No English court has yet been asked to determine what connected them.

Part 2 begins that test.

I am Raja Miah MBE. It is now eight years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs.

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