More Than 1 000 Children Abused By Grooming Gangs In Telford Amid Decades Of Failure

An independent inquiry found that rape, sexual abuse, brainwashing, drug use and other crimes had “flourished out of control” in the Shropshire town since the 1970s. Similar findings followed the 2014 report into gang activity in Rotherham and investigations in other towns, and the Telford report said child sexual exploitation “still exists today and is widespread across the country”. Tom Crowther, chairman of the inquest, QC said “obvious signs” of exploitation such as teenage pregnancies and disappearances were ignored as children were branded prostitutes or blamed for their “lifestyle” and perpetrators were let off the hook. “The exploitation was not investigated because of racial nervousness,” because the perpetrators were mostly reported as Asian men, he concluded. “Teachers and youth workers were discouraged from reporting child sexual exploitation (CSE). Offenders were discouraged and exploitation continued for years without a concerted response.” The investigation found that even after West Mercia Police launched an operation in 2009 and led to several prosecutions, the force and the local council “reduced their specialist CSE teams to virtual zero – to save money”. At least one victim of grooming gangs in Telford, 16-year-old Lucy Lowe, who was pregnant, was murdered and her death was then used as a threat to keep other victims quiet. She was murdered along with her mother and sister by her thug Azhar Ali Mehmood, then 26, who set fire to their home in 2000. Lucy had Mehmood’s first child when she was 14 and had been abused by him since the age of 12, but was not charged with any sexual offences. Contemporary media reports called Lucy his “girlfriend” and spoke of a “stormy relationship”. Another victim, 13-year-old Becky Watson, was killed in 2002 in an unexplained car accident. Mr Crowder said failures by the police, the council and other authorities had allowed generations of children to “suffer terribly”, who were treated as “sex commodities”, either trafficked for sex or sold for profit by their abusers. He added: “Countless children have been sexually assaulted and raped. They were deliberately humiliated and degraded. They were shared and traded. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened. They lived in fear and their lives changed forever.” Mr Crowther said it would be “completely wrong and undoubtedly racist to equate membership of a particular racial group with a propensity to commit CSE” and that there were perpetrators from different races, nationalities and backgrounds. Lucy Lowe, 16, was murdered by her abuser in Telford (PA) “A large proportion of these cases involved perpetrators described by victims/survivors and others as Asian or, often, Pakistani,” he added. “The evidence clearly shows that the majority of suspects at the CSE in Telford were men of south Asian origin.” The report said there had been “racial tensions” over a number of issues in the local community, which the police and council did not want to “escalate”. The investigation spanned three years and covered abuse dating back to 1989, although it revealed accounts of victims who had been targeted in the 1970s. “For decades the CSE thrived in Telford unchecked,” Mr Crowther said. “I saw references to exploitation become ‘generational’ and seen as ‘normal’ by the perpetrators and as inevitable by the victims and survivors, some of whose parents had gone through similar experiences. “Such attitudes can only develop if exploitation is not properly recognized and challenged, and in my view, for many years in Telford – as in many other towns in England – it was not.” The 1,200-page report found the abuse was not hidden and that police, schools and the council had known about it since the 1990s. But warning signs such as repeated incidents of missing girls, teenage pregnancies and reports in the local press of what was then called “child prostitution” were not properly responded to by Telford and Wreakin Council or West Mercia Police. Meanwhile, the victims were criticized for their “lifestyle choices” and accused of putting themselves at risk. One survivor told the inquest how she was expelled from school after becoming pregnant while being abused and that a teacher told her to “stop sleeping with those boys or she would never make anything of herself”. The report said victims were often trapped using the “boyfriend model” of grooming, where they were targeted by older men looking for young and vulnerable girls. 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