Politically correct police officers and local officials who failed to tackle mostly Muslim, South Asian heritage rape gang groomers dismissed their victims as “child prostitutes” and “troublemakers”, a survivor has revealed.
The issue of so-called grooming gangs, largely consigned to obscure regional reports by the establishment media again after a number of high-profile scandals in towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford enjoyed a brief spell in the spotlight, has been highlighted again over the course of the Conservative Party leadership contest, which will decide the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Rishi Sunak, the favourite to replace Boris Johnson among Tory MPs, has claimed he would establish a task force to investigate grooming gangs and introduce a new type of life sentence for predators, while Liz Truss, the favourite among ordinary party members, has claimed she would see that the police officers and officials who ignored or even condoned abuse are finally held to account.
Samantha Smith, a survivor of grooming, has made the most of the issue’s time in the sun to shine a spotlight on exactly how bad the authorities’ response was before the scandals began to break, and how police and local officials “did absolutely nothing to bring my abusers to justice.”
“I was made to feel unworthy of help or support, as though the abuse I experienced was my fault. My social workers even spelled it out. ‘Your behaviour and actions have led you to where you are today,’” she recalled in an article for the Daily Mail.
“I had no idea that I was not alone, but one of more than a thousand children in Telford who had been sexually exploited over decades while the police and youth workers, whose job it is to protect us, not only failed to act but all too often blamed us as the architects of our own trauma,” Smith added, describing how inquiries into the scandal had established that the abuse was “not investigated because of nervousness about appearing racist.”
“Meanwhile, the largely working-class white victims were treated as no-hope cases who were destined to fall into a life of crime, branded ‘troublemakers’ or even ‘child prostitutes’ by police,” she lamented, noting that “[t]eachers and social workers were found to have been actively dissuaded from reporting abuse”.
Police Superindepent Tom Harding, who infamously claimed that the scale of abuse in Telford was “sensationalised” before official probes established that it was every bit as bad as whistleblowers claimed, was singled out by name by Smith.
There is no indication that Hading ever faced any real consequences, however — indeed by 2020 he was a Chief Superintendent, and received high praise from senior officers at the police force covering Telford ahead of a move to a neighbouring Welsh force.
Moreover, the Indepenent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which is supposed to serve as the official watchdog for English and Welsh police forces, has just dropped an investigation into three Greater Manchester Police officers referred to them after an enquiry into grooming in their force area, with the IOPC declining to respond to press enquiries from Breitbart London as to whether they have ever recommended sanctions against specific officers over rape gang failures.