Child sexual exploitation became ‘the norm’ in Manchester

In their own words, for some children in greater Manchester, sexual exploitation has become a fact of life. So common, most don’t even report it.

After the grooming scandal in Rochdale was revealed two years ago, an independent report was commissioned. Channel 4 News has seen extracts of the report, due to be released on Thursday.

Part of the report admits that child sexual exploitation has become the new “social norm” in parts of Greater Manchester. Police are now pursuing 260 live investigations.

Greater Manchester Police received 13,000 reports of sexual offences against children in the last six years. In 12,000 of those cases, the alleged abusers were allowed to walk free.

Changing attitudes

Chief Crown Prosecutor for the north west, Nazir Afzal, told Channel 4 News that many more investigations were going ahead: “we have now the highest conviction rate for tackling child sexual abuse ever, we now have the lowest number of cases that we are not proceeding with, and many of these cases are being built strongly right from the beginning.”

He insisted that attitudes were changing: “We’ve spent hundreds of years saying to children and victims ‘be seen and not be heard’ – I want to hear them, I want them to be confident they can come forward and they’ll be taken seriously, and we are taking more and more of them seriously.”

While conceding that the court process still remained problematic in prosecuting child sexual exploitation cases, Mr Afzal said: “My hope and expectation is that we’ll be in an even better place in a year’s time,” and he called on others to support that effort: “what we would like to do is encourage more neighbours, more family members, more schools, more health professionals – they also have information that will enable us to build stronger cases.”