More than 1,000 children have been abused by sexual grooming gangs in Telford, amid decades of failings by police and authorities.
An independent inquiry found that rape, sexual abuse, brainwashing, drugging and other crimes had “thrived unchecked” in the Shropshire town since the 1970s.
Similar findings were issued following the 2014 report into grooming gang activity in Rotherham and investigations in other towns, and the Telford report said that CSE “still exists today, and is prevalent across the country as a whole”.
Inquiry chair Tom Crowther QC said “obvious signs” of exploitation such as teenage pregnancies and disappearances were ignored, as children were labelled as prostitutes or blamed for their “lifestyles” and perpetrators went free.
“Exploitation was not investigated because of nervousness about race,” because the perpetrators were mainly reported to be Asian men, he concluded.
“Teachers and youth workers were discouraged from reporting child sexual exploitation (CSE). Offenders were emboldened and exploitation continued for years without a concerted response.”
The inquiry found that even after a West Mercia Police operation was launched in 2009 and resulted in several prosecutions, the force and local council “scaled down their specialist CSE teams to virtual zero – to save money”.
At least one victim of grooming gangs in Telford,pregnant 16-year-old Lucy Lowe, was murdered – and her death was then used as a threat to keep other victims quiet.
She was murdered alongside her mother and sister by her abuser 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 he was not charged with any sex offences.
Contemporaneous media reports called Lucy his “girlfriend” and talked of a “stormy relationship”.
Another victim, 13-year-old Becky Watson, was killed in 2002 in an unexplained car accident.
Mr Crowther said failings by the police, council and other authorities had allowed the “appalling suffering of generations of children”, who were treated as “sexual commodities”, either being passed around for sex or sold for profit by their abusers.
He added: “Countless children were sexually assaulted and raped. They were deliberately humiliated and degraded. They were shared and trafficked. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened. They lived in fear and their lives were forever changed.”
Mr Crowther said it would be “wholly wrong, and undoubtedly racist, to equate membership of a particular racial group with propensity to commit CSE”, and that there had been perpetrators from different races, nationalities and backgrounds.
“A high proportion of those cases involved perpetrators that were described by victims/survivors and others as being Asian or, often, Pakistani,” he added.
“The evidence plainly shows that the majority of CSE suspects in Telford were men of southern Asian heritage.”
The report said there had been “racial tensions” over several issues in the local community, which police and the council did not want to “escalate”.
The inquiry took three years and covered abuse dating back to 1989, although it uncovered accounts from victims who were targeted back in the 1970s.
