9 months ago
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Failing among those detailed in highly critical report into how GMP and other agencies responded to child sexual exploitation
Greater Manchester police (GMP) secretly took the aborted foetus of a 13-year-old grooming victim in order to do a DNA test without telling the girl or her parents, a highly critical review of the police and council in Rochdale has found.
The revelation is one of a series of “deplorable” failings detailed in the latest chapter of an independent assurance review into how GMP and other agencies responded to child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Greater Manchester. The 173-page review was commissioned by Andy Burnham when he was first elected as mayor in 2017 and covers the period from 2004 until 2013.
When cases did reach court, GMP left the young victims to be “harassed and intimidated by the men who had previously abused them”, sometimes at gunpoint.
GMP took no action in the case of a 15-year-old girl who gave birth to a child of her “pimp”.
One child told GMP that her abusers kept girls in cages and “made them bark like a dog or dress like a baby”, but GMP took no action once she left Greater Manchester and was put in care elsewhere.
In an “incredible example of poor practice”, one victim, known as Amber, was herself arrested and then bailed to live with a man who had already been arrested on suspicion of grooming.
The Crown Prosecution Service, in consultation with GMP, decided to name Amber as a co-conspirator in the sexual exploitation of other children in a trial of her abusers, in what the authors describe as “deplorable further abuse of a CSE survivor”.
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