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.
Officers collected the foetus from Rochdale hospital in March 2009 but took no immediate action when the DNA failed to match possible suspects in the investigation at the time.
When cases did eventually 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 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 child sexual exploitation.
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”.
