'What's been done for these victims?'

The father of the brave girl who helped bring down the Rochdale grooming gang tells John Scheerhout why her suffering will never stop

- John Scheerhout

ONE night in August 2008, a girl aged 15 kicked off in the Balti House Heywood, takeaway in Rochdale. She smashed up the counter in what looked like a simple act of vandalism. It was actually a cry for help by a victim of horrific sexual abuse.

A cry that fell on deaf ears.

Fast-forward almost 16 years, and the courage of this vulnerable schoolgirl in calling out the vile sex abuse she and other girls suffered at the hands of a grooming gang at the time cannot be overestimated.

The Crown Prosecution Service ruled her story was 'not credible' and no charges were brought. Two members of the grooming gang the gang's ringleaders Shabir Ahmed and Kabeer Hassan - were arrested and released on bail. When a proper investigation finally began, it ended with nine men being prosecuted and jailed in 2012.

Polite society struggled to comprehend the notion of an Asian grooming gang, plying vulnerable white girls with drink and sharing them with paedophiles across the north. But it was clear white girls were being specifically targeted by a gang of largely Pakistani-heritage men because, as the sentencing judge would tell them, the men's victims were "not of your community or religion".

What followed was a plethora of reviews and apologies from the authorities - some of them very reluctant - and more prosecutions which, to the cynic, was a showy act of shutting the barn door when the horse had already bolted.

Then, in 2017, the whole story erupted again following the broadcast of the BBC documentary The Betrayed Girls, which reported how NHS leaders in Rochdale had notified Greater Manchester Police and the council of dozens of cases of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) prior to 2008, but both agencies failed to protect the children.