Abuse victim behind ‘Holly’ from Three Girls Rochdale drama slams cops who ‘turned blind eye to child grooming gang due to political correctness’
'Girl A' was plied with booze and repeatedly raped above a dingy takeaway by sick ringleader Shabir Ahmed
A VICTIM in the Rochdale child sex abuse scandal believes police and social workers ignored the horrifying crimes because of political correctness.
Girl A, as she was known in court, was raped multiple times by Shabir Ahmed.
He plied her with alcohol above a dingy takeaway in the Greater Manchester town.
Now 24, she revealed her anger at the authorities who failed to respond to reports of horrific assaults on young girls by Asian gangs dating back 15 years.
Girl A, who was played by actor Molly Windsor as “Holly” in last week’s BBC1 drama about the scandal, Three Girls, said: “The police and social workers betrayed a generation of girls by turning a blind eye.
“They knew exactly what was going on — they just didn’t want to stop it.
“They knew the girls were under-age, they knew the men abusing them were Asian. They were just too politically correct to admit it.
“They even removed the word ‘Asian’ from official reports on a rape and kidnapping in 2005.
“They thought they’d be called racist if they told the truth. So they talked about girls making ‘lifestyle choices’.
“A lifestyle choice to be a kid being raped by gangs of men queuing up at the door? I don’t think so.
“People need to realise that it is only a minority of Asian men who did this.
“It sickens me to know that all the time I was being abused in Rochdale, virtually the same thing was happening in Rotherham.
“We were all kids on a conveyor belt of abuse. I was just part of the new batch of 2008.”
Girl A, who is now a mum and living at a secret location in the south of England, believes that grooming is still going on.
She said: “I met lots and lots of girls at the time and I’m sure it’s still happening in other towns and cities.
“The cliche is that it happens at night, but it is not always like that. With me, it was quite a lot in the daytime, being picked up from school.
"I thought I was streetwise, but looking back I was conning myself.”
Last week millions of viewers watched the three-part BBC dramatisation starring Maxine Peake.
The programme showed how young victims bravely gave evidence against their abusers in 2012 — despite police and prosecutors previously dropping the case.
Girl A was just 14 when she was first raped by Ahmed, who plied her with vodka.
Ringleader Ahmed — who encouraged his victims to call him “Daddy” — passed the girls around to be abused by scores of other men, mostly of Pakistani origin.
The girls were driven to parties across Lancashire and Yorkshire where they would be abused by men who queued up outside bedrooms to take turns raping them.
Following the trial at Liverpool Crown Court, nine men were jailed. Ahmed, then 59, was initially sentenced to 19 years but this was later raised to 22 years.
He is now using taxpayers’ cash to fight deportation to Pakistan after his sentence.
Girl A, meanwhile, is trying to rebuild her life hundreds of miles from Rochdale.
But not surprisingly she has struggled to get over the bitterness she was left with after her experience.
In a book published in 2013 she said: “If social services were on a ‘journey’, it wasn’t the same one I’d been on. Nor all the others they’re still either investigating or who never came forward.
“What we went through was real. Not packaged, not dressed up, not made to fit someone’s politics or agenda. We didn’t care about things like that. We just wanted to be rescued.”
Girl A said her ordeal had made it difficult to form relationships and added: “That would be nice but I find it hard.
"Sometimes I still have emotional lockdowns.
“I don’t know how to react when someone is nice to me.
“I wouldn’t want to tell anyone what happened. It is another barrier to a relationship. I find it hard to give, emotionally.
“I need to get my head together before I can give myself. I am going to get that help now. I hope there’s some nice bloke out there.”
Girl A urged social workers and police to listen to children when they make allegations in future.
She said: “They’ve got to treat kids as kids. Everything I told them was checkable, and if they’d checked their records they’d have found that Shabir Ahmed had done this sort of thing before.”
And having survived such a shocking ordeal she said: “I can’t believe how strong I actually am.
“I don’t think you realise how strong you can be until it happens.
"I know there are girls who have never come forward and are still trapped by it, but I hope now that they’ll have the courage to break away.
“Because it’s not a life. They can get out. I look back and I think, ‘Why didn’t I run?’ But I was 15 — and I didn’t know I could.”
Council faces £1m compensation payout
Exclusive by Andy Gardner
ROCHDALE Borough Council faces paying more than £1million in compensation to young sex abuse victims.
It has already settled three civil claims of up to £125,000 each after failing to stop the abuse, and three more victims are currently suing the council, which also faces huge legal fees.
A source said: “These settlements may be just the tip of the iceberg.
"It may cost millions more.
"The young women have received compensation but the money does little to take away the memories.”
The Sun on Sunday can reveal that Greater Manchester Police is also being sued by another three victims.
A 2012 review into the scandal found that the council, police and Crown Prosecution Service “missed opportunities” to stop the abuse and that “deficiencies” in social service care were down to “patchy” training of frontline staff.
Hero reporter who exposed scandal
INVESTIGATIVE reporter Andrew Norfolk was the first to expose the Rochdale grooming scandal in a series of articles for The Times.
His original story for the newspaper in January 2011 revealed the sexual abuse of mostly white girls, typically aged around 12 or 13, largely by gangs of middle-aged Pakistani men.
His reports prompted the police and Crown Prosecution Service to reopen the Rochdale case, which had previously been dropped when CPS lawyers voiced concerns that a judge would not believe the victim.
Andrew, 52, reported on the 2012 trial at Liverpool Crown Court which resulted in the conviction of nine men on charges ranging from rape to trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Ahead of the broadcast of Three Girls he told Radio Times: “What is very difficult to do when you’re writing this kind of story, which is also the task that every prosecutor and every witness had – and that’s to get the jury, or in this case the viewer, into the mindset of a 13-year-old girl.
“To understand the confusion between the initial excitement and the adventure and loving the thrill, and then the process by which they get sucked into a world where they are out of their depth and horrible things start to happen.
"And to realise – as the police and so many professional services didn’t realise for so many years – that however complicit, however consenting they may seem, these are children who are being brutally sexually abused.”
He became focused on the Rochdale scandal because he had become “increasingly concerned” at repeatedly seeing cases of girls being groomed, plied with alcohol before being raped, beaten and coerced into having sex with men for money.
He said: “Every time there was a prosecution of two or three men, for what seemed like very similar offending, it was always treated as a one-off.”
Andrew, whose reporting won him top journalism honours The Paul Foot Award in 2012 and The Orwell Prize in 2013, also uncovered similar cases across the North as well as in the Midlands and Oxford.
His reporting uncovered the failures of local councils, police and social services – who did not act against known gangs for fear of being accused of racism.
His work resulted in a Government inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, which found in August 2014 that 1,400 girls were groomed and abused between 1997 and 2013.
Other estimates have put the figure as high as 2,000.