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Over 1,000 children in British town were sexually abused, inquiry finds

Wednesday, 13 July 2022 4:05 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 13 July 2022 4:36 PM ]

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A new damning inquiry has found that over 1,000 children were abused by sexual grooming gangs in an English town during decades of failure by police and local authorities to prosecute the offenders.

The inquiry concluded on Tuesday that rape, sexual abuse, brainwashing, drugging and other crimes had “thrived unchecked” in Telford, England.

Tom Crowther QC, chair of the inquiry, said “obvious signs” of exploitation such as teenage pregnancies and disappearances were ignored. "Countless children were sexually assaulted and raped. They were deliberately humiliated and degraded. They were shared and trafficked."

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.”

"Victims and survivors repeatedly told the inquiry how, when they were children, adult men worked to gain their trust before ruthlessly betraying that trust, treating them as sexual objects or commodities."

At least one victim of grooming gangs in Telford, 16-year-old Lucy Lowe, who was pregnant, was murdered and her death was then used as a threat to keep other victims quiet. She was killed alongside her mother and sister by her abuser, who set fire to their home in 2000.

Another victim, 13-year-old Becky Watson, was killed in 2002 in an unexplained car accident.

The inquiry was launched after a 2018 Sunday Mirror investigation found sexual exploitation reports dating back to the 1980s. The inquiry has since confirmed that the abuse was allowed to continue because the children were blamed, not the perpetrators.

Teachers and youth workers were discouraged from reporting child sexual abuse. “Teachers and youth workers were discouraged from reporting child sexual exploitation (CSE). Offenders were emboldened and exploitation continued for years without a concerted response.”

All this is the latest in a series of horrific cases of sexual abuse in Britain.

In 2014, another independent report found that as many as 1,400 children in another English town were sexually abused while the late television presenter Jimmy Savile was found to have abused 500 children, both cases occurring over decades.

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