The Betrayed Girls: an authoritative film on Rochdale grooming scandal

Jul 4, 2017 by

by Michael Hogan, Telegraph:

“I wish I had a childhood. Justice won’t ever make me feel better. Your thoughts last forever.” This was the haunting, heartbreaking final piece of testimony in The Betrayed Girls (BBC One) – a brilliant but gruelling feature-length documentary about the Rochdale abuse scandal.

Director Henry Singer’s sombre film told the decade-long story via the anonymous accounts of victims who had never been given a voice before, alongside interviews with people who spoke out on their behalf – the likes of lead investigator DC Maggie Oliver and sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham, whose heroic efforts were dramatised this spring in superlative BBC series Three Girls.

The monstrous wrongdoing here was twofold: both the abuse itself, described by victims in grim detail, and the wilful refusal to act by authorities, who turned their backs for fear of inflaming racial tensions in Northern towns.

It turned out, of course, that police and social services had long known about the abuse of white teenage girls by men of Pakistani origin – and this systematic grooming, rape and sex trafficking stretched far beyond Rochdale. When perpetrators were prosecuted, they were treated as one-offs, with no connections made or pattern spotted. For years, vulnerable children’s cries for help were ignored.

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