Councillor Sara Rowbotham vindicated after CSE report concludes she did "consistently raise concerns with both the police and children’s social care at the highest level" despite earlier claims

Councillor Sara Rowbotham has been vindicated after a damning report into CSE in Rochdale has determined that she DID in fact “consistently raise concerns with both the police and children’s social care at the highest level” – despite previous claims that she hadn’t.

Sara had been the coordinator of an NHS sexual health service in Rochdale known as the Crisis Intervention Team, part of Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust and played an instrumental role in blowing the whistle about on-street grooming of vulnerable children in the Rochdale borough. The Crisis Intervention Team was set up in 2002 to provide outreach advice and support to young people who required contraception and sexual health advice and support.

Sara, who was awarded an MBE for services to young people in 2022, had been making referrals to both the police and children’s social care since 2004 with the Crisis Team alerting GMP and the council to an “organised crime group dealing in the sexual exploitation of many children in Rochdale” in 2007.

In 2012, she gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, saying: “We were making referrals from 2004, very explicit referrals, which absolutely highlighted for protective services that young people were incredibly vulnerable. I tried to be as articulate as I possibly could to make Children’s Social Care aware of the level of concern.”

Sara explained that, as her referrals were not being responded to, she began to make the council’s safeguarding children unit aware of the referrals she was making. She went on to refute any suggestion that the Crisis Intervention Team had not appropriately communicated its concerns to children’s services – yet in 2013, two serious care overview reports from the Rochdale Local Safeguarding Children Board contained “several criticisms that the Crisis Intervention Team failed to communicate appropriately with the statutory agencies.”

The RLSCB reports criticised the Crisis Intervention Team for “not following child protection procedures and for not communicating appropriately with other agencies, and the reports also disputed the contention that the Crisis Intervention Team had made the number of referrals suggested.”

 

 

However, the report says it has established “that by October 2012, the multi-agency CSE strategy group chaired by Chief Superintendent C was aware of approximately 127 potentials victims who had been referred by the Crisis Intervention Team to children’s social care and that these referrals had not been acted on.”

In 2017, Sara featured in the BBC documentary ‘The Betrayed Girls’ which claimed the crisis team had notified GMP and Rochdale Borough Council’s children’s social care about “dozens” of cases of CSE before 2008, but that both agencies had failed to protect the children.

She received a special recognition award at the 2018 NHS Heroes Awards, and was made an honorary member of the Council of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in October 2018.

Further allegations made in The Betrayed Girls claimed that lessons had not been learned from the failure of GMP’s Operation Augusta CSE investigation in South Manchester, with the same mistakes being repeated in Operation Span.

GMP hailed Span as “a fantastic result for British justice” although it had failed to address the on-street grooming of vulnerable children and the profile of offenders since 2004, despite being aware.

During Operation Span, GMP chose not to record the numerous crimes committed against one child victim, known as Amber, even though she had provided “significant evidence” over a six-month period and identified many of her abusers in several identification parades. These perpetrators were potentially left to continue their abuse of other children.

It was with these concerns in mind that the review that today’s report is part of was commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham just two months after the documentary’s broadcast.

And today, Monday (15 January), Councillor Rowbotham has finally been vindicated after years, as the report says the concerns about CSE had been “consistently raised” with both the police and children’s social care at the highest level by Sara Rowbotham and her colleagues, noting “Senior and middle managers across both organisations were aware of this but they failed to act.

“These children were being subjected to significant harm and the statutory agencies let them down, because they found it just too difficult a problem to address.”

It said: “Sara Rowbotham and her colleagues at the Crisis Intervention Team were informing both the police and children’s social care of the prevalence of CSE within the community, but both agencies failed to respond to these concerns with the rigour and immediacy the team’s concerns required.

“The multi-agency processes in place to identify and respond to complex child sexual abuse were weak and continued to be overly reliant on child victims making disclosures to law enforcement agencies as a way of keeping them safe. There is no evidence that meaningful multi-agency assessments were put in place for individuals who posed a risk to children.”

The report’s authors also said they were “struck by the lack of intervention by both the police and children’s social care when it was known that older adult males were having sexual relations with children who were said to be ‘consenting’.”

Today’s report contrasts the viewpoint of the RLSCB reports, saying: “Our review has found compelling evidence to support the view that the Crisis Intervention Team was sharing explicit information with the authorities on the exploitation of multiple children. We also have evidence that, despite these explicit concerns, GMP and Rochdale Council failed to take appropriate action.”

The report concluded that Sara “was unfairly criticised by the two serious case reviews for not having appropriately referred children at risk of exploitation” and that her and her colleagues were “lone voices in raising concerns about the sexual exploitation and abuse of these children” for several years.

It also says: “We conclude that during Operation Span, as alleged by both Maggie Oliver and Sara Rowbotham, many children’s testimonies were ignored, and their abusers were not brought to justice. We conclude that in our judgement these allegations are credible.”

 

 

Speaking at a press conference in Manchester on Monday (15 January), an emotional Sara said: “I'd like to thank the mayor’s office for paying attention, I’d like to thank Malcom and Gary for their diligence and independence.

“I met Victoria Agoglia [Victoria’s death led to the Operation Augusta investigation; she was originally from Rochdale but under the care of Manchester City Council when she died at the age of 15 due to a forced heroin overdose]; she was a lovely girl. When she died, I cut her picture out the paper and I put it on our office wall as a testament but also as a reminder of the importance of what we were trying to do and the consequences for those young women we were working with if we failed to protect them.

“I've always been in awe of young people who have the strength to come forward, to share their evidence with the police and go through the hell of a judicial process and all those young people who share their experiences with the crisis team worker at the time they were being violated.

“It’s often said the survivors of exploitation were children who weren’t loved, so I want to acknowledge the trauma that parents, carers and other family members went through when they were doing their best to protect their children and had little or no support and the devil at the door was too powerful.

“I'd like to thank Sue Hogg, Simon Lewis, Philippa Lowthorpe, Nicole Taylor, Matt Baker and Henry Singer for dramatising and documenting this appalling series of events.

“How many more times will it take a drama or a documentary and the ensuing public outcry to call people and organisations to account?

“Crisis intervention team, the team of women I worked with, were highly skilled, they were tenacious and to committed to the young people we work with and fought for. I thought I was good at working with young people, but these women had skills way beyond mine. It's disgusting that we were disbelieved, scrutinised, misrepresented, scapegoated, and then publicly and nationally discredited by both the police and local authority. We were blamed and they said it was my fault.

“The team worked so hard, we had to hear horrendous things, we worried about young people and we tried every strategy to try and change things, only then to have our professionalism and qualifications questioned in a review. All we was trying to do was to get protective services to do their job. That’s disgusting.

“I was described as being difficult to work with but what did you expect? Children were being raped every day but both the police and Rochdale children’s services told me and kept telling me it had nothing to do with them.

“The number of young people we successfully engaged with and the information they felt able to share with us is clear in this report. No one’s ever asked me how we were able to do this. These were voluntary relationships, young people came to us, they even brought their friends. They felt safe enough to tell us even though they knew we would breach their confidentiality. They even came back to us when other services let them down.

“How can lessons be learned if no one asked us how we did that?

“Since 2004, all the evidence was given to Greater Manchester Police and social care at the time and it's now being used to support new prosecutions. Even now, whilst they are celebrating successful convictions, Greater Manchester Police fail to acknowledge the role of crisis intervention team played in providing them with corroborative evidence and contemporaneous notes.

“Everything that is being done now should have been done then. It's not like you are waiting for a new bit of tech to make it possible, all it would have taken is the right people actually giving a damn.

“After Operation Span, we were told by Pennine Care Foundation Trust, our employers, to draw a line under it. When they knew we had dozens of other cases that needed investigating. We had names and addresses, telephone numbers and very detailed accounts of serious sexual assaults against young children.

“Alongside Greater Manchester Police, they only spent time and effort questioning our numbers, well they weren’t numbers, they were real children.

“We now know from the report that this was a decision made by those organisations not to investigate. Why would they do that? That’s disgusting.

“Asking us to draw a line was beyond belief we couldn’t believe that no one wanted to protect the young people or to track down and prosecute perpetrators. This made me ill, made the whole team ill.

“I also want to say shame on every individual who was asked to give evidence to this enquiry but refused to do so. You were paid by the public when you made those decisions to lie about me and my team in a serious case review. When you failed to take appropriate actions to protect children or you failed to investigate crimes. Shame on you.

“Clearly, it was easy to discredit, diminish and dismiss to the fact that children were being manipulated, poisoned and raped.

“Shame on those who only recently said we have nothing to learn from this enquiry, we’ve already reviewed what went wrong, we’re so much better now. Shame on you.

“There’s a lot of people at the moment being asked whether their truth finally being acknowledged makes things better. Well, it doesn’t, and it definitely doesn’t in this case, help the dozens of young people who suffered the horrendous abuse detailed in this report.

“The scale of abuse was known to protective services at the time and they chose not to take appropriate action. Someone needs to explain why.

“It's tiring to continually hear organisations talking about learning lessons from past injustices and appalling practice.

“I can’t applaud the fact that services are better now because so they should be.”

Speaking at the same press conference, Councillor Neil Emmott, said he wanted “to pay special tribute to Sara Rowbotham and her colleagues who worked in the crisis intervention team.”

Mr Emmott, who has been leader of Rochdale Borough Council, said: “They fought like tigers to protect vulnerable children whilst so many others turned their backs on them, ignored them, and didn’t take their referrals of child sexual exploitation seriously. 181 referrals. Sara stands out as a beacon of integrity during that awful period, and I for one will never accept nor countenance any criticism of her actions.

“Sara and her colleagues at the crisis intervention team were told by so-called professionals that those abused children had made ‘a lifestyle choice’.  I want to say to you today those kind of words, that kind of language used by so-called professionals to describe vulnerable, abused and traumatised children frankly makes me feel both physically sick and extremely irate in equal measure.

“I think it's only right to mention today that there was one Rochdale councillor who raised the issue of child sexual exploitation during that terrible period and that was Sara Rowbotham’s mum, the late councillor Maureen Rowbotham. Maureen raised the issue with the appropriate council officers but like Sara and her team, Maureen was ignored and not taken seriously.”

Mr Emmott has also publicly apologised for Rochdale Borough Council’s actions.