In late 2012, Samantha Walker-Roberts took a Megabus from Manchester to London, bound for the Houses of Parliament. In an airless room in Westminster, she told Keith Vaz, then chair of the home affairs select committee, her story.
In October 2006, aged 12, she had gone to a police station in Oldham, Greater Manchester, to report that she had been sexually assaulted in a graveyard. Staff at the station were dismissive, she told Vaz, and encouraged her to accept a lift home from two men loitering near the doorway. She ended the night in a detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac, where multiple men took turns to rape and abuse her.
Vaz, a former Labour MP, had been tasked with investigating “localised grooming” – gangs of men preying on teenagers in certain towns and cities across England. Despite a growing fear that men of South Asian origin were overrepresented, Walker-Roberts recalls being attacked by men of various ethnicities. Her case was sent to a new child sexual exploitation taskforce called Operation Messenger. A string of failings meant just one man – Shakil Chowdhury, a British citizen born in Bangladesh – was convicted.
Appearing at the same inquiry, Peter Fahy, then chief constable of Greater Manchester police, insisted the force had a “very good record” in “dealing with vulnerable victims”. He added: “We have long had operations against things like child prostitution – Operation Messenger in places like Oldham.”
Fahy tempered his comments by saying he was “angry” that some people “got away with offending longer than we would have liked”. He was asked about an investigation into gangs of Pakistani men abusing girls in neighbouring Rochdale, later the focus of the BBC drama Three Girls. Nine men had just been convicted of raping and trafficking white teenagers in the town. The prosecution was the reversal of an earlier decision, made in 2008, which concluded that one of the victims was not a credible witness. Fahy also rejected claims that the force was reluctant to act on cases like Rochdale because of the ethnicity of the perpetrators.
However, for Walker-Roberts, now 31, the suggestion that she and other young victims whose cases were investigated by projects like Operation Messenger were prostitutes is met with the most devastation, given that some were still at primary school when they were targeted. “It’s offensive, abusive and upsetting,” she said.
For some, the fact that the first major investigation into what has become known as grooming gangs was led by Vaz strikes a galling note. His tenure came to an abrupt end in 2016 when the Sunday Mirror reported that he had used male escorts, offering to buy them cocaine while posing as a washing machine salesman named Jim. However, his report, published in 2013, stressed that local authorities must ensure that multi-agency teams tasked with fighting child sexual exploitation had enough money to fund prevention strategies.
In reality, many specialist projects were closed or merged. In Oldham, Operation Messenger battled funding cuts for several years before it was absorbed into a regional taskforce in 2014. In Telford, Shropshire, where 1,000 children were found to have been sexually exploited, a similar initiative struggled with resourcing issues. Officials in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, were criticised for running specialist exploitation services from within its child protection department after the closure of a youth work service.
It was the inquiry into abuse in Rotherham, a year after the parliamentary report, which lit a touch paper. Alexis Jay, the social work professor who led the investigation, found that 1,400 girls had been targeted between 1997 and 2013. She said they were raped, beaten, abducted, doused in petrol and set on fire. She added: “By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.”
Although the Jay report did not have the power to summon professionals to account for failings under oath, it paved the way for further investigations into child sexual exploitation. In Telford, the Labour council was initially reluctant to commission an inquiry, but later wrote to the Conservative government to ask for a statutory probe in 2018 after a string of deaths were linked to abuse by grooming gangs. The government said Telford was within the scope of its long-running independent inquiry into child sexual abuse.
Councillors unanimously voted for a local inquiry. Chaired by former judge Tom Crowther, it found widespread failings over decades. It has been held up by government ministers as a model for other local inquiries and Crowther has praised Telford council for its response to his recommendations. However, it could not force people to give evidence. One of those who declined to attend was Clive Harding, a retired police officer who led the investigation into the murder of Lucy Lowe, 16. Lowe was killed in a house fire set by Azhar Ali Mehmood, who had made her pregnant at 14, and the murder inquiry was criticised for failing to act on reports he was part of a grooming gang.
In the end, the government’s child abuse inquiry did not examine the failings in Telford in detail. Nor did it look at other areas identified as exploitation hotspots, such as Rotherham, Oldham and Rochdale. Its strand on abuse by organised networks was focused on just six towns. Harriet Wistrich, director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, described it as a “hugely wasted opportunity”.
The new inquiry, covering England and Wales, was born partly from Walker-Roberts’ bid for a statutory inquiry in Oldham, in the hope it might bring justice for other victims. Keir Starmer eventually agreed when an investigation was recommended by the Whitehall troubleshooter Louise Casey. Casey carried out an audit, which found that disproportionate numbers of Asian men were among suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation in certain areas of the country, but cautioned that it was difficult to paint an accurate national picture because there was no ethnicity data recorded in most cases.
A panel of 30 survivors, all of whom have suffered group-based abuse, was set up to advise the inquiry on its terms of reference and to help appoint a chair. Five have resigned, saying they were manipulated by the government to extend the focus of the inquiry beyond street-based grooming gangs. Yet Walker-Roberts feels like a narrow definition of this term might exclude her from the inquiry she has campaigned so vehemently for.
“The gang [who attacked her] was a one-off kidnap, so there was no grooming involved in that,” she said. “That’s why I am fighting to widen the scope, so that I can be included.” She added that the men who abused her could have other victims and her evidence might encourage them to come forward.
She and four other survivors have written to Starmer to ask that “anyone who believes their evidence should be included” should be able to participate to paint the fullest possible picture of group-based exploitation. The Guardian understands the other signatories all experienced abuse at the hands of grooming gangs, though the offenders were not exclusively Asian.
There is also the question of whether an inquiry with statutory powers – and the ability to force professionals into the witness box – will give victims the answers they crave so desperately. Earlier this year, Crowther struck a note of caution when he appeared before MPs. He said that an inquiry would be powerless to force answers from someone who claimed simply not to remember what had happened. “You can lead a horse to water,” he said. “But you can’t make that horse drink.”
• This article was amended on 28 October 2025 to clarify the remit of grooming gang inquiries. Our earlier amendment (27 October) suggested all inquiries related to England and Wales; in fact, the Jay report referenced related only to Rotherham.
