In 2003, long before the term “grooming gang” entered the lexicon, social workers in Oldham noticed a disturbing pattern: girls from local children’s homes were repeatedly going missing. Often, they were found in the same locations, being harboured by the same men. Each time the authorities thought they had got a grip on the problem, it reared its head again. By 2006, there were concerns that groups of offenders were targeting children at high schools. One girl, later referred to in court as Child X, fell into their clutches while truanting when she was 12 years old. By 14, she had been abused by 300 men and was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin.
“Unless you scratch below the surface you do not realise the enormity of the problem,” Ruth Baldwin, then the executive director for young people and families at Oldham council, said in December 2006. “We are not talking about teenage relationships. These are men in their 20s, 30s, and beyond.”
Almost two decades later, on New Year’s Day 2025, the fate of girls in this former mill town on the eastern fringes of Manchester caught the attention of the world’s richest man. GB News reported that the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, had told Oldham council the government would not fund a statutory inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town. In response, Elon Musk said on X that Phillips should be in prison.
The media storm that resulted forced a reckoning on an issue that has come to haunt Britain, not least because of the apparent over-representation of men of Asian heritage in the gangs that plagued towns such as Oldham. Several inquiries have already established that a nervousness about race hampered the response in other parts of the country.
Musk’s intervention was controversial. He was criticised for spreading misinformation and weaponising the issue to fuel a far-right agenda. But it set in motion a chain of events that forced the government to commission a statutory national inquiry on grooming gangs, covering England and Wales. A central strand will focus on what went wrong in Oldham, and it will look at “how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in responses”.
Although Oldham council now accepts its failings and has welcomed the national inquiry, at first some officials were privately baffled by the scrutiny the town was receiving. For many years, Oldham had prided itself on a child sexual exploitation strategy that was seen as being ahead of its time.
When Baldwin, who left Oldham council in 2007, first spoke of her concerns about teenagers being preyed on by older men the previous year, she announced a new taskforce designed to combat the problem. The project – involving the council, police, health services and the charity Barnardo’s – was named Operation Messenger. It was seen as being so groundbreaking that it won a Greater Manchester police award for partnership working in its first year. Yet the accolades the project received obscured a troubling truth: Operation Messenger failed many of the girls it came into contact with.
A safeguarding review, commissioned by the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and published in 2022, concluded that “the quality of casework by both the police and social care” working on Operation Messenger was “generally very poor and characterised by a failure to appropriately initiate multi-agency child protection procedures when children were known to be at risk of significant harm”.
The review found no evidence to substantiate social media rumours that the Labour-led council was covering up the scale of the problem to protect its vote among the town’s Muslim population. Operation Messenger investigated alleged offenders from a range of racial backgrounds, including white men. However, exploitation by British Asian men – particularly those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage – formed a significant chunk of its caseload. Throughout the project’s eight-year lifespan, the agencies involved wrestled with how to address the problem without fuelling the far right, perhaps mindful that Oldham had already been torn apart by racial division during the 2001 riots.
“Sexual exploitation is a real issue, and we need to be addressing it,” a 2011 memo from Greater Manchester police read. “People feel strongly about this issue and there is the potential for it to escalate. There is the perception that there is a conspiracy of silence due to political correctness and that some areas are not dealing with the issue.”
Police said in the same document that there was a “need to continue to provide support to the Messenger team” but warned: “Further cases in Oldham might bring wider media interest and further exploitation of the issue by the BNP and English Defence League. There is therefore a risk of further demonstrations and the risk of increased hate crimes.” It added that Muslim communities felt “demonised”.
One victim referred to in Operation Messenger, Samantha Walker-Roberts, has expressed concern about her story being hijacked by far-right groups. She was 12 when she was kidnapped from a police station in October 2006, as she tried to report a sexual assault by a man in a nearby churchyard. She was then trafficked around the town to be abused by multiple men. She ended the night in a quiet cul-de-sac, at the home of Shakil Chowdhury, where she remembers being raped for hours by five men.
Only Chowdhury was convicted and vital forensic evidence that could have helped trace outstanding suspects was destroyed or returned to him via his solicitor. During his trial, Chowdhury named two accomplices, but police did not follow up this information, according to the 2022 safeguarding review. The men remained at large and, in 2009, one tried to murder his wife. In 2011, this man’s wife told police he had confessed to raping a 12-year-old and had even kept newspaper clippings about Chowdhury’s trial. Again, the Messenger team did not act.
Greater Manchester police said in a statement that the treatment Walker-Roberts received was “far from the standard survivors can expect” from the force today and added that it was pursuing “long and complex investigations” into historical child sexual exploitation, which include Walker-Roberts’ case.
Walker-Roberts, now 32, has campaigned for an independent inquiry in Oldham for more than five years and hopes it will help establish whether Chowdhury, a British citizen born in Bangladesh, and his accomplices could have been stopped before they attacked her. Many years after her ordeal she tracked down some of his former neighbours; she later told the council and the safeguarding review that they recalled a “conveyor belt” of children arriving at Chowdhury’s house in taxis. Separate sources say at least one neighbour tried to alert the council before Chowdhury was arrested.
On another occasion, a few months before Walker-Roberts was targeted, the Guardian understands a 14-year-old girl, missing from a children’s home 20 miles away in another county, was found in the street, apparently having just visited Chowdhury’s house. Sources say a neighbour who helped return her to the home was later visited by detectives from another force, but Chowdhury appears to have escaped their inquiries unscathed.
When police reviewed Walker-Roberts’s case in 2014, surviving forensic evidence linked two teenage girls to Chowdhury’s property. They were interviewed and said they’d had sex with Chowdhury there when they were 16 but appear not to have made criminal complaints. The safeguarding review said this helped “support [Walker-Roberts’s] later assertion” that Chowdhury’s home “was a place where young women were sexually exploited by Asian males”.
There are also fears that senior officials didn’t understand the complexities of child sexual exploitation. Peter Fahy, a former chief constable of Greater Manchester police, described Operation Messenger, which was closed and absorbed into a regional taskforce in 2014, as being focused on “child prostitution”.
The story of Child X – the 12-year-old who went on to be abused by 300 men after she started skipping school – came to light when she stabbed one alleged offender in a row over money. The person the police pursued was an older teenager who had introduced the girl to the offenders. She was in her early 20s by the time she appeared in court. She was handed a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to sign the sex offender register for 10 years for causing and arranging for a child to enter into prostitution.
The judge told the older girl she had avoided jail because her case was “exceptional”. “Your life has not been too dissimilar to that of the girl,” he said. “You had been subject to all manner of abuse.” Whether her case really was exceptional may be a matter for the inquiry.
A few months later, another case came before the same court. A 20-year-old defendant was sentenced to a 12-month supervision order for the repeated abduction of a girl from Oldham who had been abused by Asian men. The girl’s ordeal had begun when she was 10 and the defendant was 16 with a “boyfriend” who took them out in cars to drink alcohol with other men. The Guardian sent a freedom of information request to Greater Manchester police, asking how many teenage girls had been arrested or charged by Operation Messenger, but the force said it would be too expensive to retrieve the data.
Walker-Roberts, who was once described in files as “attention-seeking” when she disclosed her abuse to a social worker, hopes the Oldham strand of the inquiry will focus just as much on how victims like her were treated by the professionals employed to help them as it will on the cultural factors that could have led to them being abused. She said many were already vulnerable by the time they were targeted by grooming gangs, having experienced domestic or sexual abuse within their families.
“They thought we were problem children causing chaos,” she said. “In reality, we were being abused. We weren’t being listened to properly. Even now, I still think attitudes to victims are not the best.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
