Police failed to act on warnings of sexual abuse in Tameside, allowing grooming gangs to operate with one alleged offender now working in the public sector, GB News can reveal.
Lucy was a young teenager when he first picked her up, and while waiting for a bus in her school uniform, taking refuge from the rain, a man drove past and offered her a lift.
She said she wasn’t surprised by the offer, it happened all the time in Hyde.
“You’d see cars full of men, driving up and down and playing loud music, getting our attention,” she told GB News.
GB News' Charlie Peters speaks to a grooming gang victim after she suffered abuse in Tameside
|GB NEWS
“There was one man, who always used to drive right past us on his own. He first approached me and asked: 'Did I want a lift home?'. He'd seen me at the bus stop and it were raining.”
Over 20 years since that day when she was invited into his car, Lucy, not her real name, is now sharing her story of abuse and exploitation in Tameside, in Greater Manchester.
The man moved quickly to groom the girl. For over a year, she said she was coerced by him and pressured into sexual abuse.
Lucy said she can remember the first time he took her to his house. “I felt really uncomfortable being with him. I’m not racist, but his house smelled like curry. And all I could think of was my mum’s going to smell this and my mum’s gonna know.”
“I felt horrible because of the way it happened. And then in the morning, he was like ‘quick, we need to get going’, kicking us out like the back door.”
She said she thought of him as her boyfriend and all his friends knew about the exploitation. Lucy said that the man’s friends tried to groom her themselves.
As the exploitation escalated, Lucy recalls an occasion when he returned from abroad and had brought her some jewellery. But things got darker for Lucy as one of the men introduced to her via her first abuser also started to exploit the young girl, who was just 13-years-old.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
“The next man was a lot older than the other one and he got talking to me about him.”
After four weeks, he made the girl have sex with him. Soon after, she saw the second man around Hyde with his wife and children.
“He just looked at me and shook his head. Then, he saw me again in Hyde, came over to me and said: ‘Don’t ever approach me when I'm with my wife and I want to give you some money because we've had sex and if you are pregnant then it's got to go’.”
At the time, Lucy lived with just her mother, who was battling mental health issues and struggled to support her daughter who was being ruthlessly exploited for sex by older men.
GB News has spoken with Lucy’s close family and friends, who have provided accounts of her life during this period.
They all recalled the name of the first abuser, which the People's Channel is withholding, and have reaffirmed details of Lucy going missing and being dropped off late at night.
“My mum was going through a mental breakdown and I was out of control,” Lucy said, “and she’d ring the police, and they’d turn up.”
But they weren’t helpful. Like many police officers dealing with child sexual exploitation across the country in the 2000s, officers would often challenge the girls instead of the perpetrators.
This trend was repeated in Lucy’s case. One on occasion when she was reported missing, Lucy came home to find a policewoman in her front room.
“The first thing she said was ‘take that cap off now’, and ‘who you think you are?’ My mum was almost explaining [that] I'm knocking about with men a lot older,” but they didn’t take action.
Speaking decades later in a safe location in Greater Manchester where she wouldn’t be recognised, Lucy said that she felt like the police were more interested in telling her off.
She returned home late at night being dropped off by a much older man, but the officer was more interested in telling her off for wearing a cap and was making her mother anxious.
Just like inquiries had found in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, and Telford, Lucy was yet another child caught in the vice of sexual exploitation who was disregarded by police officers, who likely saw her as an unruly kid, not a victim.
That moment in her front room would have been a critical opportunity to intervene and save her from further and worsening exploitation, because soon after, Lucy began to be trafficked out of Tameside and into the neighbouring borough of Oldham.
She lived near a takeaway and started to hang out there with one of her friends. “Different people would turn up visiting the takeaway. We're sat in there and it's ‘oh who’s this? Do you want to come for a drive with us?’ And one thing led to another.”
They quickly took her out of town to be abused. “At 2am in the morning [they’d be] beeping at the back of my mum's house. I'd run out in my jamas, no shoes on. Get in the car. Next minute we'd be in Oldham.”
Lucy shared a photo with GB News of how she spent her Christmas that year. She was hospitalised with pelvic inflammatory disease, caused, she said, by a Gonorrhea infection that she picked up from the men who had abused her.
The men who took her from the takeaway abused her individually, but they all knew each other. Her mum knew what was happening, but had no power to stop them.
Lucy said the health workers at the hospital in Tameside also did not ask her any questions as to how she had ended up with such a severe infection at such a young age.
The photo is haunting, with her mother leaning over the hospital bed, Lucy’s face is smiling at the camera. Lucy’s account of her hospitalisation has been supported by those who knew her at the time.
She shared with GB News another critical piece of evidence from this period. It’s another photo of her in bed, but this time at home. And unlike the invisible injury that put her in hospital, this time, she is sporting a vast black eye.
Her face is swollen and drained. The men who took her to parks and flats to be abused in Oldham had turned violent. On one occasion, when she was begging to go home, one of the men ‘backhanded’ her right in the face. “When he saw my eye swelling, he said ‘you can go home now’.”
She said she was terrified to speak out, even with the damage they had caused to her body, because the men had links to serious criminals in Greater Manchester. “Because [the abusers] had links in Oldham, I didn’t want the police getting involved, because I know they were a serious community.
“They knew where I lived. As soon as he hit me, he was like, ‘if you say anything to anyone. I swear to God. Watch what happens’.”
GB News can reveal that the first man who Lucy said groomed and abused her now works within the region in the public sector.
The People's Channel is choosing not to name them nor their employer. GB News is reporting on Lucy’s allegations and experiences after she came forward earlier this year.
She reached out to the channel via Marlon West, the father of a survivor in Tameside. Both Lucy and Marlon want Tameside “on the map”, recognised as a borough where grooming and sexual exploitation have happened and continues to blight the area.
The local council has previously been accused of ignoring warnings about grooming gangs.
Lucy was a young teenager when he first picked her up, and while waiting for a bus in her school uniform, taking refuge from the rain, a man drove past and offered her a lift
|GB NEWS
Conservative Councillor Liam Billington told GB News in January that he had been blocked from discussing the issue. He shared footage with The People’s Channel of his microphone being cut off as he spoke about the issue during a full council meeting in 2022.
In July, a new police watchdog and Ofsted report singled out Tameside in Greater Manchester for not implementing strategies for combatting grooming at an adequate pace.
In a monitoring visit in February, Ofsted’s inspection of Tameside council’s children’s services “found that there remain concerns about the timeliness of responses to children.”
It deemed the services overall had “an effective, strong response to children at risk of exploitation.” But looking across Greater Manchester, Ofsted said that “some [boroughs] have strong and established leadership arrangements, and that sustainable progress is being made in those local authorities where this needs to improve.
“The exception is Tameside, where progress has been too slow.”
Tameside’s children’s services have been rated “inadequate” since an inspection in 2016. The department was again deemed “inadequate” in 2023, which is the watchdog’s lowest score.
Both Lucy and Marlon said they fear that the council is not taking the problem seriously enough, noting that they have spoken with other victims who are preparing to come forward.
Lucy said she hopes that her bravery in speaking out will inspire others. She is now preparing to make a report to the police about her abuse. She wants the confidence of a media report to take her account of her ordeal to the authorities.
In July, the police inspectorate found that Greater Manchester Police had made "significant improvements" in how it tackles CSE since the Rochdale and Oldham scandals went public.
The force was praised for having a dedicated CSE major investigations team and for tackling grooming gangs as though they were dealing with serious and organised crime.
“I would love them to be locked up, named and shamed. I've had a horrible life growing up and now thinking back they were a part of that.
“They need to be held accountable and their families need to know what they did. Because their families only look at people like me as trash.”
Assistant Chief Constable Steph Parker, GMP’s lead for protecting vulnerable people, said: “We know there are survivors, like Lucy, whose lack of trust and confidence in us understandably remains after we previously fell far short of the help they had every right to expect from us.
“To Lucy, and any other survivors seeing this, I want you to know that when you are ready, we will listen and act if you want us to. We have specialist officers and support agencies working day-in day-out who are here to help victims and get them long-awaited justice.
“We are wholly focussed on working with partners and to repay the faith of survivors who have put their trust in us. We are relentlessly pursuing offenders to bring them to justice for their crimes, no matter how long ago they were committed. Time is no barrier to justice.”
A Tameside Council spokesperson said: “We support victims/survivors from any time, and we will work with them to access specialist services as appropriate.
“Our safeguarding work around CSE was positively highlighted by Ofsted, and the children’s commissioner described our contextual safeguarding service as a 'beacon of good practice'.
"However, as a learning organisation we recognise there is more for us to do and are fully engaged in the peer review process led by Greater Manchester Combined Authority, who will audit the quality of our multi-agency with children and report their outcomes through the GM Complex Safeguarding Board.
“We are always happy to work directly with families and our partners to discuss any feedback and explore where our services can be further improved.”