The Betrayed Girls, BBC 1, 8.30 pm, BBC iPlayer directed by Henry Singer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08xdh9r/the-betrayed-girls

Ironically, the lead story BBC Ten O’Clock News which followed this programme was a report calling for the demolition of Haut de la Garenne home in Jersey. Children weren’t listened to. Children were abused. Seventy years of failure: The Jersey Way.

 Can we demolish Greater Manchester Police? Maggie Oliver one of the few who can hold their head up catalogued their failings from the inside as a young office investigation these child abuse allegations and noted how often young girls she worked with had been let down by those supposed to protect them, by the police, by social services, by the community. We know all of this if we watched, as I did, the dramatization of their story, Three Girls, shown recently on BBC 1. But here it is Assistant Chief Inspector Steve Haywood speaking to the press after the successful prosecution of nine Asian men of Pakistani origin giving the usual reassurances to the public. The same Assistant Chief Inspector Steve Haywood that had discontinued the first investigation four years earlier. The same Assistant Chief Inspector Steve Haywood whose force conveniently lost a catalogue of evidence collated for them by one of their outstanding officers Maggie Oliver. She too was betrayed. This is an issue of class. White, working-class girls, trouble.

‘It’s no wonder they come to us,’ said ‘Daddy’ a nickname for one of those successfully prosecuted.

Although a convicted paedophile and rapist 'Daddy' does have a point.

Can we abolish the Rochdale Care System? This is shown graphically when the mother of one of the girls that is being raped and abused by men says something that is not politically correct. ‘What are you going to do about those Pakis abusing my daughters?’ she asks social workers and care workers involved with her children. She is removed from the meeting and not allowed to attend further meetings. We can’t have working-class mothers calling paedophile rapists Pakis.

The British National Front and English Defence League filled their boots with the images of Pakis raping young white girls as young as thirteen. We know this for sure because the father of Girl A speaks hear on camera and says they were the only ones that listened to what he had to say and believed him when he told them how his daughter was raped.

Thirty more prosecutions have been made since that case. That’s meant to reassure us. But if we listen to Sarah Rowbotham who made a spider-chart of all those mentioned by the girls in Rochdale and catalogued who they were and how they were connected and estimated such abuses had been going on for a minimal of ten years or more, if we listen to Nazar Afal, who, as public prosecutor estimated that 100 000 girls are abused every year, then 30 doesn’t seem that big a number. In fact your chance of getting prosecuted for raping young white girls works out at 0.0003. There’s more chance of getting hit by an asteroid. Perhaps one day we will have justice. The Betrayed Girls are still being betrayed. That shame is ours.