Rochdale child sex abuse ring
21st-century criminal gang in Greater Manchester, England
The Rochdale child sex abuse ring targeted underage teenage girls in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. Nine men were convicted of sex trafficking and other offences including rape, trafficking girls for sex and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child in May 2012. This resulted in Greater Manchester Police launching Operation Doublet and other operations to investigate further claims of abuse. Forty-seven girls were identified as victims of child sexual exploitation during the initial police investigation. The perpetrators were Muslim men, which led to discussion on whether the failure to investigate them was linked to the authorities' fear of being accused of racial prejudice. The victims were predominantly of White British heritage. One of the main traffickers, Shabir Ahmed, confirmed the specific racial targeting of White British girls, claiming the racial superiority of Pakistanis and denouncing the sexual liberation of British society.
There have been several reviews and reports written about the Rochdale child sexual abuse cases, including a Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) report that was published in 2013. The events have also been widely covered in the media and portrayed in a BBC television drama, Three Girls, in 2017.
In March 2015, Greater Manchester Police apologised for its failure to investigate the child sexual exploitation allegations more thoroughly between 2008 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rochdale child sex abuse ring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.