One-thousand girls. That's the stark figure at the centre of the inquiry into grooming gangs in Telford, which released its landmark report this week. It is believed that more than 1,000 girls have been abused and raped by grooming gangs in the West Midlands town since 1980. The inquiry was sparked by a Sunday Mirror investigation in 2018. Back then, the authorities dismissed the 1,000 figure as 'sensationalised' and suggested the newspaper had 'made it up on the back of a fag packet'. This week, inquiry chair Tom Crowther QC described the Sunday Mirror's estimate as a 'measured, reasonable and non-sensational assessment'.
Then there are the stories behind those numbers. It is hard to think of anything more depraved, more stomach turning, more evil, than what went on in Telford. Girls as young as 12 - predominantly white and working class, many of them in care - were groomed, drugged, raped, gang raped, passed around like pieces of meat by groups of predominantly British Pakistani men. Some of these girls never reached adulthood. In 2000, 16-year-old Lucy Lowe was burned to death in a house fire alongside her mother and sister. It was started by Azhar Ali Mehmood, the 26-year-old who impregnated her when she was 14. So little was done to tackle this cancer in the community that the abuse, in some cases, became 'generational', daughters suffering the same fate as their mothers.
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