Exclusive:
My reporting with my brilliant colleague Geraldine McKelvie was questioned before being vindicated – now victims must be placed at the heart of our response to the grooming gang scandal.
It was over a meal in a Telford Wetherspoons nine years ago that I heard first-hand about the almost unimaginable horrors that a grooming gang could inflict on a young life.
The young woman sitting across the table told me about her four years of hell when from the age of 13 to 17 she was routinely raped by a gang of men much older then her. She was told they would come for her little sisters if she were to reveal to anyone how “night after night I was being forced to have sex with multiple men in disgusting takeaways and filthy houses”.
Her suicide attempt aged 16, shortly after she was gang-raped by five men, was unsuccessful, otherwise I would never have met Holly Archer. Then in her mid-20s, it was immediately clear that Holly was one of the most remarkable and resilient people I have been lucky enough to meet in 25 years in journalism.
My colleague Geraldine McKelvie had helped tell her story in an astonishing and eye-opening book but it was becoming clear that what had happened – and was still happening – in Telford was much bigger. Two years before Holly’s ordeal started, Lucy Lowe’s had ended. Aged 16 and pregnant with her second child, Lucy was burned alive in her home, together with her mother and sister, in 2000. The fire was started by Lucy’s abuser, Azhar Mehmood, a man ten years older than her who had been described in court as her “boyfriend”.
Holly had been told she could end up “like Lucy Lowe” and believed it. Geraldine and I left that pub determined to find out how many more had been told the same but with no inkling it would take us 18 months to lift the lid on what would be one of Britain’s worst grooming scandals. With Holly’s help we started contacting other victims, most in their 20s and 30s, some who had never spoken about what they had been through before. Within a month we had the names of around 30 potential victims and as many as 60 posible offenders.
We met victims who didn’t know each other but wept as they told us essentially the same story – how they were groomed, raped, beaten and sold for sex, sometimes to nine men a night. We learned of a second fatality, Becky Watson, who was abused from the age of 11 and died in a car crash in 2002 aged 13. We found her mother Torron, who told us she repeatedly notified police that Becky was being abused and named the suspects. But she said: “Girls like Becky were treated like criminals.”
West Mercia Police had investigated the same gang a few years before us, under Operation Chalice, but despite identifying 100 potential victims and 200 possible suspects, they had jailed just nine and closed the case. It was the age of austerity and the specialist teams investigating child sexual exploitation had been scaled back “to virtual zero” to save money. We ploughed on, trying to speak to as many victims as we could. We needed evidence that the authorities had failed to act and some victims agreed to request copies of their files which could help us prove who knew what and when.
One victim got a visit from police trying to persuade her to withdraw the request, and when the information finally came through it was on a disk that was unreadable. A second came under pressure from social services to back away. Six months in, Geraldine messaged me: “There is potentially a third dead girl in Telford. Apparently she died after they got her hooked on drugs and was friends with Becky Watson.”
This was Vicky Round, a fifth tragic victim of the growing scandal. The gang got her hooked on crack aged 12 and on to heroin by 14. She too had been threatened. Her older sister told us: “I wanted Vicky to go to the police but she was terrified her abusers would set our house on fire and kill me and our mum.” The drugs may have claimed Vicky’s life aged 20 but her family were clear her abusers were to blame.
At the start of 2018, more than a year in, Becky’s mum found her letters and diaries. It included a list of names of more than ten grown men in red ink which we were able to link to another five victims. The list was given to police ten months before Becky died – but was handed back. By March 2018, we were ready to publish with the front-page headine “Worst Ever Child Abuse Scandal Exposed”. We had direct evidence from a dozen victims, aged from 19 to 47, and they had named more than 70 rapists and abusers, mostly from Telford’s Pakistani community.
With expert help, based on our research, estimated there could be up to 1,000 victims over four decades making the scale of abuse in Telford as bad – or even worse – than in towns like Rochdale and Rotherham. The calls for an independent inquiry grew but within days our report was being rubbished. A senior officer at West Mercia Police said he “significantly disputed” our findings and claimed our estimate of 1,000 victims was “sensationalised”.
But the victims kept coming forward to tell their stories in the Sunday Mirror and eventually the Government relented. In 2022, Tom Crowther, the chair of the resulting independent inquiry into Telford child sexual abuse, produced a report which backed our reporting and said: “Sadly, I regard it as a measured, reasonable and non sensational assessment.” The far right were quick to jump on our reporting, seeking to use it to divide communities like Telford. But their version of our story ignored the white rapists who worked with the gangs, and the ethnic minority victims who were too terrified to come forward.
Meanwhile, Holly and other survivors Scarlett Jones and Joanne Phillips worked quietly and without publicity alongside the council that failed them to implement the 47 recommendations of that inquiry. They are rightly proud of this work to bring about real change, though they are uniquely aware that abuse will never be ended.
For my part, I’m just proud to have been able to help give Holly and her campaigners a voice. The impact has been huge. Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips told me today: “I’ve known Holly for years and for over a decade she has stood up, spoken out, and refused to be silenced — not just for herself, but for every single survivor who felt ignored or disbelieved.
“Victims are at the heart of all the work I’ve done over the years in this world, we must take into account the experiences of victims like Holly so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. That is why we are announcing a new statutory inquiry that will have national oversight of local investigations and be able to direct where they are most needed. It will also have the power to gather evidence, talk to victims, compel witnesses to appear, but most importantly uncover the truth about local institutional failures.
“This will help find where more children could have been protected in the past, to be protected in the future whilst these sick predators who run these gangs in these areas are brought to justice.” Survivors rightly demand justice, but they also want a change in attitude among people who look after the most vulnerable children – police, doctors, social workers – and hope that any inquiry has that at its heart.
* We have not used any survivor’s real name.