‘They thought we were problem children’: how grooming victims were failed in Oldham

National inquiry on grooming gangs will look at how police ignored girls while officials feared fuelling the far right

• Oldham child gang-rape suspect later attempted to murder wife

In 2003, long before the term “grooming gang” entered the lexicon, social workers in Oldham noticed a disturbing pattern: girls from local children’s homes were repeatedly going missing. Often, they were found in the same locations, being harboured by the same men. Each time the authorities thought they had got a grip on the problem, it reared its head again. By 2006, there were concerns that groups of offenders were targeting children at high schools. One girl, later referred to in court as Child X, fell into their clutches while truanting when she was 12 years old. By 14, she had been abused by 300 men and was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin.

“Unless you scratch below the surface you do not realise the enormity of the problem,” Ruth Baldwin, then the executive director for young people and families at Oldham council, said in December 2006. “We are not talking about teenage relationships. These are men in their 20s, 30s, and beyond.”