IN JANUARY 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned an audit led by Baroness Louise Casey to examine existing data and evidence to draw a comprehensive picture of the nature, scale and profile of group-based child sexual abuse offending identified by police and agencies and equip law enforcement with the information and understanding they need to combat these crimes. 

Robbie Moore, MP for Keighley since 2019, told the BBC that “the scale of child sexual abuse and exploitation across the Bradford district is feared to “dwarf that of Rotherham.” 

Moore is adamant that an investigation into Bradford’s handling of child sexual exploitation in his constituency is long overdue. 

Keighley, sitting within the metropolitan district of Bradford, is one of the many towns and cities across England — but particularly in the north — where industrialised child sexual exploitation is systemic and unchecked. 

The impact of this type of crime in this town is of such a magnitude over the last 25 years that it’s described by local academics as a sociological disaster. 

The Home Office is under pressure to include Moore’s constituency as one of five case studies announced last month by the Home Secretary where the response to child sexual exploitation will be scrutinised. 

Should Keighley be included within this latest investigation by the Home Office? 

Its MP certainly thinks it should be. 

The Morning Star went to Keighley to find out why.

In 2016, Kris Hopkins, then MP for Keighley, said: “The sick model of organised groups of Asian men grooming young white girls to be sexually abused remains a blight at the heart of many communities across this country — and Keighley is top of the list.” 

But why?

The growth of grooming gangs in the north of England coincides with a supply-driven heroin epidemic of the late 1990s. Of girls receiving treatment for addiction in 2023, aged 15 to 18, the Office for National Statistics reported they had all been sexually exploited. The statistic cements the relationship between illegal drugs, and child sexual exploitation that campaigners in Keighley have been claiming is the driving force behind the town’s well-documented child abuse scandal.

The British Medical Association found that “austerity has resulted in a worsening of the underlying socio-economic causes of substance abuse and a lack of capacity to engage in preventative measures for individuals and communities.” 

Keighley Central is one of the most deprived wards in England, ranking sixth for multiple deprivation, eighth for income deprivation, fourth for employment deprivation and sixth for education, skills and training deprivation. 

Sixty per cent of children are growing up in poverty and Keighley has high levels of food insecurity and hunger. 

It has the highest crime rate of the wider Bradford district, currently ranked 17^th for crime in England. 

According to the National Crime Agency, sexual offences are more prevalent in the most deprived areas. 

The Keighley demographic resembles a checklist for factors predisposing children to sexual exploitation by on-street gangs. 

What did the authorities know of the growing number of victims in Keighley?

In 2000, a Home Office researcher found that children from Rotherham were being trafficked to Bradford for sexual exploitation to premises operated by a grooming gang based in Rotherham. She shared her findings with Home Office staff. The research was brought to an abrupt close. Her data was mysteriously removed. In 2014, the Home Office claimed to have no record of her report.

In July 2001, Bradford was a city in crisis following a riot in the heart of its red-light district. Over 164 officers were injured in the violence, with many fearing for their lives. The disorder cost the city £27 million, and more in damage to community relations.

But it was business as usual in the red light district.

In November 2001, a social worker wrote to the Area Child Protection Committee of Bradford and Airedale, with her concerns that a network of over 25 girls were being groomed, abused, and raped by predominantly young Pakistani-heritage men from Keighley involved in the towns notorious street gangs trafficking girls as young as 13 into Bradford’s red-light district where they were held captive, given drugs and abused by many men at a time. 

It sounded innocent, at first. 

Most “party houses” were places where groups of young people would meet to drink, take drugs and dance. It was the middle of the rave scene, and the pop-up venues were popular.

But there was a darker side that most never saw — including the people who were “just chilling” at the party houses. 

Along the street, or around the corner were the “yards” — sinister drug dens and crack houses, in an area known as “death row” in Bradford where ad-hoc brothels enticed unsuspecting children with drugs, money and promises. After a while, the children would be encouraged to don the uniform of the working girls on Thornton Road and earn some money behind closed doors making pornography. These were not “prostitutes” or sex workers. 

They were children being abused, victims of violent sexual crimes in need of protection, not created as addicts and forced into prostitution.

In 2002, Judge Alistair McCallum told Bradford Crown Court during a trial of two drug dealers that the city had one of the worst heroin problems in the country. “One million pounds of heroin is sold on Manningham Lane every day,” he said. “It is a shocking situation, and a lot of our young folk are ending up as heroin addicts. It [heroin] is all coming from one place — which I shan’t mention — and we don’t have a proper customs post at Leeds-Bradford airport to stop it coming in.”

Children who stumbled or were forced into the twisted territory of addiction and vice in the “yards” where drugs are manufactured, bagged, traded and consumed were in grave danger of serious harm. 

Agencies working with children at risk of exploitation identified serial, dangerous and almost exclusively white paedophiles grooming children to abuse, torture, photograph and film. 

From 2001 onwards, Bradford Local Area Child Protection Committee convened Safeguarding Children from Prostitution meetings (an earlier protocol for child sexual exploitation) to discuss the networks of children from Keighley being sexually exploited.

With enough resources, and political will, communities can be protected from this kind of crime. 

But this was 2001, and the Home Office was focused on other issues.

In 2003, parents from Keighley compiled a list of 57 names of men they reported were grooming and trafficking their daughters to Bradford and Blackpool. This list was passed to police, social services and Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley between 1997 and 2010. 

Cryer took the fight to the Home Office, and under some pressure, West Yorkshire Police instructed Operation Parsonage in 2003 — the first investigation into child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs in Britain. 

Forty-five girls were interviewed in connection with the investigation. Two prosecutions followed.

But the convictions were a convenient outlier. It wasn’t until many years later those men identified by the Home Office researcher, the terrified parents in Keighley or the children being trafficked across the north of England would face justice.

Cryer was under intense pressure from her party locally and nationally. She had been attacked as being racist. The British National Party was infiltrating her constituency standing on an anti-grooming ticket. 

Cryer was a member of the home affairs select committee between 2005 and 2010 and perfectly placed to hold the Home Office to account for the failings taking place in her constituency. 

In 2004, parents from Keighley and Rotherham attended a national conference on child sexual exploitation organised by the Campaign for the Removal of Pimping, now the Ivison Trust. 

David Blunkett, then home secretary, was present, along with several of Britain’s most senior police officers including Colin Cramphorn, chief constable of West Yorkshire Police. The Home Office researcher who initially uncovered the relationship between Rotherham perpetrators and towns across the north gave a keynote address.

After the hasty closure of Operation Parsonage in 2005 following just two trials, Cryer says she didn’t question the decision, believing that the issue had been “dealt with” by West Yorkshire Police.

Between 2005 and 2010, Bradford Safeguarding Children’s Board received reports from the newly appointed child sexual exploitation co-ordinator.

From 2006, social workers from Keighley attended regular monthly meetings with West Yorkshire Police to discuss groups of 20 children at a time at risk of sexual exploitation. 

Intelligence compiled from different sources included addresses, names, car registration numbers, businesses and properties where children were abused. They recorded details of reports of rape, trafficking and assault and counted how often these children went missing, where they were taken, for how long. Concerns were raised about the risk the girls and their families faced. Of death threats and guns being involved.

There were detailed accounts of children abducted and trafficked to other towns and cities. Health workers documented underage pregnancies; social workers took children for abortions without the knowledge of their parents. The children were treated for sexual diseases, and accident and emergency departments received children under the influence of drugs and alcohol, some of whom had been violently beaten. Children were found naked and left for dead on the moors or on the streets of Bradford.

Almost all the networks identified in the early intelligence on CSE in the north of England were involved in supply and distribution of drugs. 

When a child sees a young man with money and a fast car, they assume that he is a “big fish.” But often, the young men grooming children for exploitation were “little fish,” mere minnows swimming in a tide of criminal exploitation, addicted, desperate and afraid. 

According to confidential documents uncovered by the Morning Star, West Yorkshire Police did little to investigate the concerns raised in the multi-agency meetings.

In 2009, six men from Keighley were jailed for a total of 18 years for their part in the exploitation of a young teenage girl from a takeaway in Skipton, a middle-class market town of just 15,000 people, described as one of the best and happiest places to live in Britain.

The prosecution was the tip of an iceberg, a single piece of a bigger jigsaw involving dozens of victims in Keighley.

After a child died in a house fire later that year involving a grooming gang in Keighley, things had to change.

Bradford Council with West Yorkshire Police, and Home Office funding, developed a dedicated flagship child sexual exploitation hub which finally opened its doors in 2012.

Since then, hundreds of children in Keighley have been identified as being or suspected of being sexually exploited, with Ofsted slamming the overall effectiveness of the hub as being “inadequate” in 2018. 

In 2021, the Bradford Partnership published an independent review confirming that many victims remained unprotected from their unchallenged perpetrators. 

In 2023, Bradford’s Children’s Services was removed from the council’s control to be run by an arm’s length Children’s Trust due to the painfully slow efforts to improve the service.

Each year, in Keighley, a new cohort of victims of child sexual exploitation replaces the last on a seemingly endless conveyor belt of abuse.

Campaigners have been battling for an investigation into police failings in Keighley on child sexual exploitation for almost 25 years but neither the council, police authority, Home or Cabinet Office will allow it.

But each year the victim toll grows and the demands for justice and accountability get louder.

The question is not why Keighley should be included in the government’s latest investigation. That is self-evident in the town’s history of organised child abuse. 

The question is why the Home Office would continue to consider it appropriate to exclude well-documented systemic and dangerous failings which occurred in Keighley on child sexual exploitation over the last quarter of a century from Casey’s latest investigation. 

Ann Czernik’s series on child sexual exploitation and its political weaponisation continues next weekend. The first article can be viewed here.