It started in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the scandal made headlines in 2012, and where about 1500 victims have since been identified. Then came Rochdale, in Greater Manchester. There followed revelations from Lancashire, Birmingham, Surrey, Leeds, Bradford, and Gloucestershire, with the number of victims in each of these areas numbering in the hundreds or more.

Now an inquiry in Manchester proper has shown that – surprise! – that city isn’t immune to the predations of grooming gangs, either.

Commissioned by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, the inquiry found that at least 57 girls, many of whom lived in government-run children’s care homes, “were raped and abused by up to 100 members of a Manchester grooming gang sixteen years ago – but despite police and social workers knowing what was happening they weren’t stopped.” The girls, wrote Jennifer Williams in the Manchester Evening News on January 14, “were hooked on drugs, groomed, raped and emotionally broken.” Much of this, moreover, went on “‘in plain sight’ of officials”; indeed, “Greater Manchester Police dropped an operation that identified up to 97 potential suspects,” at least eight of whom went on to commit more assaults, and in August 2018, the city’s Chief Constable “refused to reopen the dropped operation.” At least one of the rape victims, Victoria Agoglia, who “had repeatedly told social workers she was being injected with drugs and raped,” was given no help whatsoever, and ended up dying in 2003, at the age of fifteen, of a heroin overdose, with the then coroner, Simon Nelson, concluding (in the face of massive evidence to the contrary) that “her death could not have been foreseen by the authorities,” and with records showing that Agoglia had, at age 13, been dismissed by social workers as a prostitute.