TWENTY-FOUR years ago, Joanna Smith (not her real name) aged just 13 stood in a court in Bradford giving evidence against an elderly white man who was facing 23 charges of abusing 16 teenage girls. Had it been a year later, this man’s methods of grooming his victims with presents and money, photographing and filming them would be described as grooming his victims for sexual exploitation.
 
The man’s name was Jim Merrick, and he was a Conservative councillor on Bradford District Council. He received a suspended sentence. Most of the charges against him were dismissed.  But his victims have not forgotten  their experiences of the trial. 
 
Some are dead, some have alcohol and drug problems, some are in prison, a few were further sexually exploited in the red light district of Bradford, some are sex workers, a handful fought tooth and nail to rebuild their lives. None escaped unscathed.
 
They, and their support workers, question if the ordeal was worth the suffering that the trauma of the trial inflicted.
 
It was a long time ago but for a group of teenage girls in Bradford who found themselves treated as child prostitutes blackmailing a feckless old man, the effects of the abuse and the subsequent trial have impacted the rest of their lives.
 
The ensuing guilt and confusion made them doubt their experience, and themselves, making them vulnerable to further abuse.

Is that justice?

In January 2025, the Home Secretary announced an urgent national audit probing the scale of child sexual exploitation in England and Wales. 

A report by Tri-Lateral Research published in March 2024 said that “The overall difficulty in obtaining a clear picture of child sexual exploitation (CSE) stems from fragmented, insufficient and unreliable data, insufficient understanding of the issues, victim-blaming attitudes, and the associated stigmas around child sexual exploitation,” concluding that these factors may lead to an underestimation of the problem in data sets with the true extent of CSE remaining unknown.  

Since 2017, data collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) from every local authority in England on the number of “children in need” where child sexual exploitation is a safeguarding factor. 

This information is now of critical importance to arrive at understanding the scale of CSE in England. 

“Children in need “are a legally defined group of children (under the Children Act 1989) assessed as needing help and protection. If an authority believes that a child is being sexually exploited, going missing, or perhaps being involved with gangs, they are also required to place a child in the protected “in need” category.

Over the last seven years, the number of children in need in England who have or are suspected of being sexually exploited has dropped from 20,000 in 2017 to 13,860 reported in 2024, yet the number of reported crimes of CSE have increased dramatically.

During 2021/22, in England and Wales there were 17,486 crimes logged by police where children had been sexually exploited — an average of 48 offences per day. Experimental statistics from the UK National Statistics Authority show that this number has increased to 108,370. 

Bradford Metropolitan Council has consistently been in the top five councils reporting the highest numbers of children in need where CSE is a factor. For years, the perception has been that Bradford is one of the worst affected areas of the country for CSE but there were no official data releases to confirm if that is true.

Morning Star put it to Bradford Safeguarding Board that confidential documents shared with this newspaper suggest that over the last 25 years, there are at least 7,500 victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation in Bradford, and over 1,500 in Keighley. 

The Board disputed our figures, saying that “year-on-year figures may mean that some young people who are judged to be still at risk are included again in the following year, and it is also misleading to compare historic and recent data.”
 
“Society’s understanding and knowledge of this crime has developed significantly over the last 25 years and the data and recording methods have been revised significantly over time as a result. We are therefore unable to verify these numbers or make data comparisons as we are unable to be clear about the criteria used at the time and how they have varied for the different pieces of work.”

It also said: “A key part of protecting children is understanding who is potentially at risk.” 

Since 2009, the safeguarding partnership has worked to identify those young people who may be at risk and the level of that risk so it can focus safeguarding resources.

The Board did not disclose the number of victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation that agencies identified over the last 16 years. 

It said that “it is also important to stress that the number of children identified as being at risk is not the same as the number of children who have suffered abuse.” 

Successful prosecutions of offences relating to child sexual exploitation are few and far between compared to the number of reported crimes. 

In West Yorkshire in 2023/4, 128 crimes of child sexual exploitation were recorded. 

Bradford Council welcomes the government’s plan for a rapid audit of child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs. Council leader Susan Hinchcliffe said “we’re very clear: child sexual exploitation is an appalling crime, and perpetrators should always face the full force of the law, no matter who you are.” 

Hinchliffe said: “We remain focused on prosecuting historic crimes, as well as protecting children in the here and now.”

For offences of child sexual exploitation by gangs, groups and networks, the percentage of reported crimes of this nature which result in prosecution and conviction is undetectable and many blame institutions’ fear of being called racist.

But with convictions for sexual violence at an all-time low, how credible is that explanation?

In 2014 Professor Betsy Stanko, the Met Police’s assistant director of planning and portfolio, said some categories including some of the most vulnerable rape victims were effectively decriminalised — but not because of political correctness or fears of being called racist.

A review by the Met Police performance team found that if the victim was under 17, or the quality of the statement was likely to be affected by fear or distress about giving evidence or if they had consumed alcohol or taken drugs prior to their abuse, the allegation would most likely be recorded as “no-crime” because police officers doubted their credibility as potential witnesses.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary found that 17 out of 21 forces audited failed to correctly record reports of sexual offences — including assaults on children. 

The audit conducted between February and August 2014 found that “where rapes were recorded as crimes and then reclassified as ‘no-crimes’ this was done incorrectly in at least a fifth of cases at West Yorkshire, North Wales and Greater Manchester Police.”

According to the Home Office, in England between 2023/24, 69,958 rapes were reported (including nearly 7,000 reported child rapes). Just 2.7 per cent resulted in charges being brought, part of a pattern of a sharp decrease in successful rape prosecutions since 2016/17. 

The low charging rates have led to accusations that the justice system has effectively decriminalised sexual violence against women and children.  

Britain has extensive legislation against sexual violence towards women and children but implementing these laws remains deeply problematic for reasons that are not always easy to understand.

A landmark case brought in 2018 against the London Metropolitan Police Force by victims of John Worboys, the prolific black cab rapist of London, established that police have a duty to investigate rape, and they can be held to account by victims when they significantly fail in that duty. 

The case has serious ramifications for every police force in the UK that failed to investigate complaints made by victims of child sexual exploitation. 

The claim was brought under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights contained within the Human Rights Act 1998 despite opposition from the Home Office and Metropolitan Police, who took the decision to an unsuccessful appeal in the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court judgment in the Worboys case is a conclusive ruling that the Human Rights Act provides a remedy for victims of serious sexual assault and violent crimes where police fail. 

The judgment made it clear that errors in an investigation that give rise to a breach of Article 3 must be “significant, but that operational failures by the police as well as systems failures can constitute a breach.”

The Worboys victim known as DSD said: “When I was told by the police back in 2003 that they were dropping the case, I warned them he would do it again, although never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be so many women.

“Never did I imagine that I would become embroiled in a 15-year battle for justice.”

But it’s unlikely that this brave woman realised how her fight could now benefit thousands of women who, like her, were not listened to nor taken seriously when they reported crimes of child sexual exploitation. 

A fear of being called racist isn’t a viable defence for police, councils or governments accused of what could amount to the biggest abuse of the human rights of British children in the 21st century. 

But unlike the victims of other state-sanctioned abuses of British citizens’ human rights such as the Post Office Horizon scandal, the Grenfell fire disaster or the bad blood scandal, victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation are hidden, ignored and erased by the lack of data collection, testifying to the scale and extent of this kind of crime.

In groom towns like Keighley, within the Bradford district, child sexual exploitation is not “historic” but the lived experience of almost every woman who lives in the town. 

If not directly affected, this town is full of friends, daughters, sisters, cousins, aunts, mothers and grandchildren who are. 

Without adequate specialist support and resources made available, these women, their families, and their community are trapped in a cycle of intergenerational trauma. 

These women are statistically invisible but surface in the addiction statistics, the hospital admissions for alcohol abuse, in the mental health wards and clinics, in the prescriptions for anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and in the suicide rates, their scars deeply hidden.

The Board said that “the challenges of child abuse and exploitation are not unique to Bradford. The government’s data from 2024 showed that more than 16,000 children are at risk of being sexually exploited in England every year.

“We are committed to tackling this exploitation and abuse in all its forms so that we can better protect children and bring those who commit such crimes to justice.” 

But is the justice system really working effectively to protect women and girls from child sexual exploitation?

Like the men who rape and abuse women, perpetrators of child sexual exploitation are virtually guaranteed immunity from prosecution. 

Not because of fears of being called racist or misguided political correctness but because 98 per cent of all reported crimes of sexual violence against women and girls in England goes undetected, including reports of child rape. 

That’s not justice, that’s not a deterrent. That’s a human rights scandal. 

Read part I of this series here and part II here.