Towns across the north are in 'denial' about the extent and impact of historic child sexual abuse, a former chief crown prosecutor has claimed. Nazir Afzal, who worked tirelessly to bring grooming gangs in Rochdale to justice, said a number of local authorities had point blank refused to launch reviews into child sexual exploitation in their areas - with council bosses allegedly saying 'we've moved on'.
Mr Afzal, who is now Chancellor at the University of Manchester, said a perceived culture of denial at many town halls needs to be tackled. Speaking to the Northern Agenda podcast, he said: "I do have a sense of denial around the country. I've approached some towns for example, and said 'why aren't you carrying out a look into what's going on or had gone on in your areas?' and they said, 'we've moved on'.
"I'm afraid they may have moved on, but the children who were victims have never moved on and can't move on. So we've got to tackle that issue of denial."
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Mr Afzal added: "I reach out to local authorities and ask 'what's your problem?. Why are you not doing what you need to do? Do you not see the impact it's having on public confidence and that people just don't trust you anymore because you aren't looking back at what you may have done wrong?'.
"You can only fix it if you admit you got things wrong and I think people need to grow up, treat the public as adults and actually remember that victims don't move on until you have a response that they can have confidence in."
The former North West Chief Crown Prosecutor praised the recent review into abuse in Oldham, saying: "I'm hopeful that having carried out this review, the council are serious about bringing about the change that will change things. But I think we need to take the politics out of it and focus on the victims.
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"If we do that, we might actually make some progress."
During his tenure as chief prosecutor, Mr Afzal saw a number of grooming gang members jailed - something which led the far right to target him. "I damaged their narrative, the narrative being that all brown people are sex abusers and so I had thugs outside my front door," he said.
Mr Afzal, who is due to publish a book on the issue of race in modern Britain in September, told how many people from ethnic minority backgrounds are still 'scared' to speak up about the abuse directed at them.
He added: "We're often told 'if you work hard, you'll get wherever you want to'. Actually, it doesn't work that way, you can work extraordinarily hard and not get anywhere. No disrespect to any Gavins out there, but they can fail and they can fail and they can fail and still be promoted.
"If Gavin was Khan or Singh or Patel, rest assured that any one of his failures would have been magnified so much and amplified so much that that will be the end of their career. So we still have a significant problem."
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