Maggie Oliver & Jade

Former detective and Rochdale whistleblower / Grooming gang survivor

For 16 years, she worked for the Greater Manchester Police. Working on Operation Augusta, she was part of the team that exposed the Rochdale child sex abuse ring and brought (some) perpetrators to justice. In 2013, she resigned, sounding the alarm for the extent of the malpractice surrounding the case, from intimidation and neglect of victims, to the unwillingness to properly investigate exactly how many were involved and help the countless victims.

Jade is one such victim. This is her first public interview.

Why did we invite them?

For over a decade, the corporate media has kept its head plugged firmly in the sand about the reality of the grooming gangs. Calling them “grooming gangs” is itself a euphemism - it denotes a level of cruelty that doesn’t reflect what really happened. The only way to get any sense of scale is to hear from the victims themselves.

Maggie Oliver is one of our favourite ever guests, and since the case flared up again last year, we’ve been keen to have her back. This time, she’s accompanying Jade, who was groomed, abused, and terrorised by a grooming gang in her youth. This is her story.

What happened?

”It started when I was 14. My dad took me on a drug deal, and that’s where I met my perpetrator. He would pick me up, it’d be all fun and games - buying cigarettes, taking me to school, buying me alcohol. When you’re in a care home and you’ve got no one … alcohol, house parties, cigarettes, they’re the best thing ever. It was all fun. But then they get you into a state where you trust them, and they tell you it’s okay to sleep with their brother. They say ‘if you love [me], you’ll do this’. And then it gets worse and worse…”

Jade’s story, for as harrowing as it soon becomes, isn’t unique. As Maggie explains, children in these circumstances are uniquely vulnerable. Not merely because they lack a close family unit to protect them, but because of the neglect inherent to the institutions. ”The staff in care homes are not allowed to hug the children. A child wants physical contact, and the predators, the rapists, know that. And that’s why they’re targeted.”

This is how abuse happens: target the vulnerable, meet their needs, and use the threat of neglect to extract what you want. The systemic, methodical approach was not unique to Jade - the same tactics will have been used to groom and terrorise countless girls - but each case has its own trauma. Jade’s frank description shines a blinding light on it, but even still there are missing frames. Again, it’s no accident.

”They get you so drunk you pass out. I’ve woken up in someone else’s clothes, wondering who dressed me, who undressed me. I remember 7 of them taking turns on me, [but] the ones I’m scared of are the ones I don’t remember.”

Eventually, Jade came forward. Terrified and desperate, she went to the authorities, despite the danger she knew she was putting herself in. What was the response?

”My social worker took me to McDonalds and asked if I was prostituting myself … [The authorities] never took any of us seriously. I kept going back to [my abusers], so they thought that’s what I wanted. It wasn’t. If I didn’t go back, I’d get a picture of my dad, begging on the street, with them telling me they’re going to kill my dad. I had no choice.”

The authorities failed, but they weren’t alone. The public, who one might think would find it impossible not to empathise with abused children, found ways to make it seem like their fault.

”White people called us ‘p*ki-bashers’. They’d say we were the ones that got drunk and let it happen. They’d call us ‘sl*gs’. We got the blame for everything.”

The abuse only ended when someone was prosecuted: Jade.