Fee Edwards

She raised the alarm 181 times. 181 separate referrals, about girls being groomed and abused in one northern town. For years, almost nothing happened. Then they made her redundant. Her name was Sara Rowbotham. She was born in Middleton, Greater Manchester. She was not a police officer, not a senior manager, not a politician. She worked for the NHS in Rochdale, on a small team called the Crisis Intervention Team, offering sexual health support to young people. She started there in 2004. It was the kind of job where teenagers told you things they told nobody else. And what they were telling her was horrifying. Young girls, many of them vulnerable, many of them already known to services, were being groomed, passed around and sexually exploited by groups of men. This was not a rumour. It was not one case. It was a pattern. So she did exactly what she was supposed to do. She reported it. Between 2005 and 2011, Sara and her team made 181 referrals detailing the abuse and grooming of young people. 181. Each one was a child. Each one was a warning. Here is the part that should make people angry. Those warnings went to the agencies whose job was to protect children. And again and again, they were not acted on. Some of the girls were treated as if they were making choices about their own lives, rather than as children being abused. Think about what that actually meant. A girl of thirteen or fourteen, being exploited by grown men, and the system looking at her and seeing a problem teenager instead of a victim. Sara would not accept that. She kept reporting. She kept pushing. She kept telling anyone who would listen that this was happening, and it was happening now. In May 2012, nine men were convicted in the Rochdale grooming case. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know how it had been allowed to go on for so long. That year, Sara gave evidence. She told the Home Affairs Select Committee in Parliament that Rochdale's child protection services had failed to act on her alerts, and that the abuse had been widespread. She said it in public. About the system she still worked within. Two years later, in 2014, she was made redundant. Two more years. Then gone. The woman who had done more than almost anyone to expose what happened in Rochdale was out of a job. For a while, it looked as if that would be the end of it. Another person who had told the truth, quietly moved aside. Then, in May 2017, the BBC broadcast a drama called Three Girls, based on the Rochdale case. Sara was in it. The actress Maxine Peake played her. Millions of people watched a sexual health worker refuse, again and again, to let it go, and wondered who she really was. Within days, a petition was started calling for her to be formally recognised. It gathered more than 275,000 signatures. Consider what it took to get there. Years of being ignored by the people who should have listened. Losing her job. And it took a television drama for the country to find out her name. By then, she had already found another way to serve the town. She was elected as a local councillor for North Middleton, and she went on to become Deputy Leader of Rochdale Borough Council and its cabinet member for health and wellbeing. The woman who had been pushed out of the system ended up helping to run part of it. In 2018, she received a Special Recognition Award at the NHS Heroes Awards. That October she became an honorary member of the NSPCC's council. In 2021, she was appointed MBE for services to young people. Her case became one of the clearest examples in modern Britain of what happens when a frontline worker sees abuse and the institutions above her do not respond. It is now part of how social workers, health workers and police are trained to think about exploitation, and part of an ongoing national reckoning with grooming gangs that has still not finished.