A car door was flung open and the two girls were pushed out into the darkness. They fell awkwardly on to the moorland heather as the vehicle accelerated away and the tail-lights disappeared into the night.

The girls grabbed each other, huddling together, frozen in fear. After several minutes, when they were sure the car wasn’t coming back, they looked across the barren landscape of Saddleworth Moor towards the lights of civilisation blinking faintly in the distance. Then they began the long 14-mile walk back to town.

It was a little after 8.30 the next morning when Sara Rowbotham parked her car outside the sexual health support service she ran in Rochdale, ten miles north-east of Manchester.

As she stepped out of the vehicle, she saw the two shivering girls sitting on the steps.

In 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to pursue the cases in court, describing the girls as ‘not credible’. A stock image is used above for illustrative purposes [File photo]

They had made it back and had been waiting there for hours. Before being dumped on the moors the night before, both had been violently raped by several men.

As a crisis intervention co-ordinator for the NHS, it was Rowbotham’s work with vulnerable young girls that had begun to shed light on a series of horrific crimes happening in the Rochdale area.

The reports she presented to the authorities told of a sickening epidemic of sexual abuse.

She relayed details of teenage girls being plied with alcohol and coerced into unprotected sexual intercourse with multiple men, many of whom were more than 30 years older than them.

She also told of underage girls being threatened and picked up in car parks and taken to houses across the town, where they would be passed around dozens of men.

In one case, a man in his 40s poured petrol on the head of a 14-year-old girl with learning difficulties and threatened to set her alight unless she performed a sex act on him.

Jailed abusers Abdul Rauf and Hamid Safi are pictured above. To society, the girls may as well have been invisible

For too long, Rowbotham’s complaints had been dismissed. In 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to pursue the cases in court, describing the girls as ‘not credible’.

Even the authorities who were supposed to protect them had judged the girls promiscuous teenagers who were making lifestyle choices by engaging in sexual activity with these men. Some had even been described by a police officer as scrubbers.

To society, the girls may as well have been invisible.

Two years later, when I became Chief Prosecutor for North West England, I took what would become a controversial decision to reopen the case. I didn’t know it then, but fighting for justice for those girls would become one of the most challenging, all-consuming and dangerous episodes of my career.

Before taking my new role, I’d read up on some of the issues in the North of England that might become part of my workload.

One immediately piqued my interest. It concerned a newspaper investigation into how gangs of mainly Pakistani men were grooming underage white girls for sex.

It exposed an appalling scandal in Rotherham and was starting to make deeply disturbing connections with similar patterns of abuse elsewhere.

Jailed abusers Mohammed Sajid and Abdul Aziz are pictured above. Even the authorities who were supposed to protect them had judged the girls promiscuous teenagers who were making lifestyle choices by engaging in sexual activity with these men

I suspected that in my new job, I might be able to get involved in investigating some of these crimes. In my first week, I asked colleagues whether there were any similar cases in the North West.

They told me there were and brought me up to speed on Operation Span, an inquiry which had been launched by Greater Manchester Police following complaints from 47 girls that they had been raped by grooming gangs in Rochdale.

The details were shocking. These cases followed exactly the same pattern of abuse of young white girls by British Asian men.

That evening I took home a DVD of the original interviews and watched the footage of a 15-year-old girl being questioned by police in 2008. She was the teenager the Prosecution Service had labelled not credible and would later become known as Girl A.

The look on her face as she spoke of being raped repeatedly by a gang of men was heart-rending.

But what really stood out was a police officer’s indifference. At one point he even yawned while the girl was sharing excruciatingly painful, intimate information. It was hard to watch, but I was on the edge of my seat. Immediately I knew that this was a case we needed to take up.

We were more than six years away from the breakthrough of #MeToo. But the seismic cultural shift and empowerment that this movement embodied didn’t start in Hollywood.

Jailed abusers Abdul Qayyum and Adil Khan are pictured above. I look back now and see that the Rochdale grooming trial was one of the most important cases not only in my career, but in the history of modern British justice

I was well aware it was going to be tough. Having decided not to prosecute the ringleader and other key figures of the grooming gang back in 2009 when the original case was dismissed, how on earth could we now say we believed Girl A?

Just thinking about how that conversation would go with a jury gave me a headache.

‘Members of the jury, we want you to believe the brave testimony of Girl A – even if we didn’t believe her ourselves two years ago.’

And if we couldn’t prosecute the men in the case of Girl A, how could we press on with cases for the other girls? It was a legal nightmare.

But I couldn’t get that video out of my mind. I was adamant that these men needed to be prosecuted and was equally sure that, contrary to the usual thinking, public confidence in justice would be damaged if we didn’t overturn the original ruling.

I informed the police of my intention and prepared an official notice to set things in motion.

But just before I made my final move, I had a conversation with one of my colleagues that would prove a turning point in the whole story.

As he held the envelope containing the notice, we talked about what needed to be done next. ‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘We do what we should have done in 2009.’

I sounded confident, but we both knew it was complicated. How, my colleague asked, could we explain our earlier dismissal of Girl A? I leaned forward and met his gaze. ‘We’re going to put our hands up and say we got it wrong.’

Jailed abusers Mohammed Amin and Kabeer Hassan are pictured above. One of the biggest challenges was always going to be the defence team’s cross-examination of the girls, and so it proved

His eyes widened. The word ‘wrong’ wasn’t something any of us were used to saying in relation to our line of work.

‘Wrong’ wasn’t even a word in the legal test that needed to be applied in order to attempt to reverse the 2009 decision.

Since then, the test has changed and simply asks if the decision was wrong. But at the time, for a decision to be overturned, the original decision must have been deemed ‘so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could ever have come to it’.

No one had ever said they were wrong within our walls, let alone admitted such a thing to the outside world. But sometimes, in order to move forward, we needed to make difficult choices.

Why should the young victims pay the price for our mistakes?

Once we had agreed this course of action, it was as though a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. After that, things started to happen fast.

The police began making arrests, leading to 11 men being charged. Only two men had been investigated in 2009, but more were now known to detectives.

The next step was to decide which girls would appear in court. In the end, we opted for six, including Girl A. We didn’t want to prolong the mental torment of more victims any more than was absolutely necessary.

We knew, too, that it was of vital importance that we fully supported these six incredibly vulnerable young women throughout the process. Most of their experience of adults was either of abusers, or of authority figures they believed had failed them.

A police liaison officer talked them through every aspect of the trial to ensure they would feel safe and comfortable.

One of the witnesses, for example, would be woken up each morning with a bacon sandwich and a Disney film. Anything to try to maintain some semblance of normality and get them through this terrifying ordeal.

One of the biggest challenges was always going to be the defence team’s cross-examination of the girls, and so it proved.

Girl A appeared via video-link from a police station and was questioned by 11 barristers over a period of six days.

It was exhausting enough for us, so I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her.

The defence had no other strategy than to say this didn’t happen, and day after day she’d be told she was a liar.

When she had been questioned by the ninth barrister, she finally lost her temper – much to the lawyer’s delight.

‘Now we see the real you!’ he exclaimed.

I watched in despair. Facing such scrutiny would be gruelling for anyone and it was no surprise that, worn down in this way, a witness might lash out – particularly one who had been through so much already.

I could feel my own nerves thrumming. I was grateful that at least the girls had extensive support, including independent advisers who provided pre-trial therapy and sexual-violence counselling, along with the invaluable help from the liaison officer.

As the case finally drew to an end, I felt confident about our chances of success. But outside the courtroom, another narrative was brewing.

Journalists were beginning to look at the institutional failures in the initial dealings with this case. They wanted to know why we hadn’t acted previously when we had evidence of the crimes.

The CPS put together an anodyne press statement that said very little and included no mention of the earlier decision not to prosecute. The aim was to avoid more controversy – but I didn’t agree with it.

The only way to move on was to show the public that we could recognise our errors and correct them. We had to deal with the issue upfront.

The next day, journalists assembled for a pre-verdict briefing at Greater Manchester Police headquarters. I sat at the back of the room, in the audience.

Even David Cameron, the then-Prime Minister, called me, asking how widespread a problem the grooming gangs were. I told him it was a deep-rooted issue that we simply hadn’t been paying enough attention to nationwide

One journalist asked: ‘So what happened in 2009? Why was no one prosecuted then?’

I found myself getting to my feet. The room turned to look at me.

‘I’m Nazir Afzal,’ I said, in the sudden hush. ‘I’m the Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West and I can tell you that decisions were taken in 2009 by police and prosecutors not to prosecute this case. Those decisions were wrong.’

The room was completely silent.

I continued: ‘When I arrived in May last year, I reversed that decision, which is why we can now focus on justice being done.’

It’s hard to admit to mistakes, particularly when vulnerable people had suffered so much as a result, and when you also knew that your colleagues may face consequences. Ultimately, both the police and the CPS would issue apologies for their failures.

Thirteen police officers would be investigated, social workers struck off and council officers cleared out. It was tough for all of us, but if we were to do our jobs properly, we needed to recognise when we could do better.

Later that day, I was pacing around my office in Manchester, waiting anxiously for news of the court verdict. I couldn’t settle until I had it.

Finally, the phone rang.

‘Nine are guilty,’ announced my colleague John Dilworth.

For the first time in what seemed like weeks, I smiled.

The men were jailed for up to 25 years each.

Outside the court, a statement from one of the victims was read out. Speaking of her ‘brilliant relief’, she said: ‘After all these years, something has been done.’

I felt those words deep in my bones. Something had been done. And the whole world knew.

Even David Cameron, the then-Prime Minister, called me, asking how widespread a problem the grooming gangs were. I told him it was a deep-rooted issue that we simply hadn’t been paying enough attention to nationwide.

For me, the repercussions of the trial rumbled on in both a positive and a negative way. Some sections of the media wanted to know more about the identities of the prosecutors who had blocked the case back in 2009. This put me in a difficult position.

Of course, I knew who they were. One had already left the CPS and the other had been disciplined. But I wasn’t going to hang them out to dry. I explained that I took responsibility for anything that happened in the CPS, even the things that hadn’t happened on my watch.

The reaction was dramatic. Facebook groups belonging to far-Right activists claimed, wrongly, that it was me who hadn’t prosecuted the Rochdale Asian grooming gangs for attacks on white girls in 2009.

Conversely, I was ruffling others’ feathers because it seriously damaged their narrative to think that a brown-skinned person had reversed the decision not to prosecute, had brought the case to court and seen nine members of a grooming gang jailed.

Within 48 hours, I received 17,000 abusive and racist emails demanding that I be sacked and deported. Police warned me that there had been threats to my safety, and a panic alarm was installed in our house.

It was a terrible experience. How had I got to the point where my wife and children were suddenly in danger?

That weekend, a group of men congregated in the road where I lived, waving placards and banners calling me an apologist for rape gangs. As I lifted the phone to call the police, anger surged through me, more intense than anything I had ever felt.

For several weeks we felt like prisoners in our own home. It reminded me of growing up in Birmingham, where I had been regularly taunted by racist thugs.

But the positives that emerged from the trial far outweighed even such a distressing incident.

I spent a lot of time talking to my boss Keir Starmer – now the new Labour leader but who, in 2008, had become Director of Public Prosecutions – on what we needed to do in the wake of Rochdale.

Together, we began to develop the Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel, which would look at instances where previously dismissed cases of sexual abuse could be re-examined, should a victim wish to revisit their allegations. The panel opened the floodgates.

For example, football coach Barry Bennell was jailed for 30 years for subjecting young players at Manchester City and Crewe to hundreds of sexual offences.

More long-term, the panel’s work led to the Metropolitan Police launching Operation Yewtree.

It was a watershed moment, and the nation was about to have to deal with some deeply uncomfortable truths surfacing about a host of prominent celebrities, some until then widely beloved.

Sir Jimmy Savile was exposed as a prolific sex offender and BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall, singer Gary Glitter and entertainer Rolf Harris were all jailed for sexual abuse.

The right of powerful people to abuse people from lower social classes, seemingly impervious to justice, was over. A dirty secret in Rochdale that had been ignored for too long had given us the impetus to look hard at Britain’s landscape of sexual abuse.

I look back now and see that the Rochdale grooming trial was one of the most important cases not only in my career, but in the history of modern British justice.

Child-grooming had fully established itself in the public consciousness as an abhorrent, highly emotive crime.

© Nazir Afzal, 2020

Adapted from The Prosecutor, by Nazir Afzal, published by Ebury Press, also available in ebook and audio format.