There was a period, not so long ago, when the #MeToo scandal was everywhere – and rightly so. The furore sparked by immensely courageous women who blew the whistle on Harvey Weinstein was long overdue. Across the globe, others took up a hashtag in response. Men in positions of power had abused those without power for too long. Time’s up.

That was supposed to change everything.

A parallel scandal that should also provoke feminist ire broke last week, yet it didn’t result in quite the same outcry. Here in Manchester, the police and council knew that potentially at least 57 children – almost all of them girls – had been raped in the south of the city in the mid-00s, but the vast network of abusive men was left to get on with it.

I’m not saying there was no backlash when that story broke. When Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s report exposing the scandal was published on Tuesday, there was public fury and despair on a huge scale. It was clear on Facebook and Twitter, and we heard it from horrified locals and beyond.

But the higher level outcry I had been expecting didn’t materialise. It stayed off the front pages, apart from ours, and the rage from the online feminist movement did not match Weinstein levels of vitriol.

I asked for a comment from No 10 on Wednesday but, at the time of writing, have received nothing. It didn’t get raised in parliament. Our local Labour MPs were muted in their response.

My conclusion feels painfully inescapable. This set of female victims was different to the others. They were poor, sidelined and, even now, invisible. When their story was finally heard, it took this landmark independent inquiry to make their case, but the resulting attention was not what it should have been.

For anyone reading about this for the first time, it’s worth a recap of what Burnham’s report found, the scale of the abuse and why it should have provoked a rage equal to that prompted by Weinstein.

The first phase of his two-year review into child sexual exploitation looked at Manchester 16 years ago, prompted by a 2017 BBC documentary called The Betrayed Girls. It is well worth watching. The film shows how a specific form of child abuse by British Asian men had not gone unnoticed in towns such as Rochdale, but had gone officially unremarked upon.

There was no real reason to think that the abuse didn’t extend further – geographically speaking – than that and, sure enough, Burnham’s review confirmed that a police investigation called Operation Augusta, set up after the death of Victoria Agoglia, a 15-year-old in council care, had been launched into a probable south Manchester grooming network in 2004. It had, however, been quietly shut down because police resources were considered better spent elsewhere, despite 97 potential suspects having been identified.

This should surely be a classic #MeToo call to arms. Scores of vulnerable girls living in the city’s care – care not necessarily being the operative word – had been identified as probable victims, then abandoned. The rape allegations were all there on the social care files. Yet it was apparently their own problem that men decades older were preying on them when they had no advice, no love, no way of knowing what was a bad shout. As one grown woman said to me last week, recalling being abused by older men while in care when she was 14 and younger: “I didn’t know abuse was wrong.”

If this sounds like an extraordinarily harrowing and scandalous story, that’s because it is

If you’re not already angry, try this: eight of the potential suspects abandoned when Augusta was shut down went on to commit sexual crimes, including the rape of a girl.

Who stepped up? Margaret Oliver, a heroic detective who had been working on the original investigation and had gained the trust of some of the girls in question. She was horrified to come back from compassionate leave in summer 2005 to find Augusta “had just disappeared as if it had never even existed”.

But it had. She then spent years campaigning for it to be reopened, vilified and loathed by Greater Manchester police senior command (she no longer works for the force) . Until Burnham’s review finally vindicated her last week, nobody in charge ever listened.

If this story sounds extraordinarily harrowing and scandalous, that’s because it is. But as Oliver said last week: “It’s the truth.”

It is, indeed, a story about truth, as well as power – the power of men to sexually abuse the girls they chose to exploit and of those in charge who opted to dismiss it.

It’s also about the power of society to prioritise one set of vulnerable women over another. Feminism is meant to be about defending all women and girls, especially those in a situation where they have no agency and who find themselves on the back foot, humiliated and discredited. That powerlessness is infinitely magnified if you’re a child in care.

One horrified former council officer sums up the way those girls should have been treated: “If that was my daughter, I’d have run barefoot down the road and dragged her out of the car.” That’s how a parent thinks. It isn’t necessarily how the state thinks. Yet these children are, and were, ours to protect.

So that is how appalled we should be by this. They’re our girls, collectively. And if modern feminism is the #MeToo movement, then it has to care as much about the women in the shadows as those in the limelight.

Jennifer Williams is politics and investigations editor for the Manchester Evening News

• This main image on the article was changed on 20 January 2020 as it incorrectly showed a view of Rochdale, not Manchester.