Grooming gangs who preyed on 700 women and girls in north-east England acted with “arrogant persistence” after police were seen to be punishing victims for their situation, a serious case review has found.

The report from the retired barrister David Spicer into the response by authorities in Newcastle to child sexual exploitation concluded that victims received effective protection after the launch of a Northumbria police investigation in January 2014. Before that, however, the force’s actions lacked consistency and had little impact, it said.

Seventeen men and one woman were jailed last year for being part of a network that plied 22 women and girls aged 13-25 with drink and drugs before sexually assaulting them between 2011 and 2014.

The trials were the result of the Northumbria police investigation Operation Shelter, part of the larger Operation Sanctuary, the force’s investigation into the sexual exploitation of vulnerable children and adults. The report said Sanctuary had identified 700 victims in the force’s area. Perpetrators have received a total of 429 years and three months in prison as part of the operation.

Addressing the response from authorities before 2014, the report said perpetrators were not consistently investigated or interviewed. “Historical information was not routinely accessed and incidents were treated as separate occurrences with no strategy to pull information together to improve understanding of the whole picture,” it said.

“While perpetrators were not punished or disrupted, attempts to persuade victims to change behaviours and not return to the abusers led to consideration of deterrent punishments of victims for being drunk and disorderly or for making false allegations when accounts were changed. Some victims were placed in secure accommodation.

“This sent an unhelpful message to perpetrators. They were unlikely to be prosecuted or prevented from continuing to abuse, encouraging an arrogant persistence. It also had a significant impact on victims who learnt that nothing would be done against perpetrators.”

The report highlighted a stark contrast between the approach taken before and after early 2014, when a Northumbria police investigation was first launched, but it stressed that many of the reasons identified for lack of action in reviews in other cities – including ignoring whistleblowers, members of the public or families, lack of compassion or empathy, misplaced concerns about political correctness and fears of allegations of racism – did not occur in Newcastle.

It did, however, add: “Practitioners did feel that early responses had the appearance of blaming the victims for their behaviour and allocating them responsibility for making bad choices.”



The report detailed victims’ accounts of sexual abuse after being drugged. “I never had sex when I was sober,” one victim told Spicer. “I wanted to leave. I was given drink. I kept saying no and fighting them off. I was very tired and fell asleep. When I woke, I had been raped.”

“I didn’t think what was happening was wrong,” said another. “I thought they were my friends. They bought me drink and drugs. I thought it was OK because of my family. Then it became more sinister. Different. There were parties with men a lot older: 30-40, when previously 20-21.”

The situation in Newcastle had clear similarities to grooming scandals in other cities across the UK, in which gangs of British Asian men abused white girls. A report in the Times in 2012 was the first to claim that gang rape and trafficking were widespread in Rotherham. A subsequent investigation by a former chief inspector of social work, Prof Alexis Jay, concluded in August 2014 that failures of political and police leadership contributed to the sexual exploitation of 1,400 children in the town over 16 years.



Spicer’s serious case review into Operation Shelter was commissioned by Newcastle’s social services in May 2015. Its publication was delayed as the four criminal trials that resulted from the police investigation took three years to conclude.

During the final trial in the Operation Shelter investigation last year, the court heard that an off-duty probation officer had called the police after seeing one of the defendants – a convicted sex offender – ushering drunk girls into his car in 2011. After a visit to the man’s house, a police log of the incident said “there was nothing to suggest there was anything untoward”.

Speaking at a press conference after the publication of the report, Darren Best, the temporary deputy chief constable of Northumbria police, admitted the incident had been a missed opportunity.

During the trials, the court heard that Northumbria police had paid a convicted child rapist £9,680 over 21 months to find out about the times and whereabouts of parties where girls were being plied with drugs and alcohol, in order to gather evidence for their investigation.

The NSPCC children’s charity condemned the use of the informant, saying it raised serious questions about the force’s approach to child sexual exploitation operations. The police argued it would not have been possible to uncover the crimes in Operation Shelter using conventional methods.

Spicer’s report touched only briefly on the use of a paid informant, saying the chief constable had acknowledged that this carried risks but “emphasised that sexual exploitation involves thinking outside the box”.

Spicer, a former chair of the British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, said other towns and cities could learn from Newcastle’s response. He said: “Unlike some other areas, Newcastle agencies did not try and sweep this under the carpet but actively went looking for it – and as a result, a large number of perpetrators were arrested and prosecuted, and victims saved from further trauma. That is not to say that lessons have not been learned.”

Spicer said a striking feature of the Newcastle case was that it identified adults with vulnerabilities as victims of the grooming.

