Phil McCann North West Tonight
HandoutA woman who was abused by grooming gangs has said she was labelled a “vigilante” by police when she tried to stop other paedophiles harming children.
Samantha Walker-Roberts, from Oldham, was abused from the age of eight by men she met through friends, before becoming the victim of grooming gangs when she was 12.
Years later, she set out to find the men who had exploited her.
The now 31-year-old said when she gathered evidence in the streets around where one of her abusers had lived and handed it to Greater Manchester Police (GMP), she was told to “back off” and locals were told not to talk to her.
Greater Manchester Police said the way she was treated by officers was “far from the standard survivors can expect from GMP today”.
Ms Walker-Roberts said she and her late husband Steven also posed as children in chat rooms to see if paedophiles would target her in the way she had been targeted as a child.
She said they did, and that the evidence they gathered led to the convictions of three men.
But she said police “took a very dim view of it and sent press releases out into the newspapers calling us vigilantes and paedophile hunters to deter others from doing it”.
GMP said at the time that Ms Walker-Roberts and her husband had “taken the law into their own hands” with “vigilante-style activity”, warning there was a “danger” that any copycats could “impact negatively on any future court proceedings”.
The children’s charity the NSPCC also raised concerns in the past about so-called “paedophile hunters”, warning that their well-intentioned activities might risk driving offenders underground and hamper police investigations.
Ms Walker-Roberts has written about her experiences in a book, telling the she wanted other victims “to know that there is nothing to be ashamed of”.
She also said she wanted her book to act as “a memoir for my children” so they can “know everything I’ve done, and how I’ve got through it all”.
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Her book details how she was repeatedly dismissed as a liar and an “attention seeker” by Oldham Council social workers and GMP officers, allegations backed up by a 2022 independent review into safeguarding failings in the borough, in which she was identified as “Sophie”.
Her book tells the story of one night in 2006 when she was abducted and passed between as many as nine men in three separate grooming gangs across three different homes.
She wrote that the ordeal was like “one long continuous scream”.
It began after she got into a car with two men who went on to abduct her after they offered to give her a lift from the reception of Oldham police station, where she had been turned away after trying to report an earlier sexual assault because she was accused of being “drunk”.
‘More victims’
Only one man, Shakil Chowdhury, has ever been convicted of Ms Walker-Roberts’s abuse that night.
GMP said another man was charged with rape but failed to attend court in 2007.
Ms Walker-Roberts said her visit to the street led to finding out “a lot of information regarding neighbours witnessing a lot more victims in that property”.
The man who groomed her online when she was 12 went on to rape and abuse her when they met in a supermarket car park in Oldham.
He turned out to be a serial paedophile in his thirties and was later jailed.
The safeguarding review found there were “missed opportunities” by police officers and social workers to identify him as a risk to her.
“I believe that if social services had acted as they should have done, I don’t think any of it would have actually happened”, Ms Walker-Roberts said.
She has played a part in shaping the national response to the experience she and other victims had, giving evidence to a select committee, and helping change sentencing guidelines for sexual abuse perpetrators.
She also met Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips to press for a national inquiry into sexual exploitation, a request which was initially rejected but then granted after a review by former government Victims Commissioner Baroness Louise Casey.
However, Ms Walker-Roberts said she was angry that the review would focus on “group-based” sexual exploitation – the official term for abuse perpetrated by grooming and rape gangs – and has called for it to also include online grooming and abuse by people known to the victim, which were forms of abuse which she also endured.
“Every type of sexual abuse matters, grooming gangs shouldn’t just be purely in the media at the moment it should be about all kinds of abuse,” she said.
‘Being silenced’
A GMP spokesman said: “Samantha suffered horrific abuse which was compounded by appalling failures by the authorities that should’ve protected her at that time.
“This is why the Chief Constable personally apologised to her when the Oldham review was published in 2022.
“Our priority is ensuring that survivors who have put their trust in the GMP of today get long-awaited justice.”
The force said the inquiry into historical allegations of sexual abuse in Oldham, launched in response to the 2022 safeguarding review, was continuing “to ramp up”.
“We have made over a dozen arrests this year alone,” it said.
“These are long and complex investigations, but we will not allow time to be a barrier to justice”.
A Home Office spokesman said the government would “leave no stone unturned in bringing to justice victims of child sexual abuse” and said it was committed to a national inquiry on grooming gangs.
Four survivors have quit that inquiry this week, over concerns it was being diluted and that their voices were “being silenced”.
But Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has sought to reassure survivors the inquiry will not be “watered down”.
Ms Walker-Roberts said she hoped her story showed people “there’s nothing to be ashamed of [in] coming forward and speaking out and trying to get into a safe place, because life is so much more peaceful when you’re away from it.”
