Maggie Oliver: “They’re going to re-traumatise victims”

Maggie Oliver has seen it all before. “I’ve been on this treadmill – probably that’s the right word – for 15 years since I resigned,” the former Greater Manchester Police detective tells me, when we speak the day after the Makerfield by-election.

The result is in: the Greater Manchester mayor will be returning to parliament. Oliver has found a moment to chat to me in between interviews with Indian TV channels. What did they want to talk to her about? “The usual: grooming gangs, why has nothing been done.”

Long before the grooming gangs scandal became a topline issue in British politics, before it caught the eye of Elon Musk and sparked a national debate that has fuelled the rise of an insurgent political party, Oliver was blowing the whistle about the horrific, systemic failures of police forces to tackle child sexual exploitation. Her efforts to raise the alarm about vulnerable young girls being trafficked and raped by gangs of predominantly Pakistani men while social workers and police officers turned a blind eye went unheeded. She quit in 2012 to expose a Rochdale child sexual abuse ring, and has been campaigning for justice for victims ever since, setting up the Maggie Oliver Foundation in 2019 to champion survivors (“Our motto is ‘transforming pain into power’ – people come to us completely and utterly broken”).

A decade and a half later, following countless reports and reviews, not to mention a scathing TV drama Three Girls for which Oliver was a consultant, the rest of the country finally seemed to be catching up. The early months of 2025 saw renewed political focus on examining cases of historic abuse, some going back decades. Under pressure – from the Tories, from Reform, from Musk, and from Labour MPs – Keir Starmer commissioned Louise Casey to complete a rapid “national audit” on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Casey came to Oliver and asked her to introduce her to survivors. “I think she was shocked in what she saw and what she heard,” Oliver tells me. “I thought her report pulled no punches.”

The Casey report revealed a litany of serious failings, including a reluctance for public officials to record or examine the ethnicity of perpetrators, because of “fear of appearing racist”. She made a string of recommendations, among them a full national statutory inquiry. It was what many campaigners had been pressing for. And on 14 June 2025, Starmer at last relented and announced one, to be led by former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield.

But on the one-year anniversary of Casey’s audit being published, progress has been agonisingly, incomprehensibly slow. “In my opinion we have seen virtually no change, no movement, since that report came out,” Oliver, now 70, says. Her voice is tight with frustration. She tells me that just the day before, she and a group of survivors had meeting with Longfield and her panel to discuss what the terms of the statutory inquiry might be. A year since it was announced, “we’re still at the stage where we don’t really know what it’s going to offer.”

In the meantime, campaigners are still having to fight, even for things they thought politicians had already agreed to. In March this year, the Maggie Oliver Foundation won a High Court case to take the government to judicial review over its failure to implement the recommendations of a different report, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse led by Alexis Jay, which was published in 2022. It is, she says, a historic win – and a crucial one, given the new inquiry has been launched when the recommendations of previous ones still hang in the balance. “If there is no requirement or a government to implement those recommendations either, why are we going to put victims and survivors through it again? What’s the point?”

Apparent victories have transpired to be not what they seem. Take the government’s move to accept Casey’s recommendation that victims with criminal convictions relating to their abuse should be pardoned. While welcome, the government’s measure only applies to “child prostitution” offences, not the other crimes – public order offences, drug possession – an abused victim in crisis may have been prosecuted for while police took no action against their abusers.

“They’ve taken the easy option, the cheap option, but one that in all reality will make hardly an ounce of difference,” deplores Oliver. “A child who has been abused, the fight or flight instinct kicks in… They’ve sought help, they’ve been dismissed by their social workers, by the police, so they fight for themselves. Then they get locked up then for what is a minor offence, and the horrendous abuse they suffer goes unaddressed.”

What of the news last week – welcomed by rape advocacy organisations – that the first batch of historic grooming gangs cases have been referred back to the police? Operation Beaconport is reviewing hundreds, potentially thousands, of previously closed cases between January 2010 and March 2025 which police forces and the CPS chose not to take forward. Isn’t this a step towards finally achieving justice and closure for victims?

“I would swear but I’m going to bite my tongue,” Oliver replies at the implicit promise to reopen thousands of cases. Then she reconsiders. “No I’m not, I’m going to say it’s fucking ridiculous.” Of course the principle is sound, but where, she wants to know, are the resources? “If you’re not putting more police in, if you’re not giving more training… where are they suddenly going to find officers? Where are you going to get the resources to prosecute?”

She pauses. “It’s just pipe-dream world, it is not going to happen. My fear is that they’re going to re-traumatise victims and survivors, give them false hope, and then dash their hopes when they realise they can’t do anything.”

The theme of “false hope” and “empty promises” has been a motif of Oliver’s work ever since she started trying to get politicians to listen. She doggedly neutral when it comes to political parties, deeply critical of Labour but scathing of those trying to capitalise on the trauma of abuse victims, turning it into “a political point-scoring football”.

“The Conservatives were in power for most of the time that I’ve been fighting this battle,” she says, reeling off the government ministers she met – Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Chris Philp. “In all honesty, they did nothing. Now that they’re in opposition suddenly they’re very vocal.”

What of man-of-the-moment Andy Burnham, up in Oliver’s own patch? The Greater Manchester Combined Authority website has a page with a timeline that “sets out the action that Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has taken to help the Greater Manchester system to support victims to get justice, face up to past systemic failures and ensure perpetrators face the consequences of their crimes.” It’s an impressive list, detailing media interventions, inquiries, investigations and convictions dating from May 2017, when Burnham became mayor and the BBC drama Three Girls aired.

how Burnham got in contact with her to kickstart a review of Operation Augusta, Greater Manchester Police’s previous inquiry into child sexual abuse that was shut down in 2005, after hearing her on the radio. When she worked alongside him, she was “hopeful”. But the mayor, she said, was more interested in talking about the failures of the past than “showing leadership and courage and gripping what is going on now”.

One particular case continues to agitate her: a new inquest into the death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, a child rape victim who died in 2003 after a man injected her with heroin. He was jailed for just three and a half years, while the coroner described the teenager as “having a propensity ‘to provide sexual favours’”. After the report into Operation Augusta was published in 2020, revealing the full extent of the state’s failure to both protect Agoglia and properly investigate her death, there was pressure for another inquest. It still hasn’t happened.

“The grandma of Victoria was promised the world by Andy Burnham, he was going to give her justice for her granddaughter.” Oliver sighs, “She is 80-odd years old, she’s completely blind, she’s still waiting for the inquest. She’s had no answers.” She pauses. “I think they’re waiting for her to die.”

At the point at which Augusta was closed down, 97 suspects had been identified. Some of the cases have been reopened, and the Maggie Oliver Foundation is supporting several of the original victims. But nearly two decades on from the first investigation and seven years after the publication review Burnham commissioned, “they are still waiting for their cases to be even sent to the CPS”.

In the vacuum and gridlock of offialdom, some politicians are taking matters into their own hands. As the statutory inquiry grinds towards getting started, Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe has been working on his own “Rape Gang Inquiry Report”, published on 16 June for the anniversary of Casey’s audit. Unsurprisingly given Lowe’s politics (his party is to the right of Reform on immigration, calling for mass deportations and advocating a strictly limited definition of who can be “British”), it focuses heavily on the ethnicity angle. It defines the scandal as “the systematic targeting of vulnerable girls, overwhelmingly White British, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs across towns and cities up and down the nation”, and cites Islam as a religion and a culture that are a driving force behind the rape gangs.

Such framing is obviously provocative. I consider what Oliver said about people using the issue as a “political point-scoring football”, turning victims of horrific abuse to their own ideological ends. At the same time, there is no doubt that the avalanche of outrage at the start of 2025, particularly from the online right, helped make a decades-long injustice impossible to ignore. So what does Oliver think of Lowe’s findings?

“I stayed out of it,” she says bluntly. Then, on the suggestion Lowe uncovered fresh horrors, “There is nothing in those reports that I haven’t known for 20 years.”

She doesn’t want to comment on the politics beyond saying there is space for everyone to “raise awareness”. But there is one thing for sure on that has Oliver’s backing: pursuing action, not against the perpetrators of child sexual abuse but against the officials who failed, again and again, to act. She too wants to see individuals held accountable for their dereliction of duty, and has set up a crowdfunder for civil litigation or potentially private prosecutions.

“The shame lies with the state”, she says. “The abuse is horrific, but what has compounded that a million times is the gross criminal neglect that is entirely in the hands of senior police, home secretaries, senior council leaders and social workers. The guilt and the responsibility, and for me criminal neglect, lies in their hands, and I want to see criminal accountability.”

This isn’t just about righting historic wrongs, she says. It’s preventing future children from being failed. “If we have a chief constable today who knows that there is another chief constable from 10 years ago in prison for misconduct in a private office or malfeasance or neglect, I believe that chief constable in office today will be far less likely to bury a job.”

That crowdfunding effort is separate to her charity, which she is at pains to stress does not receive any money from the government – a deliberate decision, to ensure they don’t feel limited in what they can say out of fear funding will be withheld. The Foundation’s main work is raising awareness and victim support and advocacy. It is “inundated”, she says, with survivors still trying to process their trauma, rebuild their lives and get the justice they deserve.

That reminds me of something Oliver said earlier: “on every level I feel we are failing at our duty as a country”. I ask her if she thinks what she witnessed as a police detective is still going on. “I know it’s still going on.” The failure of police forces to take historic accusations of rape gang sexual abuse seriously, or rape gang sexual abuse itself? “Both.”

That’s why she’s taking the government to judicial review for not implementing Alexis Jay’s recommendations. It’s why she’s not satisfied with the progress of the statutory inquiry, with the response to Casey’s audit, with Operation Beaconport and its lofty ambitious which cannot be achieved by current resources. And it’s why she’s through with empty promises, whichever party they come from.

“I know it inside out. And I can spot the lies and the game-playing a million miles away now.”