Three Girls: Petition calls for award for Rochdale whistleblower Sara Rowbotham

More than 130,000 demand social worker,
played by Maxine Peake in BBC1’s Three Girls, be acknowledged

One-Minute Read

It asks that the social worker, played by Maxine Peake in the
BBC1 drama Three Girls, be formerly acknowledged for her work to
get justice for the underage victims.

Rowbotham, who managed the local council’s sexual health crisis
intervention team between 2003 and 2014, campaigned for years after
teenagers in the town confided to her they had been sexually
exploited by a ring of older men.

Despite this, however, police and social services were reluctant
to take the reports seriously. Many of the victims were from
vulnerable backgrounds, which Rowbotham believes contributed to the
reluctance to pursue the claims.

“The girls didn’t trust police or social services to help them
and I quickly found out why they felt this way, as no one wanted to
listen to them,” she wrote in The Guardian.

“My calls to police were ignored and social workers told me the
girls were making lifestyle choices.”

Her team’s work proved instrumental in building the case against
the nine men who were convicted of participating in the abuse and
given prison sentences in 2012.

Two years later, in 2014, Rowbotham was made redundant from her
post.

“The very lady who believed these children, supported these
children, never once dismissing these children or gave up on these
children was tossed aside,” says the petition.

In 2013, a serious case review found that “widespread sexual
abuse of vulnerable young girls in Rochdale could have been avoided
if the authorities had acted sooner,” the Manchester Evening News reports.

Greater Manchester Police issued an apology in 2015 for failing
to follow up on the reports of abuse more thoroughly, but no
officer has ever faced disciplinary action.

The petition on change.org calls for Rowbotham’s work to be
commended by the police and Crown Prosecution Service as well as by
the government. Rowbotham now works as a councillor on Rochdale
borough council.