The heartbreaking case of Sophie - a 12 year old girl repeatedly raped hours after police ignored her pleas for help

When a vulnerable 12-year-old girl was molested in a churchyard she went to Oldham police station. She hoped that officers would bring her attacker to justice.

Instead, her cry for help was ignored and she was turned away for being ‘drunk’.

Minutes later she was in the hands of vile sexual predators. It was the beginning a night of torment in which she was raped multiple times by men, most of whom have never been caught.

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A review of allegations of sexual exploitation in Oldham, released today, has found that authorities failed to properly investigate the crimes against the young girl in 2006, known only as ‘Sophie’.

The report, by experts Malcolm Newsam and Gary Ridgway, is also damning about the response of social services to Sophie’s plight, with council staff accusing her of being ‘prone to fantasise’ and ‘putting herself at risk’. An outreach worker described Sophie as being in ‘good spirits’ in one visit despite ‘paradoxically’ recording that she had also drunk bleach before their meeting.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) were told the names of two of her attackers but failed to charge either of them with a crime. One of these men would later be jailed for the attempted murder of his wife.

When as an adult Sophie complained to the council about the handling of her case, officers branded her as ‘litigious’ and told her too much time had passed for it to be looked into. GMP also denied any wrongdoing and refused to admit failures to Sophie and her family, despite launching its own probe that identified missed forensic evidence and serious weaknesses in the original investigation.

These combined failures and subsequent denials have meant she has spent the past 15 years in limbo fighting the institutions that