Jennifer Depew, RD

I'm warning you now. This is a hard listen. The police weren't the rescue. Survivors say they were the PREDATORS. The HUNTERS. The ones these children needed saving from. So who protects you when the people with the BADGE are the ones in the room? @officialsammyuk describes what some of them called cop nights. Officers taking TURNS with the children, she says. Then handing them back to the gangs like nothing happened. A reward for looking the other way. Watch her say it. Watch the interviewer go silent, because even he couldn't take in what he was hearing. If the people meant to save these children were hunting them, who was ever coming? Nobody. That's the answer and it doesn't leave you. This was a town where 1,400 children were abused. And it wasn't one bad officer. Now listen to what survivors have told the BBC. One says she was raped from the age of 12 in a marked police car, by a uniformed officer, who told her he'd hand her straight back to the gang if she didn't comply. She said being raped once by a copper was easier than being raped by 15 or 20 men in a night and he knew it. She named him, she says. He was never arrested. He died on restricted duties before anyone laid a hand on him. Another, abused by hundreds of men over five years from the age of 11, says she was hunted down by an officer who knew where she'd be, who demanded sex or raped her in the back of the car, and threatened to call the gang himself if she refused. One survivor says she was forced into an illegal abortion, the officer who abused her then sat across from her and conducted her police interview. The uniform she was taught her whole life meant safety. For her, it was the trap. Now look at how high it goes. The watchdog upheld a complaint that the force gave the gang's ringleader a NO ARREST deal, after he abducted a pregnant 14 year old girl. The court heard that some officers passed him drugs. Passed him information. The very people meant to catch him. Then look at what they did with their own. Eight years. Ninety one investigations. The watchdog found the force fundamentally failed to protect these children. Forty three complaints upheld. Gross misconduct found. Not one officer lost their job. Not one was charged. Seven were quietly allowed to retire before they could even face a hearing. A former investigator called it, at best a reputational cover up, at worst outright corruption. The same force is investigating its own former officers. Marking its own homework. The woman who led the original inquiry says she's shocked they're allowed to. This is the bit that gets me. That eight year investigation, the one that was meant to find all this, never uncovered the alleged police rapes at all. It took the survivors own lawyers, years later, dragging it out case by case, to force it into the light. The official inquiry looked straight at it and missed it. So what you've just read is only what slipped out. Only what they couldn't bury. Because how does a child report the police, to the police? The ones we know about are the ones who got out and were finally believed. For every one of them, there are the ones who never could say a word. Because the people they were meant to run to were the ones some of them needed saving from. They had one job. Protect the children and the ones who did this put on the uniform and did the opposite. Nobody was coming and don't tell yourself this is the past. It's still happening, right now, today, in towns all over this country. Nothing has changed. Grooming and abuse don't belong to one colour or one faith. White, black, any background, evil hides everywhere. But that's not the scandal. The scandal is that the machine built to stop it, the police, the councils, the people we pay and trust to protect our children, can rot from the bottom to the very top and close ranks to protect itself. Until we tear it out by the root and start again, it will keep happening. To somebody's daughter. To somebody's son. While the people who were meant to come, never do.