THE LITTLE GIRLS THAT WERE TAKEN AWAY TO BE GANG RAPED AND TRAFFICKED FROM BIRMINGHAM CARE HOMES BEGAN TAKING OVERDOSES. SOME DID THIS AS A PLEA FOR HELP. OTHERS WERE TRYING TO KILL THEMSELVES. INSTEAD OF PROTECTING CHILDREN IN ITS CARE, BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL WAS WORRIED ABOUT BAD PUBLICITY. In 1991 Dr Jill Jesson investigated the sexual exploitation of twenty girls in the council's care. She found evidence of serious psychological damage. Several had taken overdoses. Others had inflicted injuries on themselves. One girl was just 13 years old. Ten others were only 14 or 15. They were children Birmingham City Council had a legal responsibility to protect. The same investigation found that Birmingham Social Services had no systematic response to allegations of rape. BUT IT WAS CONCERNED ABOUT PROTECTING ITSELF FROM BAD PUBLICITY. Those are not my words. They are the findings of the council's own researcher. In section 5.7 of her report, Jesson identified a concern to protect the children's homes, their residents and the Social Services Department itself from bad publicity. Now consider what happened four years later. In December 1995 the report finally came before Birmingham councillors. The Director of Social Services, Richard Evans, put his own paper on the front of it. He told councillors there was no significant quantitative problem. He defended the decision not to circulate Jesson's findings. He warned against what he called "voyeuristic intrusion". And then he made an extraordinary accusation. He told councillors that concerns about the report being buried or ignored had been "deliberately manufactured". THE GIRLS' SUFFERING WAS DOCUMENTED. THE COUNCIL'S CONCERN ABOUT BAD PUBLICITY WAS DOCUMENTED. AND THE DIRECTOR DISMISSED CONCERNS ABOUT BURYING THE REPORT AS MANUFACTURED. Birmingham's councillors then voted against an enquiry. Twelve to five. The question is no longer simply what happened to those girls. IT IS WHO KNEW WHAT WAS HAPPENING, WHO DECIDED THE EVIDENCE SHOULD STAY OUT OF PUBLIC VIEW, AND WHO WAS PROTECTED BY THOSE DECISIONS. Jess Phillips was a Labour councillor on Birmingham City Council from 2011 to 2015. In 2012 the council made her its first Victims' Champion. She held that role in November 2014, when Jill Jesson told the Birmingham Mail that the council had buried her report and ordered the copies destroyed. She still held it in April 2015, when Peter Hay told the council's own scrutiny committee that the report had been withheld for reasons that were not clear, but that there had been no cover-up. Weeks later Phillips left for Westminster as the MP for Birmingham Yardley. So the council's champion for victims was in post while her own council was told it had buried a report into the rape of girls in its care, and while it cleared itself. Phillips then went on to become the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. As minister she rejected Oldham's request for a government-led inquiry into the rape gangs. The government she served in refused a national inquiry until Casey's audit forced its hand in June 2025. What did Birmingham's Victims' Champion do in 2014 and 2015 about the Jesson Report? What did she do to find out who ordered the copies destroyed, and who protected the men? And when she had the power as a minister to send an inquiry into her own city, why did she refuse? A national statutory inquiry now has the power to compel Birmingham City Council to surrender its records and answer questions under oath. When Jess Phillips was Birmingham's Victims' Champion, what did she do to uncover what had happened to the Jesson Report? What did she do to establish who protected the men exploiting girls in her city's care? AND BIRMINGHAM TODAY. 143 children identified as at risk of, or experiencing, sexual exploitation. More than half of them had repeatedly gone missing. 98 live investigations. Six assessed as group-based. Two private hire drivers stripped of their licences following police intelligence about potential sexual offences against children. The council's published figures still omit the ethnicity and nationality of the suspects. Under pressure, Birmingham City Council has republished what it calls the Jesson Report. But what it has released is the version placed before councillors in 1995, complete with Richard Evans's paper warning against "voyeuristic intrusion". THE ORIGINAL, UNALTERED REPORT THAT JESSON SAYS SHE WROTE BEFORE THE ETHNICITY OF THE MEN WAS REMOVED HAS STILL NOT BEEN PUBLISHED. The national inquiry must establish what happened to the girls in Jesson's report, what was ever done about the men, and why the council treated its own findings as something to defend itself against. Read the investigation here: redwallandtherabble.co.uk/fo… I SHARE ALL OF MY CONTENT FOR FREE. THERE ARE NO PAYWALLS TO ACCESS ANY OF MY WORK. Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way. The paid subscriptions have stalled. Worse, tens of thousands of people are now reading these articles without even joining the free mailing list or even following my pages on X or Facebook. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it. This is becoming impossible to sustain. You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account. And yet, despite all of that, we forced the national inquiry. We did that because enough ordinary people refused to go away. But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. And I cannot do it indefinitely working on my own. That is why I keep talking about 50,000 committed subscribers. It is not a vanity number. I did not pluck it out of the air. With fifty thousand people with me means when we uncover something important, it does not depend on a newspaper editor, a television producer or an algorithm deciding whether you are allowed to see it. It gives us reach they cannot easily shut down. But there is another reason. I need to build a proper backroom operation around this work. At the moment I am investigating, researching, writing, publishing, producing the videos, running the newsletter, dealing with the technology and then starting again. It is unsustainable. I need people behind me who can take care of the technical and production work so that I can spend my time doing the thing I do best. That is why we have been pushing so hard for new paid subscribers. 🔴 SIGN UP HERE 👉 redwallandtherabble.co.uk If you read my work and want it to continue, I need your help. Sign up for free. There are no paywalls to access any of my work. If you can afford the £3 a month or £30 for the year, please become a paid subscriber. We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next. Raja Miah MBE