The three women, who remain anonymous for life, met Stephen Watson, the Greater Manchester (GMP) police chief, at the force headquarters on Tuesday to apologize in person. It comes a decade after a high-profile trial in which members of a child exploitation gang were found guilty and jailed for their involvement in a gruesome case that sparked a national debate. Kate Ellis, a lawyer at the Center for Women Justice (CWJ), said the public apology and settled compensation claims represented a “landmark moment” after a protracted battle. “I really felt for a long time that it was a war of attrition,” he said. In his apology to the women, Watson said: “It’s a matter of deep personal regret that your childhood was so severely affected by the horrific experiences you endured. GMP could and should have done much more to protect you and we disappointed you. “I hope it will be a little consolation to know that dealing with our failures in this regard means that it is completely less likely that others will suffer like you. “We will continue to improve our reactions to such horrific circumstances, prevent the same thing from happening in the first instance, and ruthlessly prosecute the perpetrators so that they are fully accountable.” Concerns about the treatment and sexual trafficking of working-class girls, mostly white, by mostly Asian men, began to rise in the early 2000s. One of the women who received the apology is known as Daisy. He was 12 years old when he was first abused, which for a number of years included rape and serious sexual assault. He was also the victim of many other physical attacks. Former Detective Maggie Oliver, who quit her job to help care for surviving gangs, welcomed the apology. Photo: Maggie Oliver / PA Daisy told police she was abused on several occasions between 2005 and 2008. The allegations were ignored and she was treated as a troublemaker and petty criminal, her lawyers say, and she still has a criminal record that she will have to disclose about certain cases. He said in a statement that he did not know if he thought the GMP had changed its mind. “But I am happy that they took into account their failures and in the end there was some responsibility. It has been 10 years since Operation Span [the GMP investigation] and until now they had never accepted what really happened. “If we had never found lawyers, I do not know if they would have ever apologized to us.” A key player in the story was Maggie Oliver, who in 2012 resigned from her job as a police detective and became an informant to protest the terrible failures of the police. He later founded the Maggie Oliver Foundation, which supports and advocates for child sexual abuse survivors. Oliver said she was relieved that, after a 10-year all-out battle, the GMP “finally acknowledged that their horrific treatment of these three victims was wrong, even inhumane.” An apology could not fix the pain the three women suffered, Oliver said, “but at least now they can start looking ahead for the rest of their lives knowing they have failed.” The three women started their claim against GMP in 2019. The process against the Crown Prosecution is ongoing. Ellis said what they achieved was great after all they had been through. CWJ director Harriet Wistrich said: “The trial 10 years ago was hailed as a victory, but it was followed by years of miserable police failures.” He said the same failures persisted, citing a report released in February that said police and councils were still downgrading the scale of child sexual exploitation by criminal gangs. “We hope that this historic victory will give an additional impetus to the police force across the country to implement effective measures to tackle this heinous crime.”