THE woman who raised the alarm about vulnerable girls being exploited by grooming gangs in Rochdale will speak at Bradford conference on child sexual exploitation.

Sara Rowbotham, who was recently portrayed by Maxine Peake in TV drama Three Girls, will be one of the guest speakers at the Yorkshire CSE Conference, which is being held at Bradford Academy on Wednesday, February 14.

She will question what has changed following the high-profile case in a talk titled ‘CSE – have the lessons been learnt?’

The conference has been organised by the BLAST project, a local charity that tackles the grooming of boys.

Other speakers at the event will include Madeleine Black, an abuse survivor and founder of The Forgiveness Project, and Dr Helen Beckett, director of The International Centre: Researching child sexual exploitation, violence and trafficking, at the University of Bedfordshire.

There will also be a series of workshops looking at issues such as raising awareness of CSE in minority communities, gender bias in cases involving the grooming of young men, and how online pornography is used in grooming.

Mrs Rowbotham was working for the NHS in Rochdale when she started to identify young people who were involved in, or vulnerable to sexual exploitation. For the next eight years she tried to bring this issue to the attention of services with little or no meaningful response.

In 2012 she was forced to “whistleblow,” seeking support from her local MP and eventually being called to give evidence to the Home Office Select Committee inquiry in to CSE.

It is the ninth time the conference – which attracts large numbers of people from Yorkshire councils, schools and charities – has been held in Bradford.

Last year’s conference looked at a case of a boy from the Bradford district who had been groomed online by dozens of men over several years. A serious case review was released last year and highlighted failings by both the police force and children’s social services

Phil Mitchell, founder of BLAST, said: “It is an issue that more people are aware of now. However, you still get some organisations where someone will say ‘I’m the CSE champion.’ You ask what they do and they are not really sure what being a CSE champion means.

“A lot of people are passionate about doing something to tackle CSE but don’t fully understand it.

“There is still a lot people can learn about CSE, we think some of the workshops at this event will be very popular.”