I think the difficulty is in telling which are cases of multiple, independent, credible witnesses and which are cases of multiple, not fully credible ‘witnesses’.
In the case of Cyril Smith, he abused children in a hostel for boys (therefore the children were by definition going to be considered ‘unreliable’ as witnesses - obviously only wrong’uns end up in care homes /s) and at a special school where the same would apply.
This is the horrible thing about successful long-term abusers. They pick their victims very carefully.
It doesn’t help that in addition to ‘plausible’ claims, there are numerous utterly implausible claims.
The pendulum has swung from police being generally dubious about claims to ‘always believing any claim’ no matter how ludicrous and back again at various points.
For example, the allegations Nobby_Stiles refers to about paedophile rings killing young boys after raping them (assuming he means the claims by ‘Nick’) are pretty thoroughly debunked (see the independent review linked above) and were patently dubious right from the start.
Yet they were investigated at great length and with considerable publicity before (inevitably) collapsing.
Given it is clear that there were certainly high-profile, serial and prolific abusers, the police are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
