A damning report by a former chief inspector of social work into child sexual abuse occurring on an almost industrial scale in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham — abuse that the local authorities knew about but chose to turn a blind eye to — has shone a piercing light on a problem that is believed to be widespread in other parts of the country as well.
The report, ‘An Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham,’ was commissioned by the Rotherham Borough Council. Presented by its lead author Alexis Jay on August 26, the report puts the numbers of child victims of predatory gangs of sexual offenders at 1400, “on a conservative estimate,” over the period of the inquiry’s brief, from 1997 to 2013.
It paints a picture of a dysfunctional local administration in which the channels of communication between the police, child protection coordinators, and elected Councillors had broken down, resulting in a collective failure to take action on what at least three previous inquiries, in 2002, 2003, and 2006 had established.
The leader of the Labour-controlled Rotherham Council Roger Stone has stepped down following the publication of the report, even as calls grow louder for Shawn Wright, who is Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire, to step down as well.
In her chilling report detailing the “appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered,” Professor Jay says that girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators. “They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.”
Equally alarming is the second problem the report identifies, which is “the collective failures of political and officer leadership” despite “growing evidence” from residential care and youth workers that “child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.”
The report states that despite a majority of perpetrators being identified as “Asian” by victims, Councillors did not engage with the Pakistani community to which most of the Asian perpetrators belong. “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
