Accountability and Public Services
Here are two excellent reports on the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal - one from the Guardian, the other from the Independent.
I am still reading the report by Professor Alexis Jay, but one case study that stands out is that of a father who went to rescue his daughter (a child) from these despicable rapists yet ended up being arrested by the police for disturbing the peace.
Now that takes some nerve and some explaining.
For example, how is it possible that a public service could treat a father and his daughter in this way and who is being held accountable for presiding over such an appalling mess.
Councils are large, well resourced organisations with lots of highly paid senior officials and elected councillors, so it's not unreasonable to expect that people at the top should accept responsibility when things go so terribly wrong.
Especially when Professor Jay's report makes clear that the authorities were well aware of what was happening long before the Rotherham scandal finally broke.
Rotherham: a putrid scandal perpetuated by a broken system
Level of abuse uncovered by Alexis Jay appears to make this South Yorkshire town the nation's sex exploitation capital
By Randeep Ramesh - The Guardian
Roger Stone, leader of Rotherham council, who has stepped down from his position. Photograph: Ross Parry
The putrid mess that oozes from the 160 pages of Alexis Jay's report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham is so thick that one gags rather than read the words.
Children in the town were systematically identified by gangs as vulnerable, seduced with drugs and drink, brainwashed into believing they were in a relationship with an adult and then used for sex, often raped before sometimes being trafficked to nearby cities to work as prostitutes.
The brutal violence that surrounded this depraved process was shocking. Children who refused to acquiesce to ever more macabre demands were doused in petrol, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and told they would be next if they told anyone.
While some of this will be familiar to a British public which has been appalled by the revelations tumbling out of high-profile child abuse cases since 2010, Jay's report lays bare a mephitic hole in Yorkshire.
Over 16 years, she says, a "conservative estimate" is that 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the town. Girls as young as 11 were gang-raped by men.
This level of abuse appears to make Rotherham the nation's child sex exploitation capital. If the town's experience was replicated across the country, England would have 19,000 children criminally abused by gangs every year. The children's commissioner thinks that at the moment the figure is about 2,000.
It's not as if there was a lack of evidence of a growing problem on Rotherham's streets.
Internal reports from a decade ago revealed "links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality".
Schools raised the alert about children being picked up "by taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown males".
What allowed these crimes to continue was not just that abused children were cowed into silence or mentally enslaved by older men, but that even when they spoke out they were met by a culture of disbelief from the authorities.
Time and time again, police and social workers appear to talk of mothers being unable to deal with children "growing up".
In one instance, a girl of 12 was groomed, raped and then trafficked. The authorities "blamed the child … for placing herself at risk".
In another case an 11-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted, then a year later found drunk in a car with a suspected abuser who had taken indecent pictures of her on his phone. She was declared to be at "no risk of sexual exploitation".
Many of the children came from poorer backgrounds and troubled homes and were in care. The suspicion is that council officials and police officers considered them part of an underclass who were not so much the victims of crime as authors of their own misfortunes.
That the local administration and police knew about the problems and chose not to prevent them clearly shows something is rotten in Rotherham.
Even today, young people are afraid to use taxis in the town, preferring to catch buses than be taken on the "longest, darkest route home" and be peppered with "flirtatious or suggestive" conversation about sex.
What made South Yorkshire perhaps more politically charged is that in many cases the victims were underage white girls and the perpetrators were Asian men.
There were other abuse cases – in Oxford and Telford – with the same mix of ethnicities.
The far right had a field day with slogans which cast Muslim men as dangerous paedophiles. The tabloids leapt on remarks made in 2012 by the judge in a widely reported Rochdale case, Gerald Clifton, who in sentencing nine Asian men for 77 years for abusing and raping up to 47 girls said: "I believe one of the factors which led to that is that they [the victims] were not of your community or religion."
Andrew Norfolk, the Times's dogged and brilliant reporter who broke the story in Rochdale, has always said the "overwhelming majority of child abusers in this country are white men acting on their own".
However, his own analysis was that race was important to discuss because council staff feared "treading into a cultural minefield".
The report accepts that the concern of being labelled a racist did mean people pulled back from probing too deeply.
However, there must be an acceptance that perpetrators were criminals rather than Muslims. Surely the crime of a young girl being raped should have led officials to act, whatever the colour of the skin of her assailant?
What is clear is that the rot is more than the sum of individual abuses. It is the perception of a cosy, indifferent bureaucracy – social workers, councillors and police officers who could not face up to do something about terrible crimes partly because of their prejudices about the poor and partly because they were concerned about being labelled as prejudiced against Asians.
The effect is that the scandal goes beyond its shocking details and raises the question: just how are poor and vulnerable children being looked after in England?
Rotherham child abuse report: 1,400 children subjected to 'appalling' sexual exploitation over 16-years
Children were subjected to rape, trafficked to other cities and beaten, report published today finds
By PAUL PEACHEY - The Independent
The horrifying cost of official failure to confront widespread child sexual exploitation has been revealed in a damning report detailing how abusers exploited 1,400 children from a single town over 16 years.
Gangs of Asian men groomed, abused and trafficked vulnerable children while police were contemptuous of the victims and the council ignored what was going on, in spite of years of warnings and reports about what was happening.
Despite what the inquiry head called a “blatant” failure of leadership at the Labour-run council, nobody will be sacked or face inquiries into their inaction. The leader of the council, Roger Stone, quit today because of what he called “historic failings”. He apologised in 2013 for the failure to protect children in the town – and the inquiry said the act of contrition should have been made years earlier.
The report commissioned by the council, covering 1997 to 2013, detailed cases where children as young as 11 had been raped by a number of different men, abducted, beaten and trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England to continue the abuse.
Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the report, said she found “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”.
It said that three reports from 2002 to 2006 highlighted the extent of child exploitation and links to wider criminality but nothing was done, with the findings either suppressed or simply ignored. Police failed to act on the crimes and treated the victims with contempt and deemed that they were “undesirables” not worthy of protection, the inquiry team was told.
One young person told the inquiry that “gang rape” was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham where she lived. In most of the cases that the inquiry team examined, the victims were white children under the age of 16 and the perpetrators named in the files as “Asian males”.
The report said council staff were scared of being accused of racism by flagging up the issue in a town of nearly 260,000, where 8 per cent were from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
However, schools raised the alert over the years about children as young as 11 being picked up by taxis, given presents and phones and taken to Rotherham and other towns and cities.
Following the case, The Times revealed details showing that police and agencies had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet had failed to prosecute.
John Cameron, head of the NSPCC helpline, said: “This report is truly damning and highlights consistent failures to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of predatory groups of men. It is quite astonishing that even when frontline staff raised concerns, these were not acted upon so allowing devastating child sexual exploitation to go unchallenged.”
Council chief executive Martin Kimber said that all the key officers concerned with child protection during the time of the review had left the council.
The horrifying cost of official failure to confront widespread child sexual exploitation has been revealed in a damning report detailing how abusers exploited 1,400 children from a single town over 16 years.
Gangs of Asian men groomed, abused and trafficked vulnerable children while police were contemptuous of the victims and the council ignored what was going on, in spite of years of warnings and reports about what was happening.
Despite what the inquiry head called a “blatant” failure of leadership at the Labour-run council, nobody will be sacked or face inquiries into their inaction. The leader of the council, Roger Stone, quit today because of what he called “historic failings”. He apologised in 2013 for the failure to protect children in the town – and the inquiry said the act of contrition should have been made years earlier.
The report commissioned by the council, covering 1997 to 2013, detailed cases where children as young as 11 had been raped by a number of different men, abducted, beaten and trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England to continue the abuse.
Professor Alexis Jay led the investigation into child abuse in Rotherham (PA)
Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the report, said she found “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”.
It said that three reports from 2002 to 2006 highlighted the extent of child exploitation and links to wider criminality but nothing was done, with the findings either suppressed or simply ignored. Police failed to act on the crimes and treated the victims with contempt and deemed that they were “undesirables” not worthy of protection, the inquiry team was told.
One young person told the inquiry that “gang rape” was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham where she lived. In most of the cases that the inquiry team examined, the victims were white children under the age of 16 and the perpetrators named in the files as “Asian males”.
The report said council staff were scared of being accused of racism by flagging up the issue in a town of nearly 260,000, where 8 per cent were from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
However, schools raised the alert over the years about children as young as 11 being picked up by taxis, given presents and phones and taken to Rotherham and other towns and cities.
Rotherham Council leader Roger Stone resigned following the report's publication (PA)
One researcher for the Home Office who raised concerns with senior police officers about the level of abuse in 2002 was told not to do so again, then suspended and sidelined, the inquiry found. Youth workers who worked with the victims and had already repeatedly told police and officials about the problems were criticised by full-time council staff and their roles downgraded.
The focus on Rotherham followed the jailing of five Asian men in 2010 after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex. The five men, described as sexual predators by the judge, groomed teenage girls and had sex with them in cars and parks in Rotherham.
After the five were jailed, police said the case showed how seriously the force and the council treat the issue of child sexual exploitation.
One researcher for the Home Office who raised concerns with senior police officers about the level of abuse in 2002 was told not to do so again, then suspended and sidelined, the inquiry found. Youth workers who worked with the victims and had already repeatedly told police and officials about the problems were criticised by full-time council staff and their roles downgraded.
The focus on Rotherham followed the jailing of five Asian men in 2010 after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex. The five men, described as sexual predators by the judge, groomed teenage girls and had sex with them in cars and parks in Rotherham.
After the five were jailed, police said the case showed how seriously the force and the council treat the issue of child sexual exploitation.
Rotherham Council chief executive Martin Kimber (PA)
Following the case, The Times revealed details showing that police and agencies had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet had failed to prosecute.
John Cameron, head of the NSPCC helpline, said: “This report is truly damning and highlights consistent failures to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of predatory groups of men. It is quite astonishing that even when frontline staff raised concerns, these were not acted upon so allowing devastating child sexual exploitation to go unchallenged.”
Council chief executive Martin Kimber said that all the key officers concerned with child protection during the time of the review had left the council.
