Massive child-sex scandal in Rotherham

[cosmicalstorm]

If I get this right all perpetrators were Muslims and or Pakistanis so the local police and government were afraid to move because that would have been racist? Or is this just a right wing spin on something different that went down?

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.

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.
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.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr ... 91825.html

[madd0ct0r]

The BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-so ... e-28939089

The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham".

Prof Jay said the first of these reports was "effectively suppressed" because senior officers did not believe the data. The other two were ignored, she said.

The inquiry team found that in the early-2000s when a group of professionals attempted to monitor a number of children believed to be at risk, "managers gave little help or support to their efforts".

The report revealed some people at a senior level in the police and children's social care thought the extent of the problem was being "exaggerated".

the Guardian (only one I've found so far to upgrade the weaselly 'asian' to 'pakistani taxi driver'
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014 ... e-children

Blatant failures of political and police leadership contributed to the sexual exploitation of 1,400 children in Rotherham over a 16-year period, according to an uncompromising report published in the aftermath of allegations of gang rape and trafficking in the South Yorkshire town.

Written by Prof Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work, the investigation concluded that the council knew as far back as 2005 of sexual exploitation being committed on a wide scale by mostly Asian men, yet failed to act.

This is the fourth report clearly identifying the problem of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham. The first, commissioned by the Home Office back in 2002, contained "severe criticisms" of the police and local council for their indifference to what was happening under their noses. But instead of tackling the issue, senior police and council officers claimed the data in the report had been "fabricated or exaggerated", and subjected the report's author to "personal hostility," leading to "suspicions of collusion and cover up", said Jay.

Council and other officials sometimes thought youth workers were exaggerating the exploitation problem. Sometimes they were afraid of being accused of racism if they talked openly about the perpetrators in the town mostly being Pakistani taxi drivers.

Roger Stone, Rotherham's Labour council leader since 2003, said that he had stepped down with immediate effect following the publication of the Jay inquiry. "I believe it is only right that I, as leader, take responsibility on behalf of the council for the historic failings that are described so clearly in the report and it is my intention to do so," he said.

Jahangir Akhtar, the former deputy leader of the council, is accused in the report of naivety and potentially "ignoring a politically inconvenient truth" by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls. Police told the inquiry that some influential Pakistani councillors in Rotherham acted as barriers to communication on grooming issues.

On a number of occasions, victims of sexual abuse were criminalised – arrested for being drunk – while their abusers continued to act with impunity. Vital evidence was ignored, Jay said, with police apparently trying to manipulate their figures for child sexual exploitation by removing from their monitoring process girls who were pregnant or had given birth, plus all looked after children in care.

The telegraph is normally pretty conservative:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... d-eye.html

Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.
In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual.
...
Prof Jay said: “Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the police gave no priority to child sex exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.”
It emerged that there had been three previous reports into the problem which had been suppressed or ignored by officials, either because they did not like or did not believe the findings.
Tuesday’s report concluded that by far the majority of perpetrators were Asian men, and said council officials had been unwilling to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist.
The report stated: “Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. 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.”
For years, the police failed to get a grip of the problem, dismissing many of the victims as “out of control” or as “undesirables” who were not worthy of police protection.[\quote]

back to the independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr ... 92578.html

The case – from 2001 and detailed in today’s independent report – was the last straw for the Home Office researcher who had persuaded the young victim to go to the police. She wrote to the chief constable of South Yorkshire police and at a subsequent meeting with a senior officer and council staff was firmly told never to do such a thing again. When she handed in her research data to the Home Office, the council suspended her erroneously, and then sidelined her so that her part of a report on prostitution was never completed.

The story highlights the atmosphere of cover-up and collusion at Rotherham Council. Nobody in the upper echelons of the child-care system could say they were not aware of the raft of warnings. But a collective failure of leadership meant continued, well-founded warnings about the widespread sexual abuse of children were suppressed, ignored or played down because of short-term political considerations.

The priority in Rotherham was jobs and investment and, to some senior figures, any focus on child sexual exploitation was an unwelcome sideshow. In one extraordinary episode in 2009, a senior unnamed official shouted and swore through an hour-long meeting as he complained that Rotherham had “too many looked-after children” which accounted for the council’s spending problems.

The report highlights the highly dysfunctional atmosphere among both officers and councillors which led to the “blatant” failure of its leadership. One person told the inquiry team “the member barometer re sexual matters was skewed”.

The report details an atmosphere of bullying, machismo and sexism at a council where senior women officers were not welcomed and difficult issues of rape and sexual exploitation of children could not be discussed. It heard evidence that the council was a “very grubby environment” in which to work where one woman was encouraged to wear shorter skirts to get on and a senior member said women were fit only for “cooking, washing and darning”.

And yet Professor Alexis Jay said that three reports in 2002, 2003 and 2006 could not have been clearer in their description of what was going on. The first was suppressed because senior council officials did not believe the evidence. The next two, that linked child abuse and drugs, were ignored.

Police colluded with the council’s inaction. The report said that officers from the South Yorkshire force regarded “many child victims with contempt”. The report heard of two cases where fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused only to be arrested themselves when police were called.

The councillor with responsibility for children’s services in Rotherham for part of the period covered by the report was Shaun Wright, the current police and crime commissioner – the elected watchdog – of the force. Political opponents called on him to consider his position.

[/quote]

But if you want some truly nasty writing: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 92497.html


TLDR:

top level council and police suppressing the reports becuase they 1) didn't believe them 2) didn't want to believe them 3) thought the kids involved were scum anyway. This pressure trickles down through the council hierarchy taking on weak excuses and pretences, to the point where anyone with ambition just avoids the topic.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I hope these guys get the whole bookshelf thrown at them. The council leader stepping down sounds way too much like a cop-out, "oh, I'll take responsibility and resign." Sorry sunshine, it doesn't work that way.

This part in particular is pretty damning:

"In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual."

That's some messed up shit right there.

[Thanas]

Yeah, that is a massive scandal, on par with the german foster care scandal or the catholic church seminary scandals.

[darth_timon]

I find it unimaginable that child abuse would be allowed to carry on on such a scale, for fear of racism claims. I know which is worse, and to not act out of racism fears is beyond the pale. It's cowardly and shameful.

[NecronLord]

You don't need to rely on the news-media, the whole report is available online

[cosmicalstorm]

One of the investigators behind this scandal claims she was bullied and called a racist. One of the victims might have been murdered and turned into kebab? This reads like a horror story from BNP

'I was called a liar and a racist for exposing this sex gang abuse horror', by SUE REID

Report found 1,400 children abused between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham
Majority of victims described the perpetrators as 'Asian' men
The figure is likely to be a conservative estimate of the true scale
Victims terrorised with guns and doused in petrol and threatened with fire
More than a third of the cases were already know to agencies


Even those of us who warned for years of young girls being traded in provincial towns as sex slaves were shocked at yesterday’s revelations of the scale of the crimes.

Particularly shameful was the silence of police, councillors and senior social workers. For crucial information about the crimes that had been given to the authorities — often by parents frantic about their daughters going missing or turning up drunk and dishevelled late at night — was either suppressed or ignored.

And so the brutal street-grooming and sexual abuse went on for 16 years. One girl quoted in the report says she thought ‘gang-rape was a usual part of growing up’.

It was many years ago that I began investigating this scandal for the Mail. At first, I was accused by some of making up the stories that were, in fact, told to me by parents and the abused girls themselves. I was also branded racist.

The reason? I had dared to mention the uncomfortable truth about this abhorrent behaviour: most of the victims are white or of mixed race, while all too often the perpetrators come from Britain’s South Asian communities.

Yesterday’s report was a vindication of the Mail’s journalism as Professor Alexis Jay said that the majority of the abusers were Pakistani males.

Crucially, I believe the reason the crimes were not tackled properly by the authorities was because the racial make-up of the perpetrators was a taboo subject.

In the politically correct culture of modern Britain, police, councillors and social services chiefs were terrified of being accused of racism if they highlighted crimes by racial minorities.

Instead, they shamefully blamed the girls for being out of control, wilful young teenagers who eagerly consented to sex with men old enough, in some cases, to be their fathers or even grandfathers in exchange for a ‘good time’.

Even the fact that the grooming gangs referred to their victims as ‘white trash’ did not seem to provoke a murmur of alarm from those in authority.

It was four years ago that a confidential document compiled by the police admitted for the first time an unpalatable fact about sexual exploitation of girls by gangs in South Yorkshire.

‘There is a problem with networks of Muslim offenders both locally and nationally,’ said the report, which was leaked to the Mail and other newspapers.

‘This is particularly the case in Sheffield, and even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with Asian males exploiting young white females.’

As a result, Rotherham’s then MP Denis MacShane blamed a ‘misplaced racial sensitivity’ for the lack of action by the police to follow through their investigations and he questioned the role of the local Pakistani community. At last, the truth began to trickle out.

Mohammed Shafiq, the director of Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for harmony between different ethnic communities, was one of the first within the Muslim community to address the problem.

Like many other decent-thinking Muslims, he was appalled at what was happening. Extraordinarily, he received death threats for what he said.

Subsequently, he has said: ‘What I said has been proved right — that if we did not tackle the problem, there would be more abusers and more girls getting harmed.’

It is vital to stress two important things. First, that the great majority of Asian men are law-abiding citizens with strong family values. Second, that rape and paedophilia are problems across all sectors of society and have nothing to do with race and ethnicity.

Yet the responsibility for these crimes to continue unpunished for so long lies with the weakness of those authorities whose duty it is to care for the vulnerable.

As one of the Rotherham girl victims told ITV last night: ‘The authorities knew how old I was. They knew my abuser could be a danger to other children as well.

‘They had full knowledge of it. They just never did anything. The authorities should get the same punishment as the men who did this to me.’

During my investigations, one charity in Rotherham (that had been set up to counsel abused girls) told me it was not prepared to reveal the racial make-up of the sex gangs. Another, the Coalition For The Removal Of Pimping in Leeds, refused to hint at the background of the criminals.

It seemed to me utterly wrong for the ethnicity of the suspects to be kept secret. It was an impediment to the police’s chances of catching the criminals.

But now a series of successful criminal prosecutions have been made and yesterday’s report is, at last, honest about the scandal. Shockingly, in two cases, the fathers of two girls who tracked down their daughters — and rescued them from houses where they had been gang-raped — were arrested themselves by police.

Other families were terrorised (to try to silence them) by gangs sitting in cars outside their houses, smashing windows and making continual abusive phone calls.

Speaking on conditions of strict anonymity because she fears for her safety even though she has now left the town, one of the early victims of the Rotherham gangs told me that she was at primary school when she was first attacked.

‘One minute I was playing with dolls, the next I was a sex slave.’

She had met two Asians in their 20s and 30s at a shopping centre where she went on Saturdays with her parents. The men said that they wanted to be her friends. They started picking her up after school in flash cars, including a Bentley with personalised number plates, plying her with vodka, cigarettes and cannabis.

‘I thought I was having a great time. It was exciting to start with. I had no idea the men were part of a gang,’ she recalled.

But one day, the leader of the gang led her to a patch of wasteland and raped her. The rest of the gang watched — laughing, calling her ‘white trash’ and photographing the assault on their mobile phones. Afterwards, she was left to pick herself up, wash the blood off her clothes in the nearby public lavatory and catch a bus home.

Then the threats began. ‘They said they would firebomb my home with my parents inside, shoot me with a pistol, rape my mother and kill my older brother if I told anyone about the rape. In my child’s mind I wanted to believe the gang leader was my boyfriend and had feelings for me, but soon he was making money out of me by selling me to other men.’

This girl’s story was not a one-off. A frighteningly similar scenario was played out time and time again by the gangs.

As yesterday’s report finally confirmed, sex slavery is an organised and violent crime which, police say, reaps four times as much money for these gangs as drug-dealing. Perhaps the last word should go to the girl hoodwinked by the Bentley-driving gang when she was just 13.

She says: ‘Most of the men running the sex slave gangs in the north of England are Asians of Pakistani origin. But very few of the authorities will admit this.’

Now, at last, they are doing so. Let’s hope it means a fresh chapter and that girls in Britain will never suffer at the hands of such evil men again.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -REID.html

[Iroscato]

One of the investigators behind this scandal claims she was bullied and called a racist. One of the victims might have been murdered and turned into kebab? This reads like a horror story from BNP

That would be because it's an article from the Daily Mail, a paper dedicated solely to taking the UK back to 1954, any way it can.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Also, that article mentioned nothing about kebabs, so I've no idea where you got that.

[TheFeniX]

You don't need to rely on the news-media, the whole report is available online

I couldn't make it more than half way through that report. I keep seeing post-2000 dates in the report and it boggles my mind. You (naively) expect to see shit like that with dates before you were born. I couldn't imagine having to write this report.

This is just one excerpt that makes me physically nauseous.

We read the files of ten boys who were groomed and abused by the lone male prosecuted and sentenced in 2007, and a further seven files of boys/young men who were his alleged victims. Following the trial, children’s social care considered only two of the ten victims to meet the threshold for social care, although many had been raped and at least one was suspected of being involved in abusing other child victims. So far as we could ascertain from the files, none of these children was referred to Risky Business, and only one was referred for specialist counselling, where there was a long waiting list. One of the children who failed to meet the threshold for social care went on to become a serious sex offender, convicted of the abduction and rape of young girls.

The sad part is (as terrible as the whole thing is): it's hard to even know who direct all my hate toward. There's so much failure on so many levels. I'm going to have to cut myself off, because I'd otherwise just go full Internet Tough Guy of what my response would be if I was in charge.

[Siege]

Rotherham child abuse: Police commissioner will stay on

South Yorkshire's police commissioner has vowed to stay in the job despite calls from his own party for him to quit over child abuse in Rotherham.

An inquiry found at least 1,400 children in the town were sexually exploited by predominantly Asian criminal gangs between 1997 and 2013.

Shaun Wright was the Labour councillor in charge of children's services at Rotherham Council from 2005 to 2010.

He said he was the most appropriate person to hold the post of PCC.

A report commissioned by the council was published on Tuesday and revealed the massive scale of abuse in Rotherham.

The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled "racist" if they focused on victims' descriptions of the majority of abusers as "Asian" men.

In the wake of the report's findings, political rivals and colleagues said Labour PCC Mr Wright should stand down from his role.

A Labour spokesman told the BBC: "In the light of this report, it's appropriate... Shaun Wright should step down."

Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, said Shaun Wright "needs to stand up and be counted for what happened under his watch".

She added that "the reality is that under his watch when he was working in the council all of this abuse was going on it wasn't being picked up. And for me it's a clear message he needs to send to the victims that we are here to support you, we did wrong by you. He's got to resign."

In light of how absolutely sickening the news out of Rotherham has been to think he's the right man for the job this man has to be either completely delusional, or fully aware that his successor will likely charge him with being complicit and/or completely failing in his goddamn duty.

[cosmicalstorm]

BBC has done their best to report this without mentioning the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Imagine the outroar if the tables were turned, a bunch of immigrant girls molested by middle aged white men.

[PKRudeBoy]

BBC has done their best to report this without mentioning the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Imagine the outroar if the tables were turned, a bunch of immigrant girls molested by middle aged white men.

They'd hang Gary Glitter.

[madd0ct0r]

BBC has done their best to report this without mentioning the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Imagine the outroar if the tables were turned, a bunch of immigrant girls molested by middle aged white men.

They said Pakistani on the news clip I saw.

[Vendetta]

In light of how absolutely sickening the news out of Rotherham has been to think he's the right man for the job this man has to be either completely delusional, or fully aware that his successor will likely charge him with being complicit and/or completely failing in his goddamn duty.

The job of a Police Commissioner in the UK is basically a no-job. They have almost no power to do anything to the structure of the force they are supposed to be commissioner of, and whist they are elected there is basically no public interest in doing so (one position managed a voter turnout as low as 12% last time).


Though Wright should certainly be turfed out, it won't actually achieve much from anything but a PR standpoint for the force. South Yorkshire Police could probably use all the good PR it can get though, given this and the recent publication of the Hillsborough disaster enquiry that found that the force had falsified over a hundred witness statements to shift blame from their poor crowd management onto the Liverpool fans (though the actual event was 22 years ago so there wasn't really anyone left to sack for it).

Really gives me confidence....

[cosmicalstorm]

BBC has done their best to report this without mentioning the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Imagine the outroar if the tables were turned, a bunch of immigrant girls molested by middle aged white men.

They said Pakistani on the news clip I saw.

I retract that comment.

[Vendetta]

Further criticism of the culture at South Yorkshire Police

It all smells to me like a policing culture that values having the crime statistics look right far higher than actually policing a community for the good of that community.