Back in 2014, a Yorkshire town made international headlines for all the wrong reasons. Rotherham in South Yorkshire is a name that is now synonymous with a crime that has sullied Britain’s name all over the world - organised gang rape. Throughout the UK, groups of men prey upon girls, usually from dysfunctional or chaotic backgrounds, rape them, and then force them into prostitution. For years, police did nothing to tackle these crimes, partly because, in the vast majority of cases, the victims were young white girls, and the rapists were Muslim immigrants or their descendants. The police did wish not to inflame “community tensions,” so the crimes went unpunished for decades.
Nevertheless, the Jay Report of 2014 revealed that more than 1,400 girls had fallen victim to rape gangs in Rotherham over the previous decade. A year later, I undertook a mammoth task: to find out how many white English girls had been similarly abused through the preceding five years. I wrote a lengthy report, which I will post here.
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‘Political Correctness’ and Alleged Cover-Up
The Jay Report was not the first in to the sexual abuse of young girls taking place in the town of Rotherham; three earlier reports had also been produced. One such report, known as ‘The Home Office Report’ was produced by a Home Office researcher in 2002. This criticised attitudes displayed by services in the town – including “indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation”. According to the Jay Report, the Home Office Report “stated that responsibility was continuously placed on young people’s shoulders, rather than with the suspected abusers”.
The Jay Report continues:
Senior officers in the police and the council were deeply unhappy about the data and evidence that underpinned the report. There was a suggestion that facts had been fabricated or exaggerated. Several sources reported that the researcher was subjected to personalised hostility at the hands of officials. She was unable to complete the last part of the research. The content which senior officers objected to has been shown with hindsight to be largely accurate. Had this report been treated with the seriousness it merited at the time by both the police and the council, the children involved then and later would have been better protected and abusers brought to justice. The events have led to suspicions of collusion and cover-up.
A different report, produced by Dr Angie Heal, presented a “vivid and alarming picture of the links between sexual exploitation, drugs, gangs and violent crime in Rotherham from 2002 to 2006. They were widely distributed to middle and senior managers in all key agencies. There is no record of any formal, specific discussion of these reports in Council papers”.
The Home Office Research
The Home Office Report was highly critical of services in Rotherham and of failures to protect children from sexual exploitation. Concerns were similar to those set out in the Jay Report. The Home Office Report maintained that blame was often placed on the young girl (some had been threatened with arrest for wasting police time, and some were seen as “promiscuous”). These concerns were met with “defensiveness and hostility”. The researcher told the Jay Inquiry of a lack of action to pursue perpetrators and that she had had several meetings with police at which intelligence on the identity of perpetrators was provided.
The Jay Report continues:
[The researcher] described a particular case that was ‘the final straw’. In 2001, a young girl who had been repeatedly raped had tried to escape her perpetrators but was terrified of reprisals. They had allegedly put all the windows in at the parental home and broken both of her brother’s legs ‘to send a message’. At that point, the child agreed to make a complaint to the Police. The researcher took her to the police station office where she would be interviewed in advance in order to familiarise her with the place and the officer who would be conducting the interview. Whilst there, the girl received a text from the main perpetrator. He had with him her 11-year old sister. He said repeatedly to her ‘your choice…’. The girl did not proceed with the complaint. She disengaged from the pilot and project and is quoted by the researcher as saying ‘you can’t protect me’. This incident raised questions about how the perpetrator knew where the young woman was and what she was doing.
Following this, she and some colleagues decided that she should put her concerns in writing to the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police and the Rotherham District Commander of Police. This letter was “approved by her manager and steering group” and delivered to Rotherham Police Station. This led to a meeting with the District Commander and senior Council officials, at which she was told “never to do such a thing again”. The content of the letter was not discussed.
When the content of her report was seen by senior Council officials and police, she was suspended on the grounds that she had “committed an act of gross misconduct” by including minutes of confidential meetings. She was reinstated however when it was revealed that the minutes had in fact been handed to the Home Office by her manager. She spent the remainder of her employment “working on policies and procedures, in a room on her own, forbidden access to the girls involved and not allowed to attend meetings or have access to further data”.
In her evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee investigation that followed the Jay Report, she said that she had attended several meetings with local police and informed them of suspected child abusers in Rotherham. These concerns were “disregarded, dismissed or minimised”.
She stated:
“During my final months at Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council I was subjected to intense personal hostility and intimidation, not just from Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, but also South Yorkshire Police. There is no doubt in my mind that I was placed under pressure to change and present my findings in a way that presented services in Rotherham in a better light”.
In a BBC Panorama documentary that followed the publication of the Jay Report, the researcher said that having told Council officials that the majority of the perpetrators came from the town’s Pakistani community, she was told: “You must never refer to that again, you must never refer to Asian men”. She went on: “her other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues”.
Furthermore, she claimed that the data she had collected inexplicably went missing: “they’d gained access to the office and they had taken my data, so out of the number of filing cabinets, there was one drawer emptied and it was emptied of my data. It had to be an employee of the council”.
Evidence that ethnicity played a part in the alleged Rotherham cover-up was also included in the report of Professor Jay, who wrote: “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.”
Indeed, within the report completed by Dr Angie Heal in 2006: “it was reported that a number of workers in the town involved with the issue believed that one of the difficulties which prevented CSE being dealt with effectively was the ethnicity of the perpetrators”.
NEXT CHAPTER - THE CASEY REPORT
Excellent and chilling in the same breath Anne Marie, thanks for writing this.
Anne you are the BEST