Rotherham's Disgrace


The Times newspaper led the way in exposing the scale of the sex abuse scandal in Rotherham and the role played by the local Council which not only failed the victims but went on to reject the damning criticism in an independent report from Professor Alexis Jay.

So the following Times editorial is well worth a read. 

Rotherham’s Disgrace


The town that has become a byword for grooming and rape could have reformed itself. Instead its council chose to attack The Times for exposing its wrongdoing 

It has taken three years for Rotherham council to begin to acknowledge the gravity of the child sex abuse scandal that it failed to prevent. Yesterday the council cabinet resigned en masse. They did so within minutes of the release of a devastating government report on a council exposed as corrupt, rudderless and “unfit for purpose”.

Rotherham needs a fresh start, the report said. There is no doubt of that, but even now there is little sign that the departing councillors truly understand what they did wrong. A culture of fear and denial persisted until the end of their shameful tenure — fear of being labelled racist, denial that race was part of Rotherham’s problem and denial that their wilful blindness was only making matters worse.

Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, has appointed a team of interim commissioners to clean house in Rotherham and prepare for fresh local elections next year. This is a bold and necessary intervention. But it will not be the end of a wider grooming scandal that care workers and police have yet to tackle with the determination it demands. The worry is that as Rotherham blinks in the harsh light of national scrutiny, grooming gangs continue to operate with impunity elsewhere.

The extent of Rotherham’s complicity in its own disgrace is only now becoming clear. Reports in The Times from 2010 revealed that gangs of mainly Pakistani men were grooming and raping dozens and possibly hundreds of teenage white girls and had been for more than a decade.

A report last year by Professor Alexis Jay, commissioned by the council, confirmed this newspaper’s findings and conservatively estimated the number of girls targeted by Rotherham’s gangs at 1,400. It pointed to a near total failure of the council’s children’s services to report the abuse to police or to stop it.

The point of the new report was to assess Rotherham’s response to Professor Jay’s criticisms. Most councillors simply rejected them. Some did so on the ground that these appalling crimes, including the regular gang-rape of teenagers in the council’s care, were first reported in a newspaper assumed wrongly to be a political enemy of a Labour-run council.

The worst crimes in Rotherham have, of course, been committed by the rapists themselves. Five have been convicted and dozens more cases are being handled by the National Crime Agency. But the evidence is stronger than ever that council members have actively intimidated whistleblowers and covered up critical information. In at least three cases councillors and police have been accused of sex crimes themselves. The rot ran deep. The delay in confronting it has compounded the misery of hundreds of damaged young women robbed of their childhoods.

At the heart of the scandal lies what Louise Casey, the author of the report, calls a “misplaced political correctness”. This refusal to acknowledge that virtually all the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin stemmed from “over-compensation” within a boorish and bullying work environment, the report says, but also from fear of individuals. One, former councillor Jahangir Akhtar, is alleged to have intervened to prevent random safety checks on taxis. There is a well-known link between taxis and child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

Rotherham did not have to bury its collective head in the sand. In Rochdale, when similar grooming cases came to light, new council leadership transformed protection for at-risk children with reforms of every relevant department. One council worker said the response to criticism in Rotherham, by contrast, was to “cover up and destroy” the career of whoever made it. Mr Pickles must find the next Rotherham before more young lives are destroyed.

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