But for many years now, the name “Rotherham” has meant only one thing to the rest of the country: the sexual abuse scandal of the first decade and a half of this century, in which gangs of men of Pakistani origin—descendants of immigrants to the town—sexually abused white girls in an organized and systematic fashion. This activity was ongoing, unbeknown to me, though not to the authorities, during my brief residence in Rotherham.
I cannot do better to describe the scandal than to quote the first five paragraphs of the executive summary of the independent report into it, published in 2014. Written by a professor of social work, Alexis Jay, it has the power to shock, as few official documents have:
No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.
In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. 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. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.
This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day. In May 2014, the caseload of the specialist child sexual exploitation team was 51. More CSE cases were held by other children’s social care teams. There were 16 looked after children who were identified by children’s social care as being at serious risk of sexual exploitation or having been sexually exploited. In 2013, the Police received 157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation in the Borough.
Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham. This came from those working in residential care and from youth workers who knew the young people well.