The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal - Part 1

Childhood innocence and trafficking gangs

For four successive summers as a child in the late 1950s, my parents took me on holiday to Scotland. Much as I enjoyed the two weeks we spent there, the highlight for me was the three or four days we stayed with family in Rotherham, in the North of England, on the way back to our home on the south coast.

My father had grown up at the end of the nineteenth century in Treeton, a South Yorkshire coalmining village (next door to Orgreave coking plant, the scene of a brutal police assault on picketing miners during the 1984 Miners’ strike). My grandfather worked at the newly opened Treeton pit, making and maintaining harnesses for the pit ponies, My father left school at 12 to work in the colliery office, before leaving Yorkshire to work (and prosper) in the nascent car industry, first in Manchester and then in London. By the 1950s, his two sisters had moved the four miles from Treeton to Rotherham. 

The Rotherham visits were to stay with one of my aunts and her husband, and spend time with them and their extended family. Visually, the town looked grim. Each year the imposing town centre church, black with soot, seemed to have become even blacker. But my abiding memory is of warmth. Literal warmth from the coal fire that was always burning, whatever the weather. And warmth from the Yorkshire pudding that was served before Sunday dinner. But most of all emotional warmth from my northern working class relatives, so unlike my middle class home environment down south. 

Clifton Park

My aunt and uncle lived on a drab council estate. But it was near to Clifton Park.  Every year, my retired steelworker uncle would take my cousin and I to that wonderful park, to eat ice cream and go to the circus. The circus acts were corny, and both my cousin and I worried about how the animals were treated, but I especially treasured our afternoons there.

My fond memories of Clifton Park and Rotherham, probably rose-tinted, were ones of childhood innocence. So it came as a shock, decades later, to hear of the Rotherham trafficking gangs, and the widespread sexual exploitation of children in the town, much of which, apparently, took place in Clifton Park.  Another shock came this summer, when rioters violently attacked a Rotherham hotel that now housed asylum seekers. Shock was followed with disbelief when  I learned of official plans to rebrand Rotherham as ‘Children’s Capital of Culture.’

Child trafficking gangs 

I first became aware of the widespread sexual abuse of Rotherham girls in 2012, when journalist Andrew Norfolk exposed it in the Times. I didn’t read the article, but it was covered on national radio. I think Angela and I heard about it, after years of her ME-imposed radio silence, on Woman’s Hour (this was when that BBC programme still knew what a woman was). The sheer scale of the abuse shocked us, and we wondered what we had been missing during our ME-induced isolation. Quite a lot, it turned out. Risky Business, an outreach project working with vulnerable girls, had uncovered the problem 12 years earlier, but had struggled to make anyone in authority take notice. 

Abuse on an industrial scale wasn’t confined to Rotherham. Girls in many de-industrialised Northern towns had experienced similar levels of sexual exploitation by trafficking gangs. Not that we’d have necessarily known, as there had been little reporting of it in mainstream media. Feminist journalist Julie Bindel had published, back in 2007,  a Sunday Times  article on child sexual exploitation gangs in Blackburn. She had also been trying, since 2005, to publish another article, about the disappearance of a 14-year -old victim of child sexual exploitation in Blackpool. That article was rejected by many outlets because the subject matter was considered too ‘sensitive’ (it was eventually published by the Guardian in 2008). 

It was only after Andrew Norfolk’s 2012 article, it seemed, that there was widespread recognition of the scale and ubiquity of the abuse. His article concentrated on the failings of the local authority and police in Rotherham to take effective action against the trafficking gangs. Norfolk’s focus on the ethnic background of the perpetrators contrasted with Bindel’s concern to focus on the victims, and on the sex rather than the race of the perpetrators.

The grooming process

Survivors’ experiences differed, but with many common features. Most of the Rotherham trafficking gangs were Moslem men of Pakistani heritage. Most of their victims were vulnerable white girls from working class families. It’s clear from survivors’ accounts that grooming, initially to win their trust, was central to men being able both to exploit the girls sexually, and then get away with it.

Appearing to be sympathetic and supportive was where it usually started:

“He made me feel like nobody had ever made me feel before. I felt like a princess, special and wanted, and he was my Prince Charming. … ‘Don’t worry,’ Ash said. ‘I don’t want to rush you. That’s the last thing I want to do. I’ll wait until you’re ready. I love you.’”

(Sammy Woodhouse, Just a Child, 2018)

Sometimes men used women to do the initial grooming for them:

“She’d invited a schoolgirl like me back to her flat so that I could drink and smoke with her all day, every day. But she hadn’t done it because she was lonely. In fact, as I was beginning to realise, it was quite the opposite. She’d done it so that she could procure young and vulnerable girls for sex with men … I didn’t realise it then, but Shafina’s initial kindness had been part of the grooming process. She had groomed me into feeling a misplaced loyalty. Not only that, she convinced me she was the only person who cared.”

(Elizabeth Harper, Snatched, 2022).

Alcohol, and then drugs, were offered to the children in exchange for sex. Becoming addicted to drugs made it almost impossible to leave the abusers who supplied them::

“My abusers had it all worked out. By now I drank almost every night and I was taking more and more drugs just to get through the day …. It wasn’t long before they were taking me all over the country and pimping me out to their friends. Of course, I didn’t see it like that at the time. It was just part of the deal, the price I had to pay to get the drink and drugs that I needed. … All I cared about was coke; the sex was something I had to get through so that I could get my fix.”
(Sarah Wilson, Violated, 2015)

The girls were separated from their families, and warned that if they revealed what was being done to them they would be blamed, both by their families and by the authorities. They were told that their families would be punished if they attempted to escape:

“A short while after leaving Shafina’s flat, I received threatening text messages on my mobile - both had been sent from unknown numbers. The first read ‘your (sic) not wanted at home,’ The second: ‘if you go back there, we will blow your mum’s house up.’”

(Elizabeth Harper, Snatched, 2022)

When Elizabeth Harper was about to testify against one of her abusers, and against two men who had trafficked her to London, that threat was reinforced with direct intimidation, as her father explained:

“Me and your mum, we’d started to walk up the road, just outside the house. We were just walking along when these two cars pulled up alongside us  … These lads, El, they were waving this bottle around. It was stuffed with rags and they said they’d soaked it in petrol , and they, well, they said they were going to fire-bomb our house unless you kept your mouth shut.”

Institutional failure

In a series of Times articles Andrew Norfolk had interviewed survivors, and been shown confidential internal documents by a whistleblower. These revealed a horrendous catalogue of abuse.  Yet authorities with safeguarding responsibilities - the police, the local authority, schools, etc - had little contact with the abused girls, and where there was contact, hardly any action was taken. 

“Countless girls were twice betrayed, first by men they thought cared for them and subsequently by the failure of police and social services to hold anyone to account. Groups of young and older men, most of Pakistani heritage but also Iraqi Kurds and Kosovans, were operating in different areas of the town, known to police and social services but seemingly immune from prosecution.”

The ethnic dimension is something Norfolk was struck by. Of an internal unpublished safeguarding report, he noted that  “It was a hard-hitting report in all but one respect. Issues of ethnicity and culture remained taboo.” The report had insisted that “There are sensitive issues of ethnicity with the potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting this report to ensure that its findings  embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions/allusions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided … the cultural characteristics are locally sensitive in terms of diversity.”

South Yorkshire police reacted to The Times articles with particular hostility, accusing the paper of putting children’s lives at risk by disclosing information from the confidential documents.

Norfolk had acknowledged that “a large majority of convicted child-sex offenders in Britain are white men, usually acting alone”, but the focus of successive articles he wrote about sexual abusers in Rotherham and other towns focussed on men of Pakistani heritage. Reliable data on the actual breakdown of child sex abusers by ethnic background are almost non existent, partly because the authorities think collecting and publishing them would risk inflaming community tensions. The limited evidence available suggests, though, that men with a Pakistani heritage are over-represented among trafficking gang offenders, but under-represented among offenders acting alone. 

A series of independent reports of institutional failure in Rotherham followed The Times’ revelations.

The Jay Report (2014) estimated that there had been more than 1400 victims of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the the period between 1997 and 2013. Numerous institutional failings were identified, but it was the Report’s focus on the ethnic pattern of offending that received most media attention (its finding that men’s abuse of girls of Pakistani heritage mirrored the abuse of white girls was rarely repeated):

“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. 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.”

(Alexis Jay, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, 2014)

The Casey Report (2015) noted that “Rotherham has at times taken more care of its reputation than of its needy. Child abuse and exploitation happens all over the country., but Rotherham is different in that it was repeatedly told by its youth service (Risky Business) what.was happening and it chose, not only not to act, but to close that service down.” The Report rejected suggestions made by some council members and officials that community cohesion required ignoring the ethnicity of perpetrators.

A particularly disturbing section of the Louise Casey’s Report related to the attitudes of South Yorkshire Police: “They did not seem to believe the girls or their families or those who reported problems. They did not treat them as victims …  There were numerous occasions where girls were not believed. They were threatened with wasting police time, they were told they had consented to sex and, on occasion, they were arrested at the scene of the crime, rather than the perpetrators. Police did not understand the terror which many victims lived in and their consequent fear of testifying and their anxiety over whether police could protect them.”

‘Community cohesion’ vs children’s lives

Survivors’ testimonies and inquiry reports both reveal that the authorities in Rotherham were unwilling to draw attention to the ethnic origins of the perpetrators for fear that this might undermine community cohesion.  This enforced silence was particularly damaging to survivors, as it denied their experience. It didn’t even work in its own terms, as, far from calming community tensions, it exacerbated them:

“Rotherham’s suppression of these uncomfortable issues … has prevented discussion and effective action to tackle the problem. This has allowed perpetrators to remain at large, has let victims down, and perversely, has allowed the far right to try and exploit the situation.”

(Louise Casey, Report of Inspection of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, 2015)

Far right groups like the English Defence League (EDL) had been using evidence of sexual exploitation by Pakistani-heritage gangs as a focus for their anti-Islam street protests. There was a lot of diversion going on here, as it took attention away from the fact that EDL had unusually high numbers of child sex abusers in its ranks. It also diverted attention away from questioning why so many men feel entitled to sexually abuse children. Men from different cultural groups may abuse in different ways, but to focus on just one form of abuse, typically carried out by men from one cultural group, can make it seem that only that type of abuse matters.

“It’s not a straight race thing. It’s not a culture thing. It’s a perpetrator thing. We’ve got perpetrators of all different backgrounds, cultures and races.”

(Caitlin Spencer, Trafficking survivor says she was told to blame Moslems, OpenDemocracy 23 June 2023)

Many survivors  resented it when their activism against abuse was hijacked by the far right:

“It was really strange seeing Rotherham on the news and in the papers every day (after the Jay Report was published in 2014), as for years it seemed like no one could have cared less what was going on here, no matter how awful it was. There were TV cameras everywhere when we went to the town hall, and there were loads of protestors with banners. Most people were exactly like us, families who had who had been affected and just wanted justice, but it really annoyed me when the idiots from the English Defence League turned up. They were just jumping on the bandwagon to try and make excuses for their pathetic racism. If they got their way, they’d have us believe every British-Pakistani man was a horrible paedophile, and of course that wasn’t true.”

(Sarah Wilson, Violated, 2015)

Conspiracy of silence

Once mainstream media interest died away, it became clear that the system that had let survivors down remained resistant to change. It is hardly surprising that some survivors would be drawn to political groups that appeared to be sympathetic to their concerns and would not let the issue go. In Rotherham, those groups included the far right. Many groups on the left that they might have hoped to be more open to confronting oppression embraced, instead, a ‘diversity’ agenda that deliberately avoided drawing attention to abusive behaviour by men from minority backgrounds. 

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali identified the predictable consequences, in a chapter of her book ‘Prey’ titled ‘The clock turns back’.  Her words, criticising the official understatement of assaults on women in the West by migrants from Muslim countries, apply even more pertinently to the sexual exploitation of children by men from minority backgrounds, whether or not they are migrants:

“In the interest of political expediency, politicians play down the threat and encourage the police to do the same. Excuses are made for criminal behaviour. Judges hand out light sentences to perpetrators. And the media self-censor their reporting - all in order, it is said, to avoid stoking racial and religious tensions or providing ammunition for right-wing populists This conspiracy of silence, or at least of understatement, has had predictable beneficiaries; none other than the right-wing populists.”

(Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey, 2021)

Coming next - Part 2, Denial, cover-up, and Rotherham’s bid to rebrand itself as “Children’s Capital of Culture.’