The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal - Part 2

Denial, cover-up, and the 'Children's Capital of Culture'

One weekend in 2002 the office of Risky Business, an outreach project that had supported the young female victims of child trafficking gangs in Rotherham, was broken into. Nothing was taken except some case files that were being analysed by a Home Office researcher who was investigating child sexual exploitation in the town. Computer records related to the cases were wiped.

The researcher’s draft report had been shown to the council and police authority. It exposed systematic victim blaming by police officers and care professionals, and it identified perpetrators. It was clear that the office raid was not a straightforward burglary, and that it had been carried out by council staff. The researcher, who told a parliamentary inquiry she feared for her life after being threatened by police officers, was suspended for ‘gross misconduct’. She was only allowed back on condition that she had no further contact with victims or their files. Rotherham was excluded from the final Home Office report, because of ‘implementation problems’.

“The researcher’s line-manager … confirmed that there was a great deal of personal hostility and anger towards the researcher and her work on the part of senior people. Much of what was contained in this report, and in particular the criticisms and concerns of the research officer, has been confirmed by the Inquiry from other sources … The secrecy around this report, the discrepancies in the accounts we received from senior people and the treatment of the researcher were all deeply troubling to the inquiry team. They have inevitably led to suspicion of collusion and intended cover-up. If the senior people concerned had paid more attention to the content of the report, more might have been done to help children who were being violently exploited and abused.”

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

‘Missing’ documents were a regular feature of local authority inaction in the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal. After the Jay Report was published in 2014,  ’Elizabeth’ tried to obtain a file from supported accommodation where she had been living at the time of being trafficked and abused. She knew that this file contained full details of a time when she had been trafficked from Rotherham to Bristol, to be abused as part of a drug deal between two gangs. She was told the file did not exist. A whistleblower later revealed that sensitive files had been transferred from the supported accommodation to the council. Years later, a trial of the two men who had trafficked ‘Elisabeth’ to Bristol was thrown out for lack of evidence - evidence that would have been in the ‘missing’ file. 

Resignations

Jahangar Akhtar had resigned in 2013 as Deputy Leader of Rotherham council, and as vice-chair of South Yorkshire police and crime panel. He resigned when it was revealed that he had brokered a deal under which a relative of his, Arshid Hussain, would hand over to the police a 14 -year-old pregnant girl he was abusing in return for an assurance he wouldn’t be detained.

The following year, in the wake of the Jay Report, more resignations followed, though few who resigned seemed to take much responsibility for what they had let happen on their watch.

Roger Stone, the council Leader, had been awarded an OBE for ‘services to local government.’ He had presided over a sexist bullying culture that silenced female staff and made it difficult for them to raise concerns about the sexual exploitation of girls. He attempted to divert all the blame for not tackling the trafficking gangs onto South Yorkshire Police.

Shaun Wright, Police and Crime Commissioner and former Rotherham council cabinet member for children’s services, refused to accept any responsibility for the scandal, and tried to hang on to his job for as long as possible. He stood down only after a disastrous appearance before a parliamentary committee, where an MP called him “the least credible witness I’ve ever come across.”

Martin Kimber, the council’s Chief Executive, was paid £26,000 to retire early, before he could complete an internal investigation into the 2002 theft of files from the Risky Business office.

Joyce Thacker, the council’s Director of Children’s Services, had been awarded an OBE for ‘services for young people”. She was instrumental in suppressing information about the ethnic background of men suspected of murdering a girl they had abused. She claimed that her only concern was to protect the girl’s family, despite documentary evidence about her worry about ‘community cohesion impact.’ She was given £40,000 in return for agreeing to resign.

Moving on?

“We need to stop victim-blaming and dig deeper to try to help those who report child sexual exploitation. We need to do this so other children do not end up like me.”

(Elizabeth Harper, Snatched, 2022)

Some of the Rotherham survivors of the child sexual exploitation gangs have gone on to becoming activists - telling their stories,  and giving training sessions to raise agency awareness about child sexual exploitation. Sammy Woodhouse has worked with a fostering agency, the NHS, several police forces,  and the National Crime Agency.; Elizabeth Harper has worked with local businesses and the Department of Justice, as well as directly with children at risk.

Such initiatives by survivors, alongside the critical commentary of the Jay and Casey reports, have brought about some change, but they have also been met with considerable institutional incomprehension and resistance. One positive move was the launch by the National Crime Agency of Operation Stovewood, specifically to investigate allegations of abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.  Survivors noticed that the NCA officers treated them with respect, and that they were successful in arresting perpetrators and bringing them to justice.

A separate inquiry by the Independent Office for Police Conduct into the failings of South Yorkshire Police, Operation Linden, was less encouraging. Its 2022 Report quoted numerous examples of failure by South Yorkshire Police to take child sexual abuse seriously. Police officers often viewed survivors as ‘runaways’ and ‘petty criminals’ rather than as victims of grooming and exploitation, confirming to victims what perpetrators had told them would be the authorities’ response if they reported the abuse.

One police officer had believed a 12 year old survivor had consented to sex, even though in law a child that young cannot give consent. The father of a 15 -year-old rape survivor, whose internal injuries required surgery, was told that this would ‘teach her a lesson’. South Yorkshire Police not only blamed survivors for their abuse, they failed to take action that would disrupt ongoing abuse.  Time after time, perpetrators were not challenged, let alone charged with a criminal offence. Instead, abusive men’s control over the lives of their victims was reinforced.

Despite Operation Linden uncovering numerous examples of police officers ignoring men who were abusing children in plain sight, only 43 complaint allegations were upheld. 14 officers were found to have committed misconduct or gross misconduct, but none were dismissed. One especially disturbing finding was that many survivors had alleged that particular officers were on friendly terms with perpetrators and supported their exploitation and abuse, yet this does not seem to have been taken up by the investigation.

Rotherham council, like South Yorkshire Police, have found it hard to take child sexual exploitation seriously. At times they seemed determined to undermine the limited successes of the justice system in jailing perpetrators. Arshid Hussain, leader of one the most abusive  Rotherham trafficking gangs (and relative of the former council Deputy Leader Jahangar Akhtar), had been convicted in 2016. for 23 offences against 9 girls (including Sammy Woodhouse). He was jailed for 35 years. A couple of years later, social workers from the council advised Hussain that he should apply for access to the son he had fathered as a result of raping Woodhouse, despite knowing that both mother and son were opposed to this.

In 2019, Rotherham Rise, a charity funded by the council, appointed Norsheen Akhtar to run counselling services for child sexual exploitation survivors. She is the daughter of disgraced former Deputy Leader of the council Jahangir Akhtar, and a relative of Arshid Hussain. She has access to information held by the charity on witnesses who testified against her father and her relative.

Rotherham is not alone 

Shocking though Rotherham council has been in ignoring the abuse of children in its care, it is not alone. There are similar examples of council failure where the perpetrators are white males, and the victims are boys (the London Borough of Islington) or predominantly black (the London Borough of Lambeth).  Cover-up and denial seem to be the standard response to abuse - more about disbelieving vulnerable children and protecting institutional reputation than maintaining community cohesion.

“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 Muslims, OpenDemocracy 23 June 2023)

Eight years after publication of her Rotherham findings, Alexis Jay presented another influential report - the findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Her report covered a range of institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, residential care homes, residential schools, and custodial institutions. The common factor is that the abusers are adult males, the abused are vulnerable children, and the systems that are supposed to protect children are stacked against them. In most of the cases that were examined abusers acted in isolation, though it was noted that “the sexual exploitation of children by groups of associated abusers continued to be widespread and greater than official statistics indicated.”

The legacy of silence

“This moment demands that we confront the cause: the sexism that sponsors men’s sexual entitlement to the bodies of children and women.  …  We know that sexual abuse is commonplace, it flourishes, it co-exists with surging awareness, alarm and resistance AND with cynical complacency ….  We know enough to know what is to be done - all we need to do is do it.”

(Beatrix Campbell, Secrets and Silence, 2022)

Sweeping abuse under the carpet is always damaging to the survivors, and it always gets in the way of taking effective action against perpetrators. It can also encourage false narratives that provide plausible explanations for what is going on, but divert attention away from the full extent of child abuse and its underlying causes.

Child trafficking by associated abusers in Rotherham has mainly been carried out by Muslim men of Pakistani heritage. Denying this has not only contributed to the silencing of survivors, it has allowed perpetrators to escape justice, and it has ensured that effective action to prevent continued abuse has not been initiated. It has also exacerbated community tensions, and  become a barrier to the integration that would be needed to bring about genuine community cohesion.

In such a situation, far right groups can have a field day. They can appear to be the only ones listening to survivors and acting as their protectors. Focusing attention on the race and/or religion of perpetrators, rather than on their  sex, they stoke up community division, and leave unchallenged the entitlement to the bodies of children that patriarchal culture bestows on men of all races and religions.

The August 2024 riot

The appalling riot that took place on 4 August outside a hotel in Manvers, just north of Rotherham, was the most violent of the riots that occurred in England last summer, in the wake of the murder of three young girls in Southport. Video footage widely circulated at the time showed white men photographing on their phones other men in masks hurling missiles at the windows of the hotel and at the police protecting it. Attempts were made to set fire to the building, threatening the lives of the residents and staff inside. Few women appear in the footage, but earlier in the day, before the demonstration became violent, women with young children were there, either to observe or to take part.

The UK government’s 2021 decision to locate asylum seekers in Rotherham, with its history of child sexual exploitation gangs and the presence of far right groups seeking to capitalise on the situation, had been insensitive. Its choice to house asylum seekers in a hotel that had been one of those where men in the trafficking gangs took children to be raped was particularly provocative. The local community had accepted the hotel’s change of use when, initially, it housed Afghan refugee families fleeing the Taliban. But when it changed to housing only single men, the mood changed to one of fear. 

The asylum seekers in the Manvers hotel had nothing to do with the Rotherham-based abusers of Pakistani-heritage  (almost all of them born in the town), nor with the brutal murder of 3 young girls in Southport that had triggered the riots. But the far right narrative had connected them, and turned the hotel into a symbol of establishment disregard for the safety of local residents. Anyone who took part in the attempt to set the hotel alight was responsible for participating in an act of attempted murder. But the political establishment had prepared the ground for the riot - it was their cover-up and denial of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham that seemed to give some credence to the non-existent  link claimed by the far right, between the Southport murders, the Rotherham abuses, and the presence of asylum seekers in the hotel.

Rotherham - Children’s Capital of Culture?

“In 2025, Rotherham will become the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture”  - so claims the programme’s website. This initiative, it suggests, is “created by children and young people”, though little evidence for this is given. The funding, from the UK Government, the EU (so the website states, many years after the UK leaving the EU), and South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, suggests instead that the reality is more top down.

September’s Rotherham Show, in Clifton Park, featured a Children’s Capital of Culture Area, to give a taste of what to expect in 2025. One of the acts on the Saturday afternoon was Smashby, The programme write-up explained that “Smashby’s been a favourite on the UK Pride circuit since the age of 17 but cemented his status as ‘queer artist on the rise’ with their collaborations with RuPaul’s Drag Race stars Aja and Divina De Campo.” 

Smashby claims to be “on a bit of a journey with gender”, identifying as “non binary” and comfortable with “all pronouns”.  So we don’t ignore the message, eight of the eleven strong Children’s Capital of Culture Team give their she/her pronouns pride of place on their website profiles. Obsession with ‘gender’ is hardly going to be helpful for children attempting to escape sexual exploitation. It’s not an escape from abuse, it’s another form of abuse.

Will claiming to be  Children’s Capital of Culture enable Rotherham to put the past behind it, and embrace a new future in which children can thrive? Or is it still perpetuating the silence that has allowed, and is still allowing, abuse to continue? We shall see, though the evidence so far suggests that the latter, coupled with a dose of ‘gender’ ideology,  is more likely. 

“We’re making improvements that will help change the perception of Rotherham”. So explained Dave Shepherd (Rotherham Council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Social Inclusion) at the launch event in 2022.  His statement suggests that Rotherham council sees the Children’s Capital of Culture as a rebranding exercise - more an attempt to salvage the town’s (and the council’s) reputation than to improve children’s lives. Nothing on the programme’s website suggests otherwise. 

Meanwhile, the abuse continues.