Scandal of the 1400 lost girls

Max 21C Min 1C
Wednesday August 27 2014 | thetimes.co.uk | No 71286
Only 60p to print members
How to age-proof your life
Matthew Parris on defying the odds
£1.20
The new It bag
(that we can
all afford) Times2
Scandal of the 1,400 lost girls
Officials failed to stop grooming by gangs amid racism fears
Andrew Norfolk
Chief Investigative Reporter
Failings by social workers and police
allowed 1,400 children in a northern
town to suffer years of “appalling
abuse”, almost all at the hands of men of
Pakistani origin, an independent
inquiry has found.
The leader of Rotherham council
resigned yesterday and offered
“heartfelt apologies” to girls as young as
11 in the South Yorkshire town who
were routinely gang-raped, abducted
and trafficked to other cities. Gangs
acted with virtual impunity for 15 years
while frontline staff were fearful of
highlighting their ethnicity “because it
might damage community cohesion”
and displease their bosses.
However, no official who worked in a
senior managerial position for the local
authority during that period has been
subjected to any disciplinary action.
The inquiry report described how
one girl had petrol poured over her and
another had a gun put to her head to
ensure compliance with her abusers’
demands.
Senior professionals charged with
protecting children were warned of
what was happening, yet young victims
who spoke out were treated with
disbelief or contempt by police and
social services.
Some were even blamed for the
crimes committed against them, the
report said.
When frontline youth workers submitted research in 2002, 2003 and 2006
to support their growing alarm at the
scale and nature of the child-sex
offending, the reports were suppressed
or ignored by senior officials.
Evidence was also found of a “macho,
sexist and bullying” culture within the
town hall. Female social workers were
advised by senior managers to wear
short skirts if they wanted to make
progress in their career.
Rotherham’s Labour council leader,
Roger Stone, resigned as soon as the
inquiry report was published yesterday
and apologised to victims.
The year-long inquiry, ordered by the
council in response to a lengthy
investigation by The Times, found no
definitive explanation for senior professionals’ consistent failure to protect
children and hold offenders to account.
However, the report’s independent
author, Alexis Jay, noted that “almost
all” the offenders identified by the
young, white victims were of Pakistani
heritage. She said there was a “widespread perception” among frontline
workers “that some senior people in the
council and the police wanted to play
down the ethnic dimension”.
Some staff were unsure about how to
speak about the crime pattern “for fear
of being thought racist”.
“I was told that some elected members seemed to be in denial about the
Continued on page 9, col 3
KEN MCKAY / REX
Wow factor Kate Bush, 56, took to the stage of the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith last night, 35 years after her one and only tour in 1979, and told her rapturous audience: “It’s only just begun.” Review, page 3
Ban on smoking e-cigarettes indoors ‘would cost countless lives’
Chris Smyth Health Correspondent
People should be banned from smoking
e-cigarettes indoors, the World Health
Organisation has suggested, prompting
accusations of an overreaction that
could cost lives.
Bans on “candy-like” flavours and
tougher rules on advertising to stop
e-cigarettes looking cool are needed to
stop children taking up the habit, the
international advisory body says.
The guidance divided public health
experts, with some accusing the
organisation of “unnecessary scaremongering and misleading language”
over the potential risks of e-cigarettes,
which are gaining popularity in homes,
offices and restaurants around the
world. Because e-cigarettes contain no
tobacco, some experts believe that they
are a relatively harmless way for smokers to get their nicotine fix and could
save countless lives if people prefer
them to standard cigarettes.
Others fear that the sight of “vaping”
in public places could undermine
efforts to eradicate tobacco by normalising smoking again.
In a report published yesterday, the
WHO acknowledges that so far there is
no evidence of children being tempted
to take up cigarettes after trying
e-cigarettes, and suggests that “renormalisation” is not a problem in Britain
because the growth of e-cigarettes has
not affected the gradual fall in smoking
rates.
However, the report urges a series of
tough restrictions, because the “smoke”
from e-cigarettes “is not merely water
vapour as is often claimed in the
marketing for these products”. It cites
evidence that the vapour contains
harmful pollutants.
Although it concedes that the levels
of cancer-causing compounds in
e-cigarettes are “orders of magnitude
lower than in tobacco smoke”, the
Continued on page 2, col 3
IN THE NEWS
Speaker in retreat
£10bn IT ‘disaster’
Halal stunning anger
Russian troops held
United sign Di María
John Bercow has indicated
that he may reconsider his
choice of who should run the
Commons after a bruising row
over his Australian nominee,
Carol Mills. Page 2
Britain’s biggest IT contract,
a £10 billion scheme to hold
the tax records of 50 million
people, is heading for disaster,
risking billions of pounds of
public cash, experts say. Page 6
Animal welfare campaigners
have reacted with dismay to
a call by MPs for sheep and
cattle to be stunned and left
alive in experiments to satisfy
halal meat consumers. Page 4
Kiev produced the strongest
evidence yet of direct Russian
military intervention in
Ukraine, airing videotaped
confessions by captured
Russian paratroopers. Page 28
Manchester United signed
the Argentina international
winger Ángel Di María, 26,
from Real Madrid for a
British record transfer fee
of £59.7 million. Page 64
8
1GM
Wednesday August 27 2014 | the times
the times | Wednesday August 27 2014
9
1GM
Grooming News
News Grooming
‘Professionals who did nothing to help me are as bad as my rapists’
A victim who was treated with contempt by the
police says the report is justice of a sort, but her
abusers remain at large. Andrew Norfolk reports
She sat quietly at home yesterday, gradually absorbing the findings of an
inquiry which finally told the world
that she was telling the truth.
For years, no one in authority
seemed to believe her. Twice she went
to the police, aged 13 and 14, to report
the horrific sexual offences committed
against her. No one was prosecuted.
Social workers and police treated her
as “a stupid, naughty girl” who had only
herself to blame for “hanging around
with Asians”. Her parents pleaded for
help. They found every door closed.
The Times told Amy’s story in 2012.
She came from a stable home, far re-
moved from the background of dysfunction, neglect or residential care that
is so often associated with victims of
child sexual exploitation.
On bus trips from her village to Rotherham she met new friends who
seemed to offer fun and excitement.
Before her 14th birthday in 2003, she
had been repeatedly raped and used for
sex by at least six adults in their late
teens or early 20s. They seemed
untouchable.
Amy is not her real name but she was
telling the truth. The terms of reference
for the inquiry report published yesterday specifically included requirements
to examine individual cases highlighted by The Times in 2012 and this year.
The report’s author, Professor Alexis
Jay, a former chief inspector of social
work in Scotland, studied Amy’s case
files. She concluded that the newspaper’s account of her betrayal by Rotherham’s child protection authorities
was accurate.
The report’s damning indictment of
those who let a young girl down was
“brilliant”, Amy said yesterday. “It’s
great that it’s all out into the open. It
feels like I’m finally getting a bit of
justice for what happened to me. It’s
really good to know that everyone
will realise I wasn’t making it up. It was
the truth all along.
“At the same time it makes me very
sad to think that this could have been
happening for so many years. They’re
saying that 1,400 kids were exploited.
Add in their families and you realise
how many people have been damaged.
“People have been sexually abused
and sexually assaulted in the worst way
possible. They’ve had their dignity
taken away from them, their selfrespect, everything in life worth living
for. So many lives have been ruined.”
Amy had no doubt about who was to
primarily to blame for allowing such
abuse to flourish unchecked: “Those
professionals have sat behind their
desks, taken their wages, known this
was happening, and done nothing
about it. To me that makes them as bad
as the perpetrators.”
The inquiry team studied 66 case
files, from which a handful were chosen
as “typical examples” of the unpunished sex crimes that unfolded in Rotherham between 1997 andlast year. Most
of the victims were white British children and “the majority of the perpetrators were from minority ethnic communities”. The cases included:
6 Girls as young as 11 were raped by
large numbers of men, one after the
other.
6 In two cases fathers tracked down
their daughters and tried to remove
them from houses where they were
being abused, only to be arrested themselves by police who had been called to
the scene.
6 In a small number of instances the
victims were arrested for offences such
as breach of the peace or being drunk
and disorderly with no action taken
against the perpetrators of rape and
sexual assault against children.
6 Two families were terrorised by
groups of offenders sitting in cars outside their family home, smashing
windows and making abusive and
threatening phone calls.
6 Some child victims returned to sex
groomers in the belief that this was the
only way to keep their parents and
younger siblings safe.
It took until 2010 for the only
successful prosecution to date of a
group of men for sexual offences
against Rotherham girls.
Five members of the Pakistani community were convicted of sex-grooming crimes and jailed.
In September last year, after The
Times accused a named individual and
his associates of multiple sex offences
against more than a dozen Rotherham
girls, a major new South Yorkshire
police inquiry was launched. Operation
Clover continues today.
Amy has finally received justice in
terms of being believed. It has been
definitively acknowledged that childprotection professionals let down her
and hundreds of other girls. Now she
wants those men who so casually used
her body as a cheap sex toy to be held to
account for their crimes.
Officials hid
evidence
for a decade
How The Times
broke the story
that prompted
investigation
Andrew Norfolk
Comment
Razwan Razaq: jailed for 11 years in
2010 for sexual activity with a child
September 24, 2012
Mohsin Khan, also from Rotherham:
jailed for four years in the same case
August 23, 2013
September 24, 2012
Council chief
resigns and
says sorry
R
oger Stone is the only senior
figure at Rotherham council
to take personal
responsibility for a decade of
catastrophic lapses in child
protection, but it was being suggested
last night that he should not be the
last (Andrew Norfolk writes).
Among those under pressure were
Shaun Wright, the police and crime
commissioner for South Yorkshire,
and Joyce Thacker, Rotherham’s
director of children’s services.
Amy was repeatedly raped and used for sex by six men when she was 13. Police and social workers did not believe her
Mr Stone, below, the council’s
Labour leader for ten years, said it
was only right that he should “take
responsibility on behalf of the whole
council for the historic failings that
are described so clearly in the
report”. He added: “Like any rightminded person, I am disgusted by
CSE [child sexual exploitation] and
abhor the lifelong damage that it
wreaks upon the lives of all those
affected by it.”
Since 2012, Mr Wright has been
the elected official responsible for
holding the police to account for
their actions in South
Yorkshire, but from 2006
to 2010 he was the
Labour cabinet member
on Rotherham council
with responsibility for
children’s services.
Since his election, he
has said that tackling
sex-grooming and
“protecting the most vulnerable in
society” is his No 1 priority. Yet in
2012, when he was still the deputy
chairman of South Yorkshire police
authority, Mr Wright’s response to
The Times investigation was to
accuse it of “picking on Rotherham”.
Ms Thacker has been the director
of children’s and young people’s
services in the town since 2008.
Previously, she was head of
youth services for Bradford
council and was originally a
youth work manager in
Keighley. Both Bradford
and Keighley, like
Rotherham, have a long
history of failing to
acknowledge and
tackle a sex-offending
crime pattern
involving young girls
and a criminal
subculture of
Pakistani men.
Zafran Ramzan, Razaq’s cousin, who
raped a 16-year-old girl in her home
Gangs acted with impunity
Continued from page 1
issue and refused to believe that such a
thing could happen in Rotherham,”
Professor Jay, a former senior social
worker, said.
“There was also concern not to bring
the ethnic issues out in the open,
because it might damage community
cohesion.”
Martin Kimber, Rotherham council’s
chief executive, acknowledged that the
failings identified in the report were
“neither acceptable nor excusable”.
The council had failed in its duty to
victims and their families for “a significant period of time” and for that he was
“sincerely sorry”.
Professor Jay said that girls who
fell victim to sexual exploitation, and
their families, had every right to feel
angered by her report’s revelations. The
“collective failure of political and officer leadership” was “blatant”.
Research for the inquiry suggested
that the figure of 1,400 children abused
between 1997 and 2013 was “a conservative estimate”.
Professor Jay added: “It’s hard to
describe the appalling nature of the
abuse the child victims suffered. They
were trafficked to other towns
and cities in the north of England,
abducted, beaten and intimidated.
“There were examples of children
being doused with petrol and
threatened with being set alight,
threatened with guns, made to witness
brutally violent rapes and threatened
they would be killed if they told
anyone. Girls as young as 11 were
raped by large numbers of male
perpetrators.”
I
t came far, far too late for many
hundreds of damaged girls, but
with its decision to commission
the independent inquiry that
led to yesterday’s damning
report, the leadership of Rotherham
council has finally begun to confront
the sins of its past.
The local authority’s belated
commitment to openness stands in
marked contrast to its determined
efforts in past years to hide, beneath
a very large stone, evidence of a
crime pattern that was allowed to
plant deep and poisonous roots.
The inquiry report gives details of
research findings, submitted to the
council and South Yorkshire police
in 2002, 2003 and 2006, that were
“disbelieved, suppressed or ignored”.
Much was said yesterday by senior
council representatives about the
inquiry report’s acknowledgement
of a significant improvement in the
way the sexual exploitation of girls
had been addressed in Rotherham
since 2011. As recently as 2012,
however, those holding the reins of
power at the council were
continuing the decade-long exercise
in refusing fully to acknowledge and
learn from disastrous past mistakes.
When a serious case review was
ordered into the 2010 murder of
Laura Wilson, 17, the council’s
safeguarding children board tried to
withhold it from publication. The
board, ordered to publish by the
government, produced a report with
heavy redactions that concealed
information about the ethnicity of
adults who had been suspected of
grooming her for sex from the age
of 11. It also hid details of care
professionals’ involvement with the
girl from the age of 11 to 15.
When the council discovered that
The Times intended to publish
information about care workers’
knowledge of Laura’s involvement
with “Asian men”, it sought at great
expense a High Court injunction
barring publication.
It dropped the legal action in June
2012 after Michael Gove, the
education secretary at the time,
accused the board of withholding
“relevant and important material”.
Three months later, this newspaper
revealed the extent of Rotherham’s
failure to protect exploited children.
The council’s response was to ask
the police, and then a firm of
solicitors, to investigate the leak of
restricted information.
Last August, The Times published
information about a 15-year-old
Rotherham girl, in the care of social
services, who was allowed extensive
daily contact with a violent offender
suspected of grooming more than a
dozen young teenagers for sex.
A few days after the article’s
publication, the council ordered an
independent inquiry. It should not
have taken more than a decade.
More girls suffered as the council
obfuscated. Future councils, tempted
to chase leaks rather than act on
their failings, must take heed.
TIMES
Thursday August 28 2014
ON THURSDAY
How to be a perfect cook
By Gordon Ramsay’s protégée Clare Smyth
Who’s who in Team Kate
The people behind Kate Bush’s comeback
It’s not racist to tell
the truth — my long
battle for the lost
girls of Rotherham
By Andrew Norfolk
2
1GT
Thursday August 28 2014 | the times
times2
They spoke out, asked for help,
Andrew Norfolk is
the Times reporter
who broke the
shocking story of
British Pakistani
gangs grooming
schoolgirls for sex.
Here he recalls
his fight to bring
the truth to light
I
n 2003, I moved from London to
Leeds to become north-east
correspondent of The Times.
One of the first stories I covered,
briefly, was from Keighley in
West Yorkshire, when the local
Labour MP, Ann Cryer, revealed
concerns about the targeting of
young teenage girls by “Asian men”
outside the gates of two local schools.
Parents of girls aged 12-14, lured by
older men into a world of alcohol,
drugs and sex, complained that the
police and social services seemed
uninterested in their plight. We
published a short article about the
claims, then I sat back and turned
to other stories.
If I’m honest, I didn’t want the
story to be true because it made me
deeply uncomfortable. The suggestion
that men from a minority ethnic
background were committing sex
crimes against white children was
always going to be the far right’s
fantasy story come true. Innocent
white victims, evil dark-skinned
abusers. Liberal angst kicked
instinctively into top gear.
Nick Griffin, then the leader of the
British National Party, duly exploited
the claims for all they were worth,
then stood against Cryer at the 2005
general election. As the years passed,
I could not escape a nagging feeling
that I hadn’t done my job properly.
I’d looked the other way rather than
sought to establish the truth.
Regular prodding of my conscience
came with the stories that occasionally
passed across my desk, from towns
and cities across northern England
and the Midlands, in which news
agencies and local newspapers
reported criminal prosecutions for
what seemed to be a strikingly similar
pattern of offending.
The victims were always aged 12-15,
the first contact was in a public place
— a shopping mall, a town centre, a
bus or train station — and a grooming
process developed in which girls were
initially flattered and excited by the
attentions of young men a few years
older than them who took an interest,
offered the adult thrills of cigarettes,
alcohol and rides in flashy cars, then
wanted to become their boyfriends.
A sexual relationship developed in
which the girl was sooner or later
asked to prove her love by sleeping
with his best friend, then with more
friends. In the worst cases, girls were
being taken to “parties” in houses
and flats, or put in cars and driven to
locations across the country. Always for
sex; often violent sex. There seemed a
collective nature to this offending. It
was always more than one man in the
dock. And it was hard not to notice
that the published information about
the convicted men in each case had
something else in common. They
invariably had Muslim names.
The final trigger for our
investigation came in August 2010
when I heard a radio news report from
a trial I knew nothing about. Nine
men in Greater Manchester had been
found guilty of offences against a
14-year-old girl. The offenders were
not named in the report but from the
descriptions of their crimes I realised I
would probably bet my life savings
that they had Muslim names.
So it proved, which in one key way
was strange because the vast majority
of convicted child-sex offenders in this
country — take your pick from crimes
against boys, or pre-pubescent
children, or institutional or online
crimes — are white British men,
usually acting alone. What made this
street-grooming model so different?
An extensive three-month trawl
through court records and local library
newspaper archives eventually
produced some startling figures.
Since 1997 there had been 17 court
cases from 13 towns and cities in
which two or more men had been
convicted of sexual offences linked to
the street-grooming exploitation of
young teenage girls. Of the 56 men
convicted, three were white and 53
were Asian. Of those 53 men, 50 had
Muslim names and the vast majority
were members of the Pakistani
community. We had the figures to
support the theory. Now we had to
decide what to do with them.
Initial approaches to police forces,
local authority social services
departments and even the Home
Office met with a blank refusal to
speak about the issue. Barnardo’s,
the children charity that since the
mid-1990s has run specialist projects
to support the victims of child sexual
exploitation, refused to allow any of its
staff to talk to me, even off the record.
Eventually, staff at two smaller
children’s projects, both independent,
agreed to trust The Times. One took
the plunge of introducing me to the
distraught parents of girls whose lives
and futures had been ripped to shreds.
They had repeatedly sought help from
the very authorities whose job it was
to protect children, yet nothing had
changed. Their daughters seemed lost
to them and no one was remotely
interested in holding their abusers to
From top: The Times story of August 23, 2013; the area of Rotherham where
the abuses occurred; The Times cover of September 25, 2012, left, and Jessica,
one of the victims, as a schoolgirl. Right: Amy, another victim, as she is today
the times | Thursday August 28 2014
3
1GT
times2
and were treated with contempt
FRONT COVER: POSED BY MODEL PETAR CHERNAEV/GETTY IMAGES BELOW: TIMES PHOTOGRAPHERS TOM PILSTON, PAUL ROGERS
We told Amy’s
story the day after we
revealed that the police
officers knew exactly what
was happening to hundreds
of girls in the town
account. From that first meeting, my
perspective on the entire story was
transformed. Until then it had been
about numbers and speculation about
motives and causes. Now it was about
child A, mother B, father C. How
could this seemingly invisible crime
model have been allowed to take root
to such devastating effect?
Our first story was published on
January 5, 2011. Accompanied by four
inside pages, the headline on the
front-page splash was: “Revealed:
conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs.
Most convicted offenders of Pakistani
heritage. Young girls abused across
North and Midlands.” The public
outcry was instant. Fuel was thrown
on the flames a couple of days later
when a former Home Secretary, Jack
Straw, stated that some Pakistani men
in his Blackburn constituency
regarded young white girls as “easy
meat”. The Government swiftly
ordered a national inquiry.
At which point I thought my work
was done. Instead I was told that this
investigation was now to be my fulltime job until every agency in Britain
with a responsibility to safeguard
children had in place the correct
measures and systems to ensure
that the young were protected and
their abusers held to account. It has
taken another three years, but what
ensued was a steady transformation,
for the better, in the stance adopted
towards child sexual exploitation by
police forces, local authorities, the
Crown Prosecution Service and the
judiciary. Resources have been poured
into training and staffing levels.
The number of criminal inquiries
has soared.
I spent many weeks and months
during that time sitting in court trials
at which, in the early days, I was often
the only journalist in attendance. That
all changed with a 2012 prosecution at
Liverpool Crown Court that led to
multiple convictions for nine men, all
but one of Pakistani origin, for
horrendous offences against girls from
Rochdale, one of whom, aged 15, was
placed in a bedroom, blind drunk, and
used for sex by 25 men in one night.
Negative reaction to the January 2011
story had been predictable. From
some quarters came accusations of
racism and Islamophobia. We were
accused of playing into the hands of
the far right. The accuracy of our
research was challenged, our focus on
the ethnicity of the group abusers cited
as an example of one-eyed journalism.
Support came from some
unanticipated places, though,
including forward-thinking Muslim
clerics and from Trevor Phillips,
chairman of the Equality and Human
Rights Commission. The Commons
home affairs select committee last
year produced a scathing report on
agencies’ failings. Baroness Warsi was
still a cabinet minister when she stated
in 2012 that a small minority of
Pakistani men viewed all women as
second-class citizens and white women
as third-class citizens. They viewed
such girls as “fair game”, she said.
Ironically, the only two death threats
that I received in connection with the
story both came in anonymous letters
from supporters of the far right,
seemingly outraged that The Times
was seeking to discredit Griffin’s pet
theory that sex-grooming crimes were
part of an Islamic plot to spread the
Caliphate by impregnating every white
teenager in Britain.
There have been many days during
the past four years when I secretly
longed for it all to come to an end. It
was just too bleak, the details of the
crimes too grotesque, too calculated to
make one utterly despair of human
nature. In those dark days, it was
always the girls and their families who
kept me going. Some victims
understandably broke and sank
without trace. Others, remarkably,
survived. They went through months
and years of self-hating misery but —
sometimes with admirable support
from specialist projects — have shown
extraordinary resilience to build a
future for themselves. They decided to
trust The Times with their stories and
they are the closest this tale will ever
come to having heroes or heroines.
Two came from Rotherham. We told
Amy’s story in September 2012, a day
after we revealed information from
more than 200 confidential
documents that laid bare a decade in
which senior council officials and
police officers knew exactly what was
happening to hundreds of girls in the
town, and often the names of the men
committing the offences, yet invariably
chose to look the other way. The
I didn’t want the
story to be true. It
made me deeply
uncomfortable
council ordered a leak inquiry but
showed no interest in examining its
past mistakes. Almost a year later, in
August last year, we published Jessica’s
story, which was so damning in what it
revealed of care professionals’
widespread failings that the council
was finally shamed into ordering the
year-long independent inquiry whose
report was published on Tuesday.
I’ll admit to being staggered by the
sheer number of victims — at least
1,400 — identified in the report, but it
was of course hugely reassuring to see
an official independent stamp of
authenticity given to the serious
allegations first reported by this
newspaper two years ago. By far my
best moments yesterday were phone
conversations with Amy and Jessica
after they learnt of Professor Alexis
Jay’s damning findings and her searing
condemnation of senior officials at
both Rotherham council and South
Yorkshire Police.
Each woman felt a burning sense of
vindication. They spoke out at the
time, asked for help and were treated
with contempt. They and their families
tried to tell the police about the crimes
so relentlessly committed against
them. No one in power wanted to
listen. Now someone had. They felt on
top of the world last night because
finally people would surely believe
that they were telling the truth.
Shame of Rotherham, leading
article p26