London: More than 1,400 children were sexually abused over a period of more than 16 years by gangs of paedophiles after police and council bosses turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist, a damning report has concluded. Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.

In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual. Downing Street last night described the failure to halt the abuse in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, as “appalling”. Following the publication of the report, the leader of Rotherham council, Roger Stone, resigned, but no other council employees will face disciplinary proceedings after it was claimed that there was not enough evidence to take action.

There were calls for Shaun Wright, the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire, to step down after it emerged that he was the councillor with responsibility for children’s services in Rotherham for part of the period covered by the report.

Wright, has vowed to stay in the job.

He was a Labour cabinet member for children and young people’s services at Rotherham council from 2005 to 2010 when he received three reports about widespread abuse but failed to act.

Before he was elected police and crime commissioner in 2012, Wright was also a member of the South Yorkshire police authority. Jay’s report exposed repeated failures in both the council and the police to tackle the abuse.

Rotherham’s Labour council leader, Roger Stone, resigned within hours of the publication of Jay’s report. There have been several calls for Wright to do the same.

Wright said he was the most appropriate person to hold the post of PCC.

He told the BBC the scale of the problem in Rotherham had “come as a surprise”.

“Had I known then what I know now I could have done more. As an elected member I came into this role to make a difference. At every stage I’ve done my utmost to protect those people. I have taken lessons learned in that office and brought them to bear in my new role with South Yorkshire Police.

“I believe I am the most appropriate person to hold this office at this current time,” he said.

32 live investigations

Police disclosed that there are 32 live investigations into child sexual exploitation in the town and 15 people have been prosecuted or charged in the past 12 months.

Details of the appalling depravity in Rotherham and the systemic failures that allowed it to continue were laid out in a report published by Professor Alexis Jay, the former chief inspector of social work in Scotland.

Victims were gang raped, while others were groomed and trafficked across northern England by groups of mainly Asian men. When children attempted to expose the abuse, they were threatened with guns, warned that their loved ones would be raped and, in one case, doused in petrol and told they would be burnt alive.

Prof Jay wrote: “No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013. “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.”

She added: “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.”

The report pinned the blame squarely on failings within the leadership of South Yorkshire Police and Rotherham council.

Prof Jay said: “Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the police gave no priority to child sex exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.”

It emerged that there had been three previous reports into the problem which had been suppressed or ignored by officials, either because they did not like or did not believe the findings. Yesterday’s report concluded that by far the majority of perpetrators were Asian men, and said council officials had been unwilling to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist. The report stated: “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.”

For years, the police failed to get a grip of the problem, dismissing many of the victims as “undesirables” who were not worthy of police protection. The report was commissioned by Rotherham council following the conviction in 2010 of five men who were given lengthy jail terms after being found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.

Other similar high-profile cases followed in towns and cities including Rochdale, Derby and Oxford. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, yesterday called on the Government to press ahead urgently with an overarching inquiry into child abuse in light of the “utterly devastating” report.

“As Professor Jay points out, this is not just a historic problem. Nor should we believe this is a problem unique to Rotherham,” she said.

Last night a No.10 spokesman said: “The failings of local agencies exposed by this inquiry are appalling.

“We are determined that the lessons of past failures must be learned and that those who have exploited these children are brought to justice.”

Norman Baker, the crime prevention minister, said the Government had committed to establishing an independent inquiry panel of experts to consider whether public bodies had taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse.

John Cameron, of the NSPCC, said: “This report is truly damning and highlights consistent failures to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of predatory groups of men. “It appears there was at a senior level a collective blindness over many years to the suffering of children who endured almost incomprehensible levels of violence and intimidation.

“Many of these children were already extremely vulnerable and the manner in which they were let down by agencies entrusted to protect them is appalling.

“It is quite astonishing that even when front-line staff raised concerns these were not acted upon so allowing devastating child sexual exploitation to go unchallenged.” 


Unreserved apology

Responding to the criticism levelled at the police, Chief Superintendent Jason Harwin, the district commander for Rotherham, issued an unreserved apology to all the victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE).

“We have completely overhauled the way in which we deal with child sexual exploitation and that’s been recognised in the report and by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary earlier this year,” he said.

He added: “I accept that our recent successes in tackling CSE will not heal the pain of those victims who have been let down but we continue to deal with historic investigations with great success and will continue to thoroughly investigate any new evidence available to us. “Our staff will relentlessly go wherever the evidence takes them and do everything they can with partners to identify offenders and bring them to justice.”

— The Daily Telegraph