The Member of Parliament for Rotherham has revealed that she knows survivors of mostly-Muslim rape gangs who are now 70-years-old, suggesting the scope of the abuse is far vaster than many suspected.
Sarah Champion MP was sacked from the opposition Labour’s front bench by former leader Jeremy Corbyn after writing that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” in 2017. Much like police officers and council workers in the city, who like the authorities in other areas had long failed to tackle the issue due to fears they would be branded racist for intervening, the left-wing party found the issue too sensitive to confront head-on.
Champion was not brought back into the party leadership by Corbyn’s supposedly moderate successor, Sir Keir Starmer — who instead made Naz Shah, who once shared a tweet saying “abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity”, his Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion” — but has continued to speak out on rape gangs, despite requiring enhanced police security as a result.
“I fail to understand why this topic is so emotive, when there is a clear picture of gangs with a similar profile being involved in sexual abuse and exploitation,” she wrote in the Yorkshire Post recently, against the backdrop of another victim having recently come forward to say West Midlands Police have charged none of the 18 men she named after around eight years, and lost dozens of hours of her interview tapes.
“We are very fortunate in Rotherham, because the National Crime Agency’s Operation Stovewood is looking at cases of CSE [Child Sexual Exploitation] by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013, a 16-year period,” said Champion, referring to one of several belated initiatives to try and bring some rape gang members previously overlooked by the authorities to justice.
“It has already identified 1,569 survivors and 261 designated suspects.
“To date we have had 20 convictions in court, and four awaiting trial.
“That is in 16 years. I know survivors who are 70 years old,” she said, strongly implying that such gang-based child abuse had been going on for decades longer than generally supposed.
“Think about the scale and length of time of this abuse.”
Indeed, while some infamous rape gang members such as Shahzad ‘Keith’ Khan preyed on women in a Telford residence known as ‘The Rape House’ from 1981 — without ever being punished for it — Champion’s revelations about victims who are now as old as 70 pushes the timeline of the abuse back almost to the beginning of the mass migration era in Britain.
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