The British police force which oversaw the Rotherham “grooming gangs” child rape scandal is securing charges for just one in 34 crimes flagged as having links to Child Sexual Exploitation, it has been revealed.
All told, South Yorkshire Police secured just 16 charges out of some 540 crimes officers flagged as Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) related, according to data secured by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act.
West Midlands Police, which has been slated for a wide variety of so-called “grooming” gang failures over the years, disclosed an only marginally less embarrassing figure of one in 28 offences linked to Child Sexual Exploitation resulting in a charge.
Across all 34 police forces which responded to the Freedom of Information requests from The Times, the average number of crimes flagged as having CSE links which “resulted in a charge or summons” was a mere one in 14.
“The low charge rate staggers me. My concern is that known perpetrators are slipping through the net. We need absolutely zero tolerance for this crime,” commented Sarah Champion, a Member of Parliament for the left-wing Labour party whose frontbench career as a shadow government minister was swiftly ended after she wrote an article saying that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”
“We will actively continue to investigate all CSE reports and take any action possible to prosecute and disrupt the perpetrators who commit these despicable acts,” claimed South Yorkshire Police in a statement quoted by The Times, in defiance of what appears to be statistical evidence to the contrary.
Less than a week ago, The Times reported on internal reports which found there is “little evidence of the exploiters being investigated” by West Yorkshire Police, with South Yorkshire Police being one of a number of forces refusing to disclose the findings of internal reports on their handling of child sexual abuse cases.
The newspaper said that what information it did manage to uncover came at the end of a nine-month Freedom of Information battle in which police tried to redact potentially embarrassing information.
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