A child sexual abuse whistleblower has claimed that she faced repeated efforts from the police to discourage her from reporting grooming gang activity in Rotherham.
Jayne Senior MBE, who ran the Risky Business youth project between 1999 and 2011, was a key witness in exposing the predominantly-Pakistani grooming gang crisis across the North of England, claims to have faced opposition from the police who allegedly attempted to dissuade her from passing on key evidence.
The whistleblower – who has made complaints against more than 30 officers – claimed at a police misconduct hearing in Sheffield that she was told in one meeting with police officers that she “was being racist”, “was going against perpetrators’ human rights”, and was “rocking the multicultural boat”, the BBC reports.
Senior also accused ex-Detective Sergeant David Walker of the South Yorkshire Police – who was the officer in question at the misconduct hearing – of ignoring and failing to record her concerns including that two teenage sisters (13 and 15 years old) were having sex with car wash workers.
Walker is reported to have replied to the information about the two sisters with, “this appears to be a matter for social services. Please liaise and finalise”, rather than investigate the crime himself. Walker denies all allegations of misconduct.
Senior suggested she had to do the police’s work for them saying that the information she gave “was a jigsaw. We may have one bit of information and another organisation might have another or another. We put that jigsaw together, as we did on a number of occasions”.
The former youth worker was awarded an MBE in 2016 for her services to child protection in Rotherham.
Speaking to Breitbart London, Billy Howarth, the founder of Parents Against Grooming UK (PAGUK), an anti-abuse, pro-children’s rights group based in the rape gang hotspot of Rochdale, said: “I’ve met Jayne, she’s not wrong – the way these children were treated was despicable and unfortunately, it is still happening today”.
“I’ll refer back to 2014 when in a meeting Peter Fahey the then chief of Greater Manchester Police said these girls were ‘prostituting’ themselves, therefore, GMP would not get involved. There is no such thing as child prostitution it is just child abuse,” Howarth continued.
“Both police and local authorities were instructed to follow this notion to keep community cohesion steady. It’s high time the leaders of these organisations were held to account for their part in the facilitation of child abuse in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and Cumbria alike”.
“It all started with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he sent his mate Tony Lloyd [a former Labour MP] a memo that said these girls’ chaotic lifestyles are the reason for their own plight [the fact they were sexually abused]. The decision to cover up and play down this appalling abuse was all about winning votes here in Rochdale and in every other British town this twisted behaviour reared its head in,” Howarth asserted.
Brown’s Labour government (2007-2010) was accused of sending a letter to all British police forces which suggested underage girls who were sexually groomed at the time had “made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and therefore it is not for police officers to get involved in” despite such activity clearly being illegal.
Independent investigations have suggested that men of South Asian, mostly Pakistani Muslim heritage have made up the majority of grooming gang perpetrators, with their victims mostly being white working-class girls and young women.
Police forces have previously come under fire for their hesitancy to target the rape gangs out of fear of being branded racist or stoking “racial tensions“.
In one instance an officer was told by superiors to “try and get other ethnicities”, after the majority of offenders caught were found to be “predominantly Asian males”.
The 2014 Jay report found that at least 1,400 girls – some as young as 11 – from Rotherham were systematically groomed and raped by mainly “Asian” perpetrators between 1997 and 2013.
Professor Alexis Jay who wrote the report said “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”, she continued before suggesting “the authorities involved have a great deal to answer for”.
The report found that “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”, and that police deliberately “effectively suppressed” reports due to believing claims were “exaggerated”.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.