A report commissioned by Labour politicians in the rape gangs hotspot of Rotherham denies child sexual exploitation is continuing on the “same scale” as previously.
In November 2021 it was alleged that Rotherham, where officials including police officers and social workers failed to act against the large-scale grooming, raping, and pimping of mostly white girls and young women by mostly Muslim predators of South Asian heritage for years, continues to be a place where action against such abuse is inadequate following an investigation by opposition councillors.
Conservatives on Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, which is controlled by the left-wing Labour Party, said that it “very quickly became clear that [Child Sexual Exploitation] is a continuing problem in Rotherham, that police action is seriously lacking, and that the council is committed to the idea that CSE is part of Rotherham’s past, not its present” after they began looking into the issue.
The council boasted of, incredibly, having been nominated for a social work award in 2017 despite its sordid past, and this attempted rebrand continued — despite rape gangs survivors complaining in 2018 that officials were actively trying to involve abusers in the lives of children born to their victims — with a move to style the city as “the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture” in March this year.
The Conservatives’ claims of “multiple examples” of contemporary abuse, including, according to the BBC, girls “being picked up by older Asian men in cars late at night from allotments, parks, and takeaways” and sold for sex, may have posed a substantial risk to this reinvention — but a supposedly independent report commissioned by the city’s ruling Labour party has insisted that these allegations are “not founded”.
“The review team has found no evidence that CSE may be occurring on the same scale as the past”, claimed the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Partnership, adding that it has “found no new evidence that police in Rotherham currently deny that CSE is a continuing problem”.
The Conservatives had said after their investigation that had “been unable to identify any action taken” by police officers — part of the Safeguarding Children Partnership, along with council and health service officials — when evidence of abuse had been passed on to them.
As recently as April 2022, former detective David Walker became the latest policeman cleared of any wrongdoing by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) in relation to the Rotherham scandal, meaning none of the 47 officers it has investigated have been punished for historic law enforcement failures, despite police leaders and watchdogs having repeatedly admitted to failures — in a vague, institutional sense which did not actually require any individuals to face charges, loss of pension rights, or other sanctions.
“Child sexual exploitation was treated as low priority. Investigations were under-resourced. Officers were untrained and, far too often, uncaring,” said Sarah Champion, Rotherham’s MP, of police action — or the lack of it — historically.
“The result was that potentially thousands of children were abandoned to abuse of the most shocking kind,” she added.
Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester Police (GMP) detective who helped to blow the whistle on the rape gangs scandal, said the IOPC investigations into police failings are “corrupt”.