by Peter Watt
If you are a parent then there are some things that scare you more than others. Someone else hurting your children is pretty high up that list.
The details emerging from Rotherham over the last few months about the systematic abuse of young girls are truly the stuff of parental nightmare. But it’s all made worse because it now seems that for over ten years those charged with protecting children and young people failed. In fact worst of all, they decided to look the other way!
They made a choice; protect children in the face of overwhelming evidence of sexual abuse and cruelty or worry more about some misconceived notion of “cultural sensitivities”, as if there is any culture where rape is acceptable.
They chose the latter.
It is important to say that the Times (£) has led the way in exposing both the abuse and the cover up. And some of the details that they have uncovered from confidential reports are some of the most shocking that you can imagine. The documents revealed by the Times give details of events over the years for which no one was prosecuted such as:
- fifty-four Rotherham children were linked to sexual exploitation by three brothers from one British Pakistani family, 18 identifying one brother as their “boyfriend” and several allegedly made pregnant by him;
- a 14-year-old girl from a loving, supportive family was allegedly held in a flat and forced to perform sex acts on five men, four of them Pakistani, plus a 32-year-old Iraqi Kurd. She gave a filmed police interview and identified her abusers;
- one girl, 15, spent days in hospital after a broken bottle was allegedly forced inside her by two young British Pakistani men in a park, causing her to bleed extensively;
- a 13-year-old girl was found at 3am with disrupted clothing in a house with a large group of Asian men who had fed her vodka. A neighbour reported the girl’s screams. Police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but did not question the men.
But the police and local authorities knew – and did nothing!
