In Rotherham especially there was an active coverup. I imagine it's much the same in all or most of the other cases.
Rotherham researcher
'sent on diversity course' after raising alarm. The Home Office researcher was told to "never, ever" repeat evidence, contained in her 2001 report, that most of the perpatrators were Asian men
The dads had attempted to remove their daughters from houses where abuse was taking place, but they were the ones who were then arrested by police.
Prof Jay’s inquiry said police often treated victims with ‘contempt’, frequently arresting them while taking no action against those committing offences.
“Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers,” says the August study’s author, Alexis Jay, who interviewed more than 100 people and reviewed town documents and email. And police, she says,
“dismissed the girls as unworthy of their protection.”
Senior staff from Rotherham Council ordered a raid on offices to
delete and remove case files of abused girls
The first cover-up came in 2002. An academic named Adele Gladman had been seconded to Senior’s team, where she collated existing files to show the weight of evidence that already existed against the Hussain brothers. Gladman shared her report with the council, and local and South Yorkshire police commanders, with the result that social services raided Senior’s office and confiscated the files. Gladman was sacked.
In 2010, a 17-year-old named Laura Wilson was murdered by a young gang member after he discovered that Wilson’s child, which he believed was his, had been fathered by his older uncle. Senior had logged Wilson’s history for years and identified her as at risk. Though her warnings had been ignored, Senior’s team was made the scapegoat for the murder. Her cases were folded into Rotherham social services and, when she was told she must re-apply for a senior post, she left.
However, the council report on the Wilson murder was so heavily redacted that it alerted the suspicions of the journalist Andrew Norfolk. He managed to track down Senior, who shared her files. In the end, the failure of the cover-up created the story.
Aiding and abetting child rapists is hard work. Andrew Norfolk up there is the one who broke the story wide open, and even he considered dismissing it due to political correctness.
He admits that when he first heard details of the allegations by mainly white girls against largely British-Pakistani perpetrators – during a speech by Labour MP Ann Cryer – he didn’t want to follow it up. “Immediately I thought this is a dream story for the far right,” he says. Yet as soon as he started investigating in the autumn of 2010 he knew he would have to report on it: “We found clear evidence of a crime pattern that was not being acknowledged or addressed and which was having the most devastating impact on some of the most vulnerable, innocent people in our society.”
