Rotherham: lessons from a British sex abuse scandal

Britons were outraged last week to learn that more than 1400 children in a Northern English town were sexually abused over a period of 16 years by gangs of predators while officials turned a blind eye. Recent years have seen clergy members, celebrities and entertainers exposed as molesters, but the latest revelations are particularly shocking in the type and scale of abuse involved. The attitude of the authorities sounds familiar, however, and raises questions that concern British society as a whole.

Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, was commissioned by the government last year to conduct a full inquiry into what had, and had not been done in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, since 1997, when it first came to official notice that gangs of Pakistani men were sexually exploiting mainly young white girls. Her report, published last week, states:

It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of 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. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

One girl told the inquiry that gang rape was a usual part of growing up in her district. Some of the children were in the care of the state.  (more...)

Rotherham: lessons from a British sex abuse scandal