Up to 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham. Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a review into child protection has revealed.
How could this have happened? A clue is given by the report’s authors, who state that ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’.
‘I didn’t want to appear racist’ is truly the ‘I was only obeying orders’ of our time.
Racism has become so hysterical a subject that it has crowded out all other moral concerns, including in this case the concern to look after children. (One doesn’t often get the chance to praise one’s own profession — so it is worth pointing out that, if it weren’t for some courageous reporting, notably in The Times, the full scale of the Rotherham scandal may never have been widely known.
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