The leader of Rotherham Council has resigned following the results of a report which found that at least 1,400 children were victims of ‘appalling’ sexual exploitation in the town during a sixteen year period.
The report details the ‘blatant’ collective failures during most of Roger Stone’s leadership. Professor Alexis Jay, a former senior social worker who wrote the latest report, described how children had been ‘set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone’. The report suggests that Rotherman Council and the police knew about the level of exploitation but did not act.
Jay suggested senior managers had ‘underplayed’ the scale of the abuse, which occurred between 1997 and 2013. The inquiry team said that senior figures in the police and in the social care system thought the extent of the abuse was being ‘exaggerated’.
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