Rotherham: Fear of all the wrong things failed 1,400 children

‘By 2005 few members or senior officers could say “we didn’t know”.’ It was ‘extraordinary’ that no-one on the lead Labour group on the council could remember discussing these matters. ‘The scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers’. ‘The police gave no priority to child sexual exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime’. In Rotherham, no-one seemed to care. And when they did care, it was more about what others would think of them than about children as young as 11 being raped.

Professor Alexis Jay’s report says ‘several staff’ at Rotherham Council ‘described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so’. It said:

‘Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE.