“At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013,” and British officials did nothing; they “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
Britain is desperately ill, so deeply diseased in its political culture that it is extremely unlikely that it will recover.
“Revealed: Senior Rotherham councillors ‘knew and stayed silent’ about town’s grooming gangs scandal – Exclusive in depth investigation,” by Charlie Peters, GB News, February 9, 2023:
After a series of GB News exclusives forced Cllr. Dominic Beck to stand down as the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Rother Valley in December, questions have been raised about how the local Labour Party came to select him.
This broadcaster revealed that Cllr. Emma Hoddinott, who was deputy leader of the council when it was found to be “in denial” about the extent of the town’s child sexual exploitation scandal, was on the constituency’s selection committee that put Beck forward for the seat.
But GB News now has evidence that the rot goes deeper, exposing that four serving Councillors from Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (RMBC) attended a seminar outlining in “explicit detail” the town’s sex-grooming gangs scandal in 2005, but failed to speak up, citing police pressure.
The silence of the councillors and others in positions of authority allowed the sex-grooming gangs epidemic to continue in Rotherham without sufficient council or police action. The Alexis Jay report into Rotherham in August 2014 discovered that, at a “conservative estimate,” some 1,400 girls had been abused from 1997 to 2013.
But they were not abused in total secrecy away from the knowledge of local politicians and council officials. On April 5, 2005, local youth project Risky Business delivered a seminar on the child sexual exploitation crisis in the town. It invited all serving RMBC councillors to attend.
Thirty serving councillors attended, including Council Leader Roger Stone, who would later resign in disgrace after failures in responding to the scandal were exposed in 2014.
Of the 30 councillors, four still remain in office for the Labour Party in RMBC. They are: Ken Wyatt, Rose McNeely, Sue Ellis and Alan Atkin. All hold positions of responsibility in the council.
Cllrs Wyatt and McNeely were both in the council cabinet that was forced to resign en-masse after the publication of the Jay report in August 2014, which uncovered one of the modern world’s most extensive and heinous child sexual exploitation scandals. Jay uncovered a raft of instances of council failures to intervene with the grooming gangs, with the RMBC response mired by political correctness, a nervousness about race and a denigrating perspective towards victims.
The report named councillors Jahangir Akhtar and Mahroof Hussain as it criticised Pakistani politicians for wielding disproportionate influence.
Last month, GB News revealed that Hussain was now working as an NHS diversity and inclusion manager despite his Rotherham failures.
But none of the councillors can claim that they did not know about the abuse that was rife in the town, because the 2005 seminar that they attended presented significant evidence about the scandal.
The Jay report confirmed that the seminar contained “explicit content” about child sex abuse, adding that it meant attendees then couldn’t say “we didn’t know”.
Jay said: “Seminars for elected members and senior officers in 2004-05 presented the abuse in the most explicit terms. After these events, nobody could say ‘we didn’t know’. In 2005, the present Council Leader [Roger Stone] chaired a group to take forward the issues, but there is no record of its meetings or conclusions, apart from one minute.”
GB News recently tracked down the youth worker who delivered the 2005 seminar. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they detailed the “horrifying abuse” that the councillors were briefed on.
GB News has also seen a copy of a case study shown to councillors at the meeting, disclosed to this channel by an anonymous source in RMBC.
The file outlines the experiences faced by “Julie”, not her real name, who was groomed and sexually exploited by gangs of men of Pakistani descent in Rotherham.
The case study, delivered to the councillors in April 2005, said: “‘Julie’ first became known to the project [Risky Business] when she was 12 years old due to her ‘friendship’ with other vulnerable young women known to the project. At this time her ‘boyfriend’ was a 24 year old male who was known along with his brother for the grooming and violence towards young women in Rotherham.”
It detailed poor attendance at school, adding: “Julie has attended hospital on numerous occasions often unaccompanied by an appropriate adult and has reported that she has been raped twice.
“On one occasion that Julie was missing from home she was found by the local police in the car of one of the perpetrators at the back of an unused building, no arrests were made. When speaking to her worker the following day Julie disclosed she had been sexually assaulted by two of his friends and there were drugs in the boot of the vehicle.”
Julie’s suffering was explained in “explicit detail” at the meeting….
