butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I think you need to re-read the thread. And again, the doors are truly open for you now aren't they? That's strike three i believe.
Rotherham child rape gangs: At least 1400 victims
- Thread starter Ole
- Start date
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Surely given the extent of the collusion between the local government, police and the rapists which happened to an extent that there were police and councillors who raped the girls we can now conclude that political correctness was a post-hoc justification rather than a reason for not investigating in the first place.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
We could as soon as we read the jay report - which we can then use to view the other stuff going on (yes, i'm talking about cologne) and then is being used by people to say political correctness it's killing us etc
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
I have always thought the 'South Yorkshire Police were too PC' defence just never rang true. I haven't had dealings with them personally except at a couple of football matches but they were clearly a thuggishly un-PC force even by normal police standards. Lead force in attacking the miners, totally responsible for Hillsborough and for the whole rotten farrago of lies that surrounded Hillsborough for years, the idea that they were too worried about offending liberal racial sensitivities to investigate this rape gang is just obviously crap. That story was always about deflecting blame and running the story as being about Muslims and PC liberals taking us to hell in a handcart.
Like you say, the story is literally completely incredible now. They knew. They just didn't care or were being bribed off (remember this is the force whose officers stole money out of the pockets of dying Liverpool fans and then blamed them for their own deathes).
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
On the other hand if the culture of the force in question happens to be characterised by racist fuckwits (as well as that force being negligent and very likely also corrupt), then "we were paralysed by fear of the PC brigade into ignoring systematic child rape that was going on right in front of us over several years" probably sounds a great deal more convincing as an excuse when tried out for size on your fellow racist fuckwits, whether they're cops or cop allies like the trash press, than it does to normal people who aren't racist fuckwits.
Last edited:
Lurdan
old wave
Interesting profile of Jayne Senior in The Times together with an extract from her forthcoming book. Its very long so will need to be split across more than one post.
The Rotherham whistleblower - Times (Paywalled but... )
The Rotherham whistleblower - Times (Paywalled but... )
Janice Turner
For more than ten years, youth worker Jayne Senior told police and social services about the horrific abuse inflicted on girls in Rotherham by ruthless gangs – but she was repeatedly ignored. Risking imprisonment, she turned whistleblower to expose the scandal in The Times
As Arshid Hussain was sentenced to 35 years, Jayne Senior’s triumphant “Yes!” rang across the court room. All around her young women wept and hugged. They had been children when Hussain and his two brothers Basharat and Bannaras raped, abducted and abused them.
Yet for years, no one, not police, councillors nor social workers, believed their stories or tried to bring to justice this criminal gang who claimed to “own Rotherham”. No one except – as she was called by one barrister – “the infamous Jayne Senior”.
A few days later at her home, Senior shows me intelligence she compiled on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham back in 1999. Yet it took a decade and a half for it to help form the prosecution case that had the three Hussain brothers and three associates receive prison sentences totalling 102 years.
It was this information and other details about exploitation that Jayne Senior shared with the Times chief investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk. Risking imprisonment, she became the whistleblower who provided evidence to blow the whole Rotherham scandal open.
Her book, Broken and Betrayed, will surely be made into a film, with Senior played by Keeley Hawes or Sarah Lancashire. It is a shocking and unexpectedly gripping story, part David Peace northern noir, part Lynda La Plante with a working-class, maverick heroine avenging the abuse of under-age girls by taking on powerful men.
Senior, 51, is warm and open, greets me with a hug and urges me to stay for “tea”, meaning the spag bol her husband, Paul, is cooking in the kitchen. Their plasterer son, 27, has come by for a chat – their oldest, 31, is in the Army – and 11-year-old, Sam, a champion diver, is just back from school.
For years, Senior would leave this happy hubbub, grab her coat and car keys and head off into the night to meet a terrified teenager. The girls’ stories burn through the book. Anne, who was beaten almost to death with a clawhammer when she told her pimp she was pregnant; Katrin taken up onto the moors, given a shovel and told to dig her own grave; Debbie ordered to recruit another girl to make a snuff film. Girls as young as 11, doused in petrol, raped in dirty flats, trafficked around northern towns to have sex with a waiting line of men; girls told they will be murdered or their mothers raped, if they ever dare complain.
Senior started meeting them when she joined Risky Business, a youth project set up by Rotherham council to deal with girls in danger of sexual exploitation. Care homes were their main concern. Taxi drivers – mainly older, Pakistani-origin men – would collect young girls, seduce and pimp them out. A few cases reached court, but the victims – bolshy, brassy and looking older than their years – were portrayed in court as hardened “child prostitutes”, a term Senior detests for its implied consent and career choice. The men invariably went free.
Around 2001, Risky Business noted a change. Fewer girls came from Sheffield, the nearest big city with a sizeable red light district, more from Rotherham itself. They were younger too: some only ten. Not all were in care or chaotic families: one was a doctor’s daughter. Yet all were troubled, bullied and friendless. And their stories had a similar arc: they’d be chatted up by a boy their own age, bought a McDonald’s, drinks or soft drugs. Then he’d introduce them to an older Pakistani-origin man, who had a car, nice clothes, money and charm.
“I always say that somewhere out there there’s a Hogwarts for groomers,” says Senior. “Because you can go to London, Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley … and it’s the same tactic.” The older men made them feel special with presents and questions about their lives. The girls – trusting, guileless children – would reveal where their parents worked, all about their friends and pets, where their granny lived. “One girl said to me, ‘He knew everything there was to know about me. All I knew was his nickname.’”
Once the girl was ensnared, this attentive boyfriend would turn nasty. He’d say he needed money, the girl must repay drinks and presents with favours. She must sleep with his friend, or brother, come to a certain house … The beatings would start, then the threats. “Tell anyone and we’ll hurt your mum. You told us where she lives …”
The girls who came to Risky Business trusted Senior and her team because they were “only” youth workers; unlike police or social workers, they had no statutory powers. They didn’t judge, just listened. And from these confidences Risky Business traced patterns. The same men kept cropping up. The girls told of forthcoming drug deals, guns hidden in cars. Rotherham had a regular under-18s disco where older men swarmed outside, taxis idling ready to whisk off girls. “It was an organised network,” says Senior.
But Rotherham police dismissed their information as hearsay. Until finally a seemingly sympathetic officer proposed Risky Business post its intelligence on the police computer in a high-security folder called Box 5. Senior diligently filed regular reports. Yet still the police did nothing and Senior believes underlying their inertia was disgust for the girls. They were “dirty little slags”, the worst type since they’d “even go with Pakis” and had brought it on themselves.
“We didn’t have little victims who sat there and cried,” she says. “They put a mask up, and sometimes that is quite verbal, quite aggressive. But behind every aggressive child is the one that’s asking us for help.” Besides, for Rotherham police, which didn’t have a specialist vice squad, prosecuting these men would be hard and time-consuming, with terrified victims who often made poor witnesses: all that effort might glean few convictions.
Nor was Risky Business respected by Rotherham’s social workers. These middle-class graduates looked down on youth workers as amateurs. They accused Senior of not following protocols and being too close to the girls. “We were there to be advocates and voices for these young people,” she says. “Our job was to challenge authority. I remember being shouted down in a meeting because a head of year said [of a victim], ‘Here we go again. Every time this girl opens her mouth a lie comes out.’ I caused a stink when I said, ‘I don’t believe she is lying.’”
Senior grew up in the same streets as these girls, her father an engineer at a steel foundry. The year she turned 17, her mother died suddenly and Jane found out she was pregnant by Paul. They had a second son, but full-time motherhood bored her so she started working at a youth club. She’d left school with a few CSEs but is smart, driven and energetic, so 20 years later – aged 39, working full-time and still breastfeeding Sam – she decided to do a law degree. She thought it would stop policemen fobbing her off.
In 2000, the Home Office launched a nationwide report into child sexual exploitation, sending investigators into a number of troubled towns, Rotherham included. A Yorkshire lawyer called Adele Weir (now Gladman) was sent to Risky Business to go through all its files and compile ten profiles of victims and six pimps. Weir was astounded by the sheer volume of abuse. She drafted a ten-page interim report that blasted Rotherham’s council leaders and police for failing to act, then sent it to South Yorkshire’s chief constable and the University of Bedfordshire, which was number-crunching the Home Office data.
All hell broke loose. Weir was given a harsh dressing-down by senior Rotherham police. Then, that Monday morning, Senior arrived at work to discover a burglary. No locks had been broken but case files had gone while others were deleted from hard drives. Odder still, minutes of a meeting about Weir’s report – over whom she was allowed to send it to – had been changed. The burglary was never solved. Nor was the deeper mystery: why did Weir’s findings never appear in the final 2004 Home Office report, Paying the Price?
After this bombshell, both Weir and Senior had veiled threats from police: “We know where you live”; “Make sure that car is well insured …” And Weir, bullied, her work suppressed, left the council. But Senior carried on: “I wouldn’t shut up. I thought that if I kept talking about the girls, what was happening, eventually someone would have to do something.”
For more than ten years, youth worker Jayne Senior told police and social services about the horrific abuse inflicted on girls in Rotherham by ruthless gangs – but she was repeatedly ignored. Risking imprisonment, she turned whistleblower to expose the scandal in The Times
As Arshid Hussain was sentenced to 35 years, Jayne Senior’s triumphant “Yes!” rang across the court room. All around her young women wept and hugged. They had been children when Hussain and his two brothers Basharat and Bannaras raped, abducted and abused them.
Yet for years, no one, not police, councillors nor social workers, believed their stories or tried to bring to justice this criminal gang who claimed to “own Rotherham”. No one except – as she was called by one barrister – “the infamous Jayne Senior”.
A few days later at her home, Senior shows me intelligence she compiled on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham back in 1999. Yet it took a decade and a half for it to help form the prosecution case that had the three Hussain brothers and three associates receive prison sentences totalling 102 years.
It was this information and other details about exploitation that Jayne Senior shared with the Times chief investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk. Risking imprisonment, she became the whistleblower who provided evidence to blow the whole Rotherham scandal open.
Her book, Broken and Betrayed, will surely be made into a film, with Senior played by Keeley Hawes or Sarah Lancashire. It is a shocking and unexpectedly gripping story, part David Peace northern noir, part Lynda La Plante with a working-class, maverick heroine avenging the abuse of under-age girls by taking on powerful men.
Senior, 51, is warm and open, greets me with a hug and urges me to stay for “tea”, meaning the spag bol her husband, Paul, is cooking in the kitchen. Their plasterer son, 27, has come by for a chat – their oldest, 31, is in the Army – and 11-year-old, Sam, a champion diver, is just back from school.
For years, Senior would leave this happy hubbub, grab her coat and car keys and head off into the night to meet a terrified teenager. The girls’ stories burn through the book. Anne, who was beaten almost to death with a clawhammer when she told her pimp she was pregnant; Katrin taken up onto the moors, given a shovel and told to dig her own grave; Debbie ordered to recruit another girl to make a snuff film. Girls as young as 11, doused in petrol, raped in dirty flats, trafficked around northern towns to have sex with a waiting line of men; girls told they will be murdered or their mothers raped, if they ever dare complain.
Senior started meeting them when she joined Risky Business, a youth project set up by Rotherham council to deal with girls in danger of sexual exploitation. Care homes were their main concern. Taxi drivers – mainly older, Pakistani-origin men – would collect young girls, seduce and pimp them out. A few cases reached court, but the victims – bolshy, brassy and looking older than their years – were portrayed in court as hardened “child prostitutes”, a term Senior detests for its implied consent and career choice. The men invariably went free.
Around 2001, Risky Business noted a change. Fewer girls came from Sheffield, the nearest big city with a sizeable red light district, more from Rotherham itself. They were younger too: some only ten. Not all were in care or chaotic families: one was a doctor’s daughter. Yet all were troubled, bullied and friendless. And their stories had a similar arc: they’d be chatted up by a boy their own age, bought a McDonald’s, drinks or soft drugs. Then he’d introduce them to an older Pakistani-origin man, who had a car, nice clothes, money and charm.
“I always say that somewhere out there there’s a Hogwarts for groomers,” says Senior. “Because you can go to London, Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley … and it’s the same tactic.” The older men made them feel special with presents and questions about their lives. The girls – trusting, guileless children – would reveal where their parents worked, all about their friends and pets, where their granny lived. “One girl said to me, ‘He knew everything there was to know about me. All I knew was his nickname.’”
Once the girl was ensnared, this attentive boyfriend would turn nasty. He’d say he needed money, the girl must repay drinks and presents with favours. She must sleep with his friend, or brother, come to a certain house … The beatings would start, then the threats. “Tell anyone and we’ll hurt your mum. You told us where she lives …”
The girls who came to Risky Business trusted Senior and her team because they were “only” youth workers; unlike police or social workers, they had no statutory powers. They didn’t judge, just listened. And from these confidences Risky Business traced patterns. The same men kept cropping up. The girls told of forthcoming drug deals, guns hidden in cars. Rotherham had a regular under-18s disco where older men swarmed outside, taxis idling ready to whisk off girls. “It was an organised network,” says Senior.
But Rotherham police dismissed their information as hearsay. Until finally a seemingly sympathetic officer proposed Risky Business post its intelligence on the police computer in a high-security folder called Box 5. Senior diligently filed regular reports. Yet still the police did nothing and Senior believes underlying their inertia was disgust for the girls. They were “dirty little slags”, the worst type since they’d “even go with Pakis” and had brought it on themselves.
“We didn’t have little victims who sat there and cried,” she says. “They put a mask up, and sometimes that is quite verbal, quite aggressive. But behind every aggressive child is the one that’s asking us for help.” Besides, for Rotherham police, which didn’t have a specialist vice squad, prosecuting these men would be hard and time-consuming, with terrified victims who often made poor witnesses: all that effort might glean few convictions.
Nor was Risky Business respected by Rotherham’s social workers. These middle-class graduates looked down on youth workers as amateurs. They accused Senior of not following protocols and being too close to the girls. “We were there to be advocates and voices for these young people,” she says. “Our job was to challenge authority. I remember being shouted down in a meeting because a head of year said [of a victim], ‘Here we go again. Every time this girl opens her mouth a lie comes out.’ I caused a stink when I said, ‘I don’t believe she is lying.’”
Senior grew up in the same streets as these girls, her father an engineer at a steel foundry. The year she turned 17, her mother died suddenly and Jane found out she was pregnant by Paul. They had a second son, but full-time motherhood bored her so she started working at a youth club. She’d left school with a few CSEs but is smart, driven and energetic, so 20 years later – aged 39, working full-time and still breastfeeding Sam – she decided to do a law degree. She thought it would stop policemen fobbing her off.
In 2000, the Home Office launched a nationwide report into child sexual exploitation, sending investigators into a number of troubled towns, Rotherham included. A Yorkshire lawyer called Adele Weir (now Gladman) was sent to Risky Business to go through all its files and compile ten profiles of victims and six pimps. Weir was astounded by the sheer volume of abuse. She drafted a ten-page interim report that blasted Rotherham’s council leaders and police for failing to act, then sent it to South Yorkshire’s chief constable and the University of Bedfordshire, which was number-crunching the Home Office data.
All hell broke loose. Weir was given a harsh dressing-down by senior Rotherham police. Then, that Monday morning, Senior arrived at work to discover a burglary. No locks had been broken but case files had gone while others were deleted from hard drives. Odder still, minutes of a meeting about Weir’s report – over whom she was allowed to send it to – had been changed. The burglary was never solved. Nor was the deeper mystery: why did Weir’s findings never appear in the final 2004 Home Office report, Paying the Price?
After this bombshell, both Weir and Senior had veiled threats from police: “We know where you live”; “Make sure that car is well insured …” And Weir, bullied, her work suppressed, left the council. But Senior carried on: “I wouldn’t shut up. I thought that if I kept talking about the girls, what was happening, eventually someone would have to do something.”
(...)
Lurdan
old wave
She gave frequent presentations to civic leaders or police officers, her audience always rapt and outraged, but nothing ever came of it. Later, councillors, including leader Roger Stone and head of child services Shaun Wright (later South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner), would deny they knew Rotherham had an abuse problem. Senior flicks to a photo on her phone of Wright at a Risky Business barbecue posing with one of her girls: “They knew …”
At a one-day conference on child sexual exploitation, Rotherham MP Denis MacShane (who would also later claim ignorance) listened to expert submissions, then stood up. “If only we could all just learn to get along and accept the ways of different cultures,” he said. Senior believes that MacShane implied that it was racist and divisive to point out that in Rotherham sexual abuse was carried out by Pakistani heritage men against white girls. Senior was aghast.
Indeed, she believes that silence compounded the problem. She argued the council should speak to imams and local leaders about the disgust certain Pakistani-origin men harbour for white girls. Refusing to confront it made grooming a “normal” part of growing up in Rotherham, amplifying racial tensions.
“One Asian guy,” she says, “was appalled by these men and would meet me for a chat to give me information. But his dad told him as a teenager, ‘If you want to sow wild seeds, make sure it’s with white girls.’”
Senior was often chided by social workers and Labour councillors for highlighting abusers’ ethnic background. When she proposed grooming be discussed in a local school, a teacher suggested Asian girls leave the classroom. She refused. Indeed, she notes that around 30 of the eventual 1,400 reported cases were Asian girls. One was raped by three men and their relatives, but when she sought help, an Asian social worker said it was her own fault for dressing immodestly. Senior recalls an Asian father hearing his daughter had been anally raped, so she’d remain “pure” for marriage: “He was sobbing, as much as my dad would have been. But the first thing he said was, ‘This will fetch shame on the family.’”
Then Senior finally met a police officer, Sergeant Rupert Chang, who took Risky Business seriously. Investigating a grooming gang preying upon a local park, he asked why she’d never reported anything before. Senior told him about Box 5. Chang was mystified. Box 5, he discovered, was a digital wastepaper bin: police saw nothing Senior reported. Shocked, Chang sat down and read every Risky Business file, then did what no officer had done before – he sought evidence.
Operation Central was launched, homing in on a gang of men, also suspected of drug offences. Four girls who’d suffered horrific abuse – orally raped in the street, beaten, pimped out, threatened with torture – agreed to give evidence and Risky Business staff protected them from intimidation. Eight men were charged, and five eventually convicted, winning Senior a police award for her work.
Yet, as the Casey report was to note, Senior’s success provoked professional jealousy in Rotherham social services. Risky Business was ordered to close the cases of 60 vulnerable girls and hand them to social workers. Among them was Laura Wilson. Senior had known Laura since she was ten, when she’d been driven down the motorway by a gang of men, while another girl was forced to swallow a spiked drink. Stories followed of her giving sexual favours in the back of takeaway shops. Then in her mid-teens she got involved with Ashtiaq Ashgar, had a baby by him and, after an argument, told his mother about their relationship.
Laura was found dead in a canal, stabbed many times. As news of the murder broke, Rotherham’s service manager approached Senior. “I didn’t ask you to close Laura’s case,” she said. “Yes, you did,” said Senior.
When Rotherham council published its serious case review, Risky Business was blamed for Laura’s death for neglecting to pass on warnings. Senior was devastated. It was, she believed, a blatant cover-up, a grave slur on her own reputation and she felt that the council used it as an excuse to close Risky Business. Senior left.
Around 2005, Senior went to three local newspapers anonymously about the abuse network: “But they weren’t interested.” Moreover, she knew the penalty for leaking official documents was prison. And while most Risky Business files had been seized, suppressed or mysteriously stolen, she’d saved many at home. It was never intentional. Being a bit of a Luddite, Senior hates reading long reports on screen and always prints them out. And as a restless workaholic – “I don’t know how to sit with my feet up and watch telly” – she would put a file on her memory stick to toil over until the early hours. She copied key emails, too: “I had a second sense I’d need them one day.”
Senior heard about Andrew Norfolk’s investigations on sexual abuse in other northern towns through a girl she was working with. Her parents, let down by social services, had spoken to Norfolk. They were impressed by his diligence and urged Senior to meet him. After he won her trust, promising never to reveal her as a source, she shared the information she had gathered through her work with vulnerable children.
As Norfolk’s reports were published in The Times, showing police and council wilful inaction, Senior was terrified of arrest. Later she learnt Rotherham council spent £20,000 trying to find the source of previous leaks.
But the reports brought the abuse into the spotlight and two investigations began.
A report by Professor Alexis Jay estimated that Rotherham had 1,400 cases of child exploitation and said only one group had tirelessly tried to help these girls: “There should be more people like Risky Business,” an abuse survivor said in Jay’s report. The second report, by Louise Casey, declared Rotherham council unfit for purpose, describing a culture of bullying, sexism and cover-ups; council leaders resigned en mass, although Shaun Wright resisted for several weeks.
“The day that Alexis Jay’s report came out was a rollercoaster of emotions,” says Senior. “Because it wasn’t just vindication for me. I couldn’t stop crying, and it still upsets me now when I think … So many children, so many lives damaged, and for what?”
The question echoes through the book. Rather than spend so much money and effort covering up a problem, why did the council not simply deal with it? The answer lies in the nature of Rotherham. Like other towns with sex abuse networks – Rochdale, Derby, Bolton – it is small enough for back-scratching and nepotism, while as a Labour one-party state for decades, there was no opposition to illuminate its failings and corruption.
Senior still sees known abusers driving around the town, and is often rung by girls who have still told no one. She helps runs a victim support group and shows me a text from a woman coaxed to attend, having not left her home for five years. Many of the women end up with other violent men, since that is all they’ve ever known; others recoil from any relationship at all.
This is only the beginning. Now the spotlight is shifting from perpetrators to those who allowed them to operate with impunity. In court, a girl alleged that she was raped by Jahangir Akhtar, council deputy leader, who is related to the Hussains. Akhtar is alleged to have been present when an under-age girl was handed over to police at a petrol station with a promise not to prosecute. He denies raping the girl or any other wrongdoing or misconduct. Two Rotherham councillors and several police officers are believed to be under investigation. The most mysterious is the case of PC Hassan Ali, who died after being hit by a car crossing a road the day he learnt he faced an inquiry.
After years of being ignored, silenced and discredited, the infamous Jayne Senior is now “Rotherham’s Erin Brockovich” or “The Times’ Deep Throat”, as the local paper called her. (Andrew Norfolk had to explain it was the nickname of the Watergate informant; she thought she was being compared to a porn star.) And she has decided to go into local politics, standing as a Labour council candidate in May.
“I want to live and work in a town where our children are safe,” she says. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a politician. But what I do know is people and I’m not afraid to challenge difficult things.”
At a one-day conference on child sexual exploitation, Rotherham MP Denis MacShane (who would also later claim ignorance) listened to expert submissions, then stood up. “If only we could all just learn to get along and accept the ways of different cultures,” he said. Senior believes that MacShane implied that it was racist and divisive to point out that in Rotherham sexual abuse was carried out by Pakistani heritage men against white girls. Senior was aghast.
Indeed, she believes that silence compounded the problem. She argued the council should speak to imams and local leaders about the disgust certain Pakistani-origin men harbour for white girls. Refusing to confront it made grooming a “normal” part of growing up in Rotherham, amplifying racial tensions.
“One Asian guy,” she says, “was appalled by these men and would meet me for a chat to give me information. But his dad told him as a teenager, ‘If you want to sow wild seeds, make sure it’s with white girls.’”
Senior was often chided by social workers and Labour councillors for highlighting abusers’ ethnic background. When she proposed grooming be discussed in a local school, a teacher suggested Asian girls leave the classroom. She refused. Indeed, she notes that around 30 of the eventual 1,400 reported cases were Asian girls. One was raped by three men and their relatives, but when she sought help, an Asian social worker said it was her own fault for dressing immodestly. Senior recalls an Asian father hearing his daughter had been anally raped, so she’d remain “pure” for marriage: “He was sobbing, as much as my dad would have been. But the first thing he said was, ‘This will fetch shame on the family.’”
Then Senior finally met a police officer, Sergeant Rupert Chang, who took Risky Business seriously. Investigating a grooming gang preying upon a local park, he asked why she’d never reported anything before. Senior told him about Box 5. Chang was mystified. Box 5, he discovered, was a digital wastepaper bin: police saw nothing Senior reported. Shocked, Chang sat down and read every Risky Business file, then did what no officer had done before – he sought evidence.
Operation Central was launched, homing in on a gang of men, also suspected of drug offences. Four girls who’d suffered horrific abuse – orally raped in the street, beaten, pimped out, threatened with torture – agreed to give evidence and Risky Business staff protected them from intimidation. Eight men were charged, and five eventually convicted, winning Senior a police award for her work.
Yet, as the Casey report was to note, Senior’s success provoked professional jealousy in Rotherham social services. Risky Business was ordered to close the cases of 60 vulnerable girls and hand them to social workers. Among them was Laura Wilson. Senior had known Laura since she was ten, when she’d been driven down the motorway by a gang of men, while another girl was forced to swallow a spiked drink. Stories followed of her giving sexual favours in the back of takeaway shops. Then in her mid-teens she got involved with Ashtiaq Ashgar, had a baby by him and, after an argument, told his mother about their relationship.
Laura was found dead in a canal, stabbed many times. As news of the murder broke, Rotherham’s service manager approached Senior. “I didn’t ask you to close Laura’s case,” she said. “Yes, you did,” said Senior.
When Rotherham council published its serious case review, Risky Business was blamed for Laura’s death for neglecting to pass on warnings. Senior was devastated. It was, she believed, a blatant cover-up, a grave slur on her own reputation and she felt that the council used it as an excuse to close Risky Business. Senior left.
Around 2005, Senior went to three local newspapers anonymously about the abuse network: “But they weren’t interested.” Moreover, she knew the penalty for leaking official documents was prison. And while most Risky Business files had been seized, suppressed or mysteriously stolen, she’d saved many at home. It was never intentional. Being a bit of a Luddite, Senior hates reading long reports on screen and always prints them out. And as a restless workaholic – “I don’t know how to sit with my feet up and watch telly” – she would put a file on her memory stick to toil over until the early hours. She copied key emails, too: “I had a second sense I’d need them one day.”
Senior heard about Andrew Norfolk’s investigations on sexual abuse in other northern towns through a girl she was working with. Her parents, let down by social services, had spoken to Norfolk. They were impressed by his diligence and urged Senior to meet him. After he won her trust, promising never to reveal her as a source, she shared the information she had gathered through her work with vulnerable children.
As Norfolk’s reports were published in The Times, showing police and council wilful inaction, Senior was terrified of arrest. Later she learnt Rotherham council spent £20,000 trying to find the source of previous leaks.
But the reports brought the abuse into the spotlight and two investigations began.
A report by Professor Alexis Jay estimated that Rotherham had 1,400 cases of child exploitation and said only one group had tirelessly tried to help these girls: “There should be more people like Risky Business,” an abuse survivor said in Jay’s report. The second report, by Louise Casey, declared Rotherham council unfit for purpose, describing a culture of bullying, sexism and cover-ups; council leaders resigned en mass, although Shaun Wright resisted for several weeks.
“The day that Alexis Jay’s report came out was a rollercoaster of emotions,” says Senior. “Because it wasn’t just vindication for me. I couldn’t stop crying, and it still upsets me now when I think … So many children, so many lives damaged, and for what?”
The question echoes through the book. Rather than spend so much money and effort covering up a problem, why did the council not simply deal with it? The answer lies in the nature of Rotherham. Like other towns with sex abuse networks – Rochdale, Derby, Bolton – it is small enough for back-scratching and nepotism, while as a Labour one-party state for decades, there was no opposition to illuminate its failings and corruption.
Senior still sees known abusers driving around the town, and is often rung by girls who have still told no one. She helps runs a victim support group and shows me a text from a woman coaxed to attend, having not left her home for five years. Many of the women end up with other violent men, since that is all they’ve ever known; others recoil from any relationship at all.
This is only the beginning. Now the spotlight is shifting from perpetrators to those who allowed them to operate with impunity. In court, a girl alleged that she was raped by Jahangir Akhtar, council deputy leader, who is related to the Hussains. Akhtar is alleged to have been present when an under-age girl was handed over to police at a petrol station with a promise not to prosecute. He denies raping the girl or any other wrongdoing or misconduct. Two Rotherham councillors and several police officers are believed to be under investigation. The most mysterious is the case of PC Hassan Ali, who died after being hit by a car crossing a road the day he learnt he faced an inquiry.
After years of being ignored, silenced and discredited, the infamous Jayne Senior is now “Rotherham’s Erin Brockovich” or “The Times’ Deep Throat”, as the local paper called her. (Andrew Norfolk had to explain it was the nickname of the Watergate informant; she thought she was being compared to a porn star.) And she has decided to go into local politics, standing as a Labour council candidate in May.
“I want to live and work in a town where our children are safe,” she says. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a politician. But what I do know is people and I’m not afraid to challenge difficult things.”
Lurdan
old wave
Jayne Senior on the struggle to get the police to listen
As an example of how quickly grooming can turn to abuse, the story of a 14-year-old girl called Lianna springs to mind. She came to our attention because she was seeing a man who was known to us as an abuser.
Her mother was in a violently abusive relationship which Lianna found hard to endure, so she left, and when I met her she was living in a homeless hostel. I asked her about her “boyfriend”.
“Oh, he’s just lovely,” she said, a smile appearing across her painted lips. “He takes me out everywhere, buys me stuff, fags and booze. And people are dead scared of him.”
“Oh,” I said, “why’s that?”
She leaned forward. “Guess what?” she said. “The other night when we were out in his car, he opened the glovebox and showed me what was inside.”
“What did he show you, love?” I asked. “A gun,” she replied. “How about that?!”
“You know,” I said, trying to keep calm, “that’s all part of the way he’s trying to control you. You’ll find that one day you’ll be very, very frightened knowing that he has a gun. And men who run around with guns in their cars are not nice people.”
“Nah,” she said, laughing, “he’s lovely. He’d never do owt to hurt me.”
A little over three weeks later I met her again, and I’ve never known anyone go from “groomed” to “abused” in such a short space of time. This time, there was no make-up or bright and breezy attitude. She sobbed hysterically and shook as she told me what had gone on.
“He was giving me cans of lager and a few cigs,” she said, “and all that were fine. Then, one night when we were sitting in his car, he said I owed him 200 quid for the booze and fags. He said he had drug dealers after him, and he owed them this money.”
She broke down into terrified sobs. “Now he says if I don’t get the money, he’s gonna tell my mum!”
I tried to calm her down, but it was useless. In a whisper, she told me the rest of her story. As she spoke I could feel nausea rising up into my throat.
“He said his brother had the solution to it,” she said. “He said he didn’t like it, but his brother said that if I have sex with him, he’ll pay the debt off ’cos he’s got more money than his brother …”
So they’d taken Lianna to a flat above a shop – a place that had been mentioned to us before – and her abuser’s brother had had sex with her, as planned. When it was finished, she got back into her abuser’s car and he drove her home. As she opened the door, he grabbed her wrist.
“Now you only owe us £195,” he sneered. “And if you don’t pay it …” He tapped the glovebox, indicating what was inside it.
So she was in a real predicament. How could she tell her mother that she owed all this money and could be in serious danger if she didn’t pay? In addition, how could she explain that she’d tried to pay it off by having sex with a man much older than her? I encouraged her to talk to the police, which she did. Their advice was that she “shouldn’t hang around him any more”. Easier said than done, of course, so I also drew up a Child Protection referral, which went to social care to be assessed, and her mother was informed. The money was not paid, her mother refusing to give in to blackmail, but from then on Lianna lived in fear of her life.
We were telling the police everything we heard. Risky Business had a steering group and a key players group, attended by senior police and social services representatives. At this latter meeting we would regularly share information and intelligence on those we believed were abusing young girls across Rotherham: names, nicknames, car registrations, taxi numbers, mobile phone numbers, takeaways, shops, relationships between abusers – you name it, if we’d been given it we shared it at the key players meeting. We were constantly told by senior police officers that it was “hearsay”. “Where’s the evidence?” they’d always ask.
Our police representative was Inspector Anita McKenzie, who headed the Rotherham police district’s community safety unit. She was a quietly spoken woman, approaching retirement. At first I had faith in her because she was female and I thought she would have empathy for the girls whose abuse was being detailed in our reports.
I prepared a report to everyone present for every meeting that highlighted all our concerns, including abuser identification, hotspots, girls at risk and links between girls and abusers. At one meeting we even shared intelligence on a drug deal due to take place at a supermarket car park late one evening. Unfortunately our intelligence was not considered good enough to be evidence and no action was taken. We heard later that the drug deal had indeed taken place.
I always took my own minutes because more often than not I would give a detailed description of something that had happened, only to see it reduced to one line in the official minutes.
Eventually we had so much information collated that Anita suggested we do something formal with it.
At the beginning, I can’t claim that the way we were collating information was anything like official. We’d had no training in this; we simply wrote down what we were told and checked it against other sources of information. For example, I look back at one of my reports now and see that some information about a newsagent’s had been passed to us. Four young women – two 16-year-olds and two aged just 13 – were buying cheap cigarettes from this place and were being asked for sexual favours by the workers in the shop in return for free alcohol. Another young woman had offered to make a statement to police about this. Now, that’s what we’d been told. If I could’ve visited the shop myself and made inquiries, I would’ve done. But we weren’t professional detectives, nor did we claim to be; we were just a group of people deeply concerned about a pattern of abuse in our town which seemed to grow on a daily basis.
With hindsight, perhaps our well-meaning approach at the beginning of Risky Business was part of the problem and the reason that Rotherham police refused to take us seriously. In their eyes, we were “just youth workers”, clueless amateurs who were presenting a whole lot of information to them without any evidence.
But the point was – and still is– that we weren’t the police. Surely it is their job to obtain evidence based on what they are told. If a person sees a crime being committed in the street and has a good description of the offender, is he also expected to chase after him and apprehend him? Of course not. So why was it different for us?
Anita McKenzie was constantly telling me that the information we were collating was “not strong enough to be evidence”. If I mentioned “rape” or “assault” to her when I was discussing one of our girls she’d always correct me with the words “alleged rape” or “alleged assault”. I accepted that, but what I found puzzling was the seeming lack of will by the police to do anything about such allegations themselves.
Still, we continued to supply the police and social services with information in the hope that somewhere along the line the abusers would be brought to justice.
I see in our bundle of files that two of the girls mentioned above in relation to the newsagent’s had “been giving oral sex to two Asian males aged 16 and 18 within the Clifton Park area of Rotherham”. I passed on the phone number of one of these males and his nickname, plus the fact that his number was linked to the sexual exploitation of another girl on our books.
Where possible, we would provide a description of the alleged abuser and indicate his ethnicity. If he’d been white, I’d have said that. The fact that almost all those abusing girls were of Asian origin meant that in the vast majority of cases I put down “Asian” as ethnic origin. I remember the intakes of breath when we mentioned ethnicity at steering group and key players meetings, accompanied by the occasional shaking of heads.
“Are you sure you should be mentioning this, Jayne?” “Is ethnicity really relevant?” “Jayne, don’t you think it’s a bit racist to say what their background is?”
No, I didn’t. As I said, if they’d been white males I’d have mentioned it. Like the man in the street who witnesses a crime, I assumed the police would want to know as much detail about the criminal as possible, including ethnicity. Back then, I didn’t think that was wrong. Others obviously felt differently.
© Jayne Senior 2016. Extracted from Broken and Betrayed: the True Story of the Rotherham Abuse Scandal by the Woman Who Fought to Expose It, published by Pan Books on Thursday.
As an example of how quickly grooming can turn to abuse, the story of a 14-year-old girl called Lianna springs to mind. She came to our attention because she was seeing a man who was known to us as an abuser.
Her mother was in a violently abusive relationship which Lianna found hard to endure, so she left, and when I met her she was living in a homeless hostel. I asked her about her “boyfriend”.
“Oh, he’s just lovely,” she said, a smile appearing across her painted lips. “He takes me out everywhere, buys me stuff, fags and booze. And people are dead scared of him.”
“Oh,” I said, “why’s that?”
She leaned forward. “Guess what?” she said. “The other night when we were out in his car, he opened the glovebox and showed me what was inside.”
“What did he show you, love?” I asked. “A gun,” she replied. “How about that?!”
“You know,” I said, trying to keep calm, “that’s all part of the way he’s trying to control you. You’ll find that one day you’ll be very, very frightened knowing that he has a gun. And men who run around with guns in their cars are not nice people.”
“Nah,” she said, laughing, “he’s lovely. He’d never do owt to hurt me.”
A little over three weeks later I met her again, and I’ve never known anyone go from “groomed” to “abused” in such a short space of time. This time, there was no make-up or bright and breezy attitude. She sobbed hysterically and shook as she told me what had gone on.
“He was giving me cans of lager and a few cigs,” she said, “and all that were fine. Then, one night when we were sitting in his car, he said I owed him 200 quid for the booze and fags. He said he had drug dealers after him, and he owed them this money.”
She broke down into terrified sobs. “Now he says if I don’t get the money, he’s gonna tell my mum!”
I tried to calm her down, but it was useless. In a whisper, she told me the rest of her story. As she spoke I could feel nausea rising up into my throat.
“He said his brother had the solution to it,” she said. “He said he didn’t like it, but his brother said that if I have sex with him, he’ll pay the debt off ’cos he’s got more money than his brother …”
So they’d taken Lianna to a flat above a shop – a place that had been mentioned to us before – and her abuser’s brother had had sex with her, as planned. When it was finished, she got back into her abuser’s car and he drove her home. As she opened the door, he grabbed her wrist.
“Now you only owe us £195,” he sneered. “And if you don’t pay it …” He tapped the glovebox, indicating what was inside it.
So she was in a real predicament. How could she tell her mother that she owed all this money and could be in serious danger if she didn’t pay? In addition, how could she explain that she’d tried to pay it off by having sex with a man much older than her? I encouraged her to talk to the police, which she did. Their advice was that she “shouldn’t hang around him any more”. Easier said than done, of course, so I also drew up a Child Protection referral, which went to social care to be assessed, and her mother was informed. The money was not paid, her mother refusing to give in to blackmail, but from then on Lianna lived in fear of her life.
We were telling the police everything we heard. Risky Business had a steering group and a key players group, attended by senior police and social services representatives. At this latter meeting we would regularly share information and intelligence on those we believed were abusing young girls across Rotherham: names, nicknames, car registrations, taxi numbers, mobile phone numbers, takeaways, shops, relationships between abusers – you name it, if we’d been given it we shared it at the key players meeting. We were constantly told by senior police officers that it was “hearsay”. “Where’s the evidence?” they’d always ask.
Our police representative was Inspector Anita McKenzie, who headed the Rotherham police district’s community safety unit. She was a quietly spoken woman, approaching retirement. At first I had faith in her because she was female and I thought she would have empathy for the girls whose abuse was being detailed in our reports.
I prepared a report to everyone present for every meeting that highlighted all our concerns, including abuser identification, hotspots, girls at risk and links between girls and abusers. At one meeting we even shared intelligence on a drug deal due to take place at a supermarket car park late one evening. Unfortunately our intelligence was not considered good enough to be evidence and no action was taken. We heard later that the drug deal had indeed taken place.
I always took my own minutes because more often than not I would give a detailed description of something that had happened, only to see it reduced to one line in the official minutes.
Eventually we had so much information collated that Anita suggested we do something formal with it.
At the beginning, I can’t claim that the way we were collating information was anything like official. We’d had no training in this; we simply wrote down what we were told and checked it against other sources of information. For example, I look back at one of my reports now and see that some information about a newsagent’s had been passed to us. Four young women – two 16-year-olds and two aged just 13 – were buying cheap cigarettes from this place and were being asked for sexual favours by the workers in the shop in return for free alcohol. Another young woman had offered to make a statement to police about this. Now, that’s what we’d been told. If I could’ve visited the shop myself and made inquiries, I would’ve done. But we weren’t professional detectives, nor did we claim to be; we were just a group of people deeply concerned about a pattern of abuse in our town which seemed to grow on a daily basis.
With hindsight, perhaps our well-meaning approach at the beginning of Risky Business was part of the problem and the reason that Rotherham police refused to take us seriously. In their eyes, we were “just youth workers”, clueless amateurs who were presenting a whole lot of information to them without any evidence.
But the point was – and still is– that we weren’t the police. Surely it is their job to obtain evidence based on what they are told. If a person sees a crime being committed in the street and has a good description of the offender, is he also expected to chase after him and apprehend him? Of course not. So why was it different for us?
Anita McKenzie was constantly telling me that the information we were collating was “not strong enough to be evidence”. If I mentioned “rape” or “assault” to her when I was discussing one of our girls she’d always correct me with the words “alleged rape” or “alleged assault”. I accepted that, but what I found puzzling was the seeming lack of will by the police to do anything about such allegations themselves.
Still, we continued to supply the police and social services with information in the hope that somewhere along the line the abusers would be brought to justice.
I see in our bundle of files that two of the girls mentioned above in relation to the newsagent’s had “been giving oral sex to two Asian males aged 16 and 18 within the Clifton Park area of Rotherham”. I passed on the phone number of one of these males and his nickname, plus the fact that his number was linked to the sexual exploitation of another girl on our books.
Where possible, we would provide a description of the alleged abuser and indicate his ethnicity. If he’d been white, I’d have said that. The fact that almost all those abusing girls were of Asian origin meant that in the vast majority of cases I put down “Asian” as ethnic origin. I remember the intakes of breath when we mentioned ethnicity at steering group and key players meetings, accompanied by the occasional shaking of heads.
“Are you sure you should be mentioning this, Jayne?” “Is ethnicity really relevant?” “Jayne, don’t you think it’s a bit racist to say what their background is?”
No, I didn’t. As I said, if they’d been white males I’d have mentioned it. Like the man in the street who witnesses a crime, I assumed the police would want to know as much detail about the criminal as possible, including ethnicity. Back then, I didn’t think that was wrong. Others obviously felt differently.
© Jayne Senior 2016. Extracted from Broken and Betrayed: the True Story of the Rotherham Abuse Scandal by the Woman Who Fought to Expose It, published by Pan Books on Thursday.
+ the secret services (national) - who have der fingers in everyfing -
Libertad
Sparking up a rollie in the Reichstag
Not on this thread you don't.
fairplay not as if mi5 would have any informers agents officers working in pakistani communities in post-industrial northern towns is it - Carry on Noncing!, no bombs though - sorry, its important it needs to be discussed, il butt out - peace
Lurdan
old wave
Another excerpt from Jayne Senior's forthcoming book in The Times. Long so in two parts.
‘A lot of men abused these girls’ - The Times (paywalled but...)
‘A lot of men abused these girls’ - The Times (paywalled but...)
March 25, 2009 was Operation Central “Strike Day’’, the day that the alleged abusers would be arrested. One of the most important steps would be the identification parade at a police station — an event the girls dreaded, even though it would take place behind darkened glass.
Eight men were arrested. (There could, and perhaps should, have been many more. A lot of men abused these girls; nameless men, men with families, with kids of the same age at home.) Of course, as soon as they were charged the men knew exactly who would be giving evidence against them.
The moment the girls were finished they had to return to their temporary addresses out of the area. During the period between the arrests and the trial, there were a couple of incidents that made us wonder whether their whereabouts had been discovered. One involved Charlie, who was living somewhere quite remote and the manager of the hostel rang the local police to let them know a couple of out-of-area taxis had turned up and were lingering at the end of the road.
In her early teens, long before Operation Central, Charlie fell in with a group of abusers and was going missing for days on end, as her mother tried desperately to locate her. One evening her mother was informed that Charlie was missing again, but this time she knew where to look . . . This is her story, in her own words:
I phoned up social services and said, “I can see her in the field, she’s with some Asian guys. Can you send the police?” I took my kids home and then my friend came back with me. We saw one of the men making her give him oral sex. Then everything just went haywire. I shouted, “Get off my daughter, you black bastard, she’s only 13!” I shouldn’t have said that, I know, but it just came out. They cleared off.
We phoned the police — it took an hour for them to arrive. They eventually came in a dog van, and I thought, “Surely they can’t take her in there?” One officer said to her, “If you go back to them men, everyone will think you’re a little slapper.”
She was taken to the Nottingham area, in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t allowed to know the address or the home number. I couldn’t see or speak to her for a full week. They took my statement, and because I’d called the guy a black bastard the police officer said I wouldn’t be a credible witness.
I wasn’t allowed to talk or tell anyone what had happened. I was told that if I did they would take the other kids off me. I wasn’t allowed to tell even family. When Charlie went to open up to me they stopped her. I was a witness.
The Strike Day arrests didn’t succeed in acting as a deterrent. Below, from late 2009, is a referral form on a boy who had fallen in with a group of abusers who were using him to deal drugs and hook in young girls.
[An abuser] allegedly involved in a serious sexual assault on another child has made threats towards [the boy], stating he will hang him from a tree in Clifton Park. [The boy] allegedly has a drug debt owed to [an abuser]. Information received is that [the boy] is also dealing drugs around the Ferham area on behalf of adults of concern, including [the abuser].
[The boy] was allegedly assaulted over the theft of cannabis. His mother was informed they needed to pay £20 per day until the £1,000 was paid in full. This boy was just 12 years old.
Not long after this, my husband Paul, our sons Lee and Ben and two of my brothers-in-law went out for a Christmas drink. Coming out of the pub they saw a young girl walking up the street. Then a van screeched to a halt and the Asian driver shouted, “Get in, you bitch!” Paul told him to “do one”. They walked the young girl home. I reported it to the police, and rang the girl’s social worker. She said: “What were your husband and sons doing approaching a young female late at night?”
The “young female” went on to be raped with a broken bottle and will never have a baby due to the damage caused. She told me recently that the night Paul intervened she had just been gang-raped and had run off, wanting to get home to where her mother would give her a hug and make everything better.
Between the Operation Central arrests and the trial itself, a “Lessons Learned” review of the operation was commissioned by the Rotherham Local Safeguarding Children Board. This was headed by Malcolm Stevens, a senior social worker with years of experience as a government adviser.
Malcolm noted that while it was “not possible to say whether or not Rotherham has a problem of child sexual exploitation which is more significant than anywhere else”, he did say that the facts indicated “child sexual exploitation at the top end of seriousness”. He also said that the 20 charges listed against the Operation Central defendants “do not represent the full extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham”.
However, there was also this:
Although the alleged perpetrators are of Asian origin and the victims are white, this is the factuality of these cases alone; nothing more can be drawn from that. It is imperative that suggestions/allusions of a wider cultural phenomenon is avoided. The BNP in Rotherham is said to have made such assertions already, in public and on its website, and that is highly regrettable.
I would argue that it is the denial of such a “cultural phenomenon” and the failure to tackle this properly that led to the British National Party and the English Defence League making political capital out of the situation.
That said, the review was very favourable to Risky Business, which made what happened with Operation Czar harder to understand. This was a similar scenario to Central, in that girls were being abused in and around a public park, except this one was Ferham Park, in a predominantly Asian area of Rotherham.
The referrals and information around the girls involved made for uncomfortable reading. One, aged 14, was being picked up in taxis, driven across Yorkshire and made to have sex with Asian males. For this she was paid £10. Another hung around in Ferham Park, waiting for various males to pick her up and have sex with her. Once, she was thrown in the canal as a threat. Yet another was seen getting into cars with different men. She was threatened with having her throat slashed. This girl was 13 at the time.
Howard Woolfenden, a new senior manager at the Children and Young People’s department, put Jill Holbert, a locality manager, in charge of the social care side of Operation Czar. This was the role Risky Business had performed in Operation Central yet it was decided that it wouldn’t be part of this investigation. I argued against this but Holbert put three social workers on the job. The same day some of the girls were introduced to these social workers, they were removed from their homes. The girls were furious and blamed us — because we were the ones they’d trusted in the first place.
Shortly after, Holbert asked to meet me and Christine Brodhurst-Brown. She had a list of the girls connected with Operation Czar and she told us, in no uncertain terms, that all these cases would be closed to Risky Business, “because now they have a social worker”. I protested loudly, but the deal had been done. It was also suggested that we close down the cases relating to Central but I argued that one vigorously, given that the trial was so close, and managed to keep those girls on our books.
Eight men were arrested. (There could, and perhaps should, have been many more. A lot of men abused these girls; nameless men, men with families, with kids of the same age at home.) Of course, as soon as they were charged the men knew exactly who would be giving evidence against them.
The moment the girls were finished they had to return to their temporary addresses out of the area. During the period between the arrests and the trial, there were a couple of incidents that made us wonder whether their whereabouts had been discovered. One involved Charlie, who was living somewhere quite remote and the manager of the hostel rang the local police to let them know a couple of out-of-area taxis had turned up and were lingering at the end of the road.
In her early teens, long before Operation Central, Charlie fell in with a group of abusers and was going missing for days on end, as her mother tried desperately to locate her. One evening her mother was informed that Charlie was missing again, but this time she knew where to look . . . This is her story, in her own words:
I phoned up social services and said, “I can see her in the field, she’s with some Asian guys. Can you send the police?” I took my kids home and then my friend came back with me. We saw one of the men making her give him oral sex. Then everything just went haywire. I shouted, “Get off my daughter, you black bastard, she’s only 13!” I shouldn’t have said that, I know, but it just came out. They cleared off.
We phoned the police — it took an hour for them to arrive. They eventually came in a dog van, and I thought, “Surely they can’t take her in there?” One officer said to her, “If you go back to them men, everyone will think you’re a little slapper.”
She was taken to the Nottingham area, in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t allowed to know the address or the home number. I couldn’t see or speak to her for a full week. They took my statement, and because I’d called the guy a black bastard the police officer said I wouldn’t be a credible witness.
I wasn’t allowed to talk or tell anyone what had happened. I was told that if I did they would take the other kids off me. I wasn’t allowed to tell even family. When Charlie went to open up to me they stopped her. I was a witness.
The Strike Day arrests didn’t succeed in acting as a deterrent. Below, from late 2009, is a referral form on a boy who had fallen in with a group of abusers who were using him to deal drugs and hook in young girls.
[An abuser] allegedly involved in a serious sexual assault on another child has made threats towards [the boy], stating he will hang him from a tree in Clifton Park. [The boy] allegedly has a drug debt owed to [an abuser]. Information received is that [the boy] is also dealing drugs around the Ferham area on behalf of adults of concern, including [the abuser].
[The boy] was allegedly assaulted over the theft of cannabis. His mother was informed they needed to pay £20 per day until the £1,000 was paid in full. This boy was just 12 years old.
Not long after this, my husband Paul, our sons Lee and Ben and two of my brothers-in-law went out for a Christmas drink. Coming out of the pub they saw a young girl walking up the street. Then a van screeched to a halt and the Asian driver shouted, “Get in, you bitch!” Paul told him to “do one”. They walked the young girl home. I reported it to the police, and rang the girl’s social worker. She said: “What were your husband and sons doing approaching a young female late at night?”
The “young female” went on to be raped with a broken bottle and will never have a baby due to the damage caused. She told me recently that the night Paul intervened she had just been gang-raped and had run off, wanting to get home to where her mother would give her a hug and make everything better.
Between the Operation Central arrests and the trial itself, a “Lessons Learned” review of the operation was commissioned by the Rotherham Local Safeguarding Children Board. This was headed by Malcolm Stevens, a senior social worker with years of experience as a government adviser.
Malcolm noted that while it was “not possible to say whether or not Rotherham has a problem of child sexual exploitation which is more significant than anywhere else”, he did say that the facts indicated “child sexual exploitation at the top end of seriousness”. He also said that the 20 charges listed against the Operation Central defendants “do not represent the full extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham”.
However, there was also this:
Although the alleged perpetrators are of Asian origin and the victims are white, this is the factuality of these cases alone; nothing more can be drawn from that. It is imperative that suggestions/allusions of a wider cultural phenomenon is avoided. The BNP in Rotherham is said to have made such assertions already, in public and on its website, and that is highly regrettable.
I would argue that it is the denial of such a “cultural phenomenon” and the failure to tackle this properly that led to the British National Party and the English Defence League making political capital out of the situation.
That said, the review was very favourable to Risky Business, which made what happened with Operation Czar harder to understand. This was a similar scenario to Central, in that girls were being abused in and around a public park, except this one was Ferham Park, in a predominantly Asian area of Rotherham.
The referrals and information around the girls involved made for uncomfortable reading. One, aged 14, was being picked up in taxis, driven across Yorkshire and made to have sex with Asian males. For this she was paid £10. Another hung around in Ferham Park, waiting for various males to pick her up and have sex with her. Once, she was thrown in the canal as a threat. Yet another was seen getting into cars with different men. She was threatened with having her throat slashed. This girl was 13 at the time.
Howard Woolfenden, a new senior manager at the Children and Young People’s department, put Jill Holbert, a locality manager, in charge of the social care side of Operation Czar. This was the role Risky Business had performed in Operation Central yet it was decided that it wouldn’t be part of this investigation. I argued against this but Holbert put three social workers on the job. The same day some of the girls were introduced to these social workers, they were removed from their homes. The girls were furious and blamed us — because we were the ones they’d trusted in the first place.
Shortly after, Holbert asked to meet me and Christine Brodhurst-Brown. She had a list of the girls connected with Operation Czar and she told us, in no uncertain terms, that all these cases would be closed to Risky Business, “because now they have a social worker”. I protested loudly, but the deal had been done. It was also suggested that we close down the cases relating to Central but I argued that one vigorously, given that the trial was so close, and managed to keep those girls on our books.
Lurdan
old wave
The rest of the excerpt from Jayne Senior's book.
One of the Czar cases we were forced to close was that of Laura Wilson — and just a few weeks before the trial was to begin, in the autumn of 2010, one of our staff got a call from Laura’s mother, Maggie, who told us that her daughter was missing. Now, a number of our girls would go “missing”, but usually for only a night or two. They tended to turn up — having spent time with their abusers — looking rough and dirty, but at least we could do something for them. But when Laura stayed missing, alarm bells rang. She was extra-vulnerable and she’d just had a baby. She wasn’t the sort to walk out on her child.
In her mid teens Laura started to date an Asian boy a year older than her by the name of Ashtiaq Ashgar. He was on our database of people we believed to be involved in CSE [child sexual exploitation] in that he was befriending and grooming girls of his age who would then be passed up to older men. He came from a strict background and didn’t tell his parents that he drank alcohol, smoked cannabis and had relationships with several other girls alongside Laura. Of course, she was obsessed with him so when she found out what had been going on behind her back, she hit the roof.
To take revenge on her boyfriend Laura slept with his married friend, Ishaq Hussein, who was 22. The inevitable happened and Laura became pregnant, eventually giving birth to a girl at the age of 16. She decided to keep the child and, against the odds, restarted her secret relationship with Ashtiaq Ashgar.
Perhaps because she’d had a baby and wanted some solidity in her life, or possibly because she wasn’t thinking straight, she decided to tell Ashtiaq’s family what was going on. His mother apparently went mad at her and hit her with a shoe. Then she decided to pay Ishaq’s family a visit and tell them the truth. We now know that Ashtiaq sent a text to Ishaq very soon afterwards, telling him he was “gonna send that bitch to hell”.
None of us could settle, knowing Laura was out there somewhere and very probably in danger. Brodhurst-Brown had just gone on holiday, but had asked me to update her if there was any news.
On the Monday of the following week, an officer from the Public Protection Unit rang me. “Jayne,” he said, “I have to tell you that we’ve found a shoe covered in blood.”
My heart sank. The following day my phone rang again. It was Sergeant Paul Newman. A body had been found in the canal. “It’s not been identified,” he said, “but it’s a young female. It’s not looking good at all, Jayne.”
I felt sick. I rang Simon Perry, Christine Brodhurst-Brown’s manager, and he said he’d come down to the office immediately. The staff were in pieces.
Perry hadn’t been there five minutes when there was a knock at the door and in came a police officer from the Safer Neighbourhood team. I asked him if there’d been any update.
“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid that it is Laura they’ve found, but we’re not releasing that today until she’s been formally identified. There’s another thing I should warn you about, too . . . we’ve been told that we have to take this down the honour-killing route. We can’t mention anything to do with CSE.”
I couldn’t believe it. An “honour killing”? Like she’d somehow had a hand in her own murder? All the agencies were saying this child was being groomed for abuse from the age of 10 and now here she was, dead, at just 17. Laura was a vulnerable girl who was taken advantage of and paid the price for her involvement with a group of abusers and their associates. The honour killing tag was completely inappropriate.
An emergency meeting was called at Rotherham borough council’s offices. There were a lot of grim faces around that table. I received a text from Sarah, who worked for Risky Business. She was forwarding a text she’d just received from Laura’s mum. “Please don’t let what’s happened to my baby happen to any of these other girls,” it said. “Someone has to stop this.”
Laura’s social worker was crying through the whole meeting and when it was her turn to speak she could barely get her words out. She kept going over mistakes apparently made with Laura — things that had gone wrong when she’d moved house, when she’d had the baby. She seemed to be blaming herself for everything. But it wasn’t her fault. It’s this town, I thought. This council, this police force. They’ve done nothing to protect Rotherham’s children.
It appeared that Laura had been stabbed dozens of times in a frenzied attack and there were defence marks on her arms. She had then been thrown into the canal. We heard later that she was still alive when she entered the water — the stab wounds to her head had been inflicted to keep her under.
The day after this first meeting we were called in again to decide whether there should be a Serious Case Review (SCR). Inevitably, it was found to be the only way that any such failings could be dealt with and so it was referred for approval. As we left, Jill Holbert sidled up to me.
“You know,” she said, “I never asked you to close Laura’s case.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “That’s exactly what you said.”
“No,” she said, brazen-faced, “I never asked you to close them all.”
“You did,” I replied, flushing in anger. “I’ve got the email to prove it.”
She turned on her heel and walked away. Nice try, Jill. When the Serious Case Review was approved, I co-operated by sending in everything we’d ever had on Laura.
Meanwhile, the girls involved in Operation Czar were so traumatised by being removed from their homes without warning that they refused to speak to the police. The operation was a fiasco and was abandoned. And still the abuse, violence and intimidation continued unabated.
© Jayne Senior 2016. Extracted from Broken and Betrayed: the True Story of the Rotherham Abuse Scandal by the Woman who Fought to Expose It, to be published by Pan Books on Thursday.
In her mid teens Laura started to date an Asian boy a year older than her by the name of Ashtiaq Ashgar. He was on our database of people we believed to be involved in CSE [child sexual exploitation] in that he was befriending and grooming girls of his age who would then be passed up to older men. He came from a strict background and didn’t tell his parents that he drank alcohol, smoked cannabis and had relationships with several other girls alongside Laura. Of course, she was obsessed with him so when she found out what had been going on behind her back, she hit the roof.
To take revenge on her boyfriend Laura slept with his married friend, Ishaq Hussein, who was 22. The inevitable happened and Laura became pregnant, eventually giving birth to a girl at the age of 16. She decided to keep the child and, against the odds, restarted her secret relationship with Ashtiaq Ashgar.
Perhaps because she’d had a baby and wanted some solidity in her life, or possibly because she wasn’t thinking straight, she decided to tell Ashtiaq’s family what was going on. His mother apparently went mad at her and hit her with a shoe. Then she decided to pay Ishaq’s family a visit and tell them the truth. We now know that Ashtiaq sent a text to Ishaq very soon afterwards, telling him he was “gonna send that bitch to hell”.
None of us could settle, knowing Laura was out there somewhere and very probably in danger. Brodhurst-Brown had just gone on holiday, but had asked me to update her if there was any news.
On the Monday of the following week, an officer from the Public Protection Unit rang me. “Jayne,” he said, “I have to tell you that we’ve found a shoe covered in blood.”
My heart sank. The following day my phone rang again. It was Sergeant Paul Newman. A body had been found in the canal. “It’s not been identified,” he said, “but it’s a young female. It’s not looking good at all, Jayne.”
I felt sick. I rang Simon Perry, Christine Brodhurst-Brown’s manager, and he said he’d come down to the office immediately. The staff were in pieces.
Perry hadn’t been there five minutes when there was a knock at the door and in came a police officer from the Safer Neighbourhood team. I asked him if there’d been any update.
“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid that it is Laura they’ve found, but we’re not releasing that today until she’s been formally identified. There’s another thing I should warn you about, too . . . we’ve been told that we have to take this down the honour-killing route. We can’t mention anything to do with CSE.”
I couldn’t believe it. An “honour killing”? Like she’d somehow had a hand in her own murder? All the agencies were saying this child was being groomed for abuse from the age of 10 and now here she was, dead, at just 17. Laura was a vulnerable girl who was taken advantage of and paid the price for her involvement with a group of abusers and their associates. The honour killing tag was completely inappropriate.
An emergency meeting was called at Rotherham borough council’s offices. There were a lot of grim faces around that table. I received a text from Sarah, who worked for Risky Business. She was forwarding a text she’d just received from Laura’s mum. “Please don’t let what’s happened to my baby happen to any of these other girls,” it said. “Someone has to stop this.”
Laura’s social worker was crying through the whole meeting and when it was her turn to speak she could barely get her words out. She kept going over mistakes apparently made with Laura — things that had gone wrong when she’d moved house, when she’d had the baby. She seemed to be blaming herself for everything. But it wasn’t her fault. It’s this town, I thought. This council, this police force. They’ve done nothing to protect Rotherham’s children.
It appeared that Laura had been stabbed dozens of times in a frenzied attack and there were defence marks on her arms. She had then been thrown into the canal. We heard later that she was still alive when she entered the water — the stab wounds to her head had been inflicted to keep her under.
The day after this first meeting we were called in again to decide whether there should be a Serious Case Review (SCR). Inevitably, it was found to be the only way that any such failings could be dealt with and so it was referred for approval. As we left, Jill Holbert sidled up to me.
“You know,” she said, “I never asked you to close Laura’s case.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “That’s exactly what you said.”
“No,” she said, brazen-faced, “I never asked you to close them all.”
“You did,” I replied, flushing in anger. “I’ve got the email to prove it.”
She turned on her heel and walked away. Nice try, Jill. When the Serious Case Review was approved, I co-operated by sending in everything we’d ever had on Laura.
Meanwhile, the girls involved in Operation Czar were so traumatised by being removed from their homes without warning that they refused to speak to the police. The operation was a fiasco and was abandoned. And still the abuse, violence and intimidation continued unabated.
© Jayne Senior 2016. Extracted from Broken and Betrayed: the True Story of the Rotherham Abuse Scandal by the Woman who Fought to Expose It, to be published by Pan Books on Thursday.
Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
Playlist of the ..largely self serving..testimonies being given to that enquiry.
Ignore the odd one or 2 titles.
Rotherham Scandal - YouTube
Ignore the odd one or 2 titles.
Rotherham Scandal - YouTube
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
not-bono-ever
meh
good.
bimble
floofy
Looks in some ways quite similar, (court cases just concluded in Newcastle)
Seventeen men found guilty over Newcastle sex grooming network
Seventeen men found guilty over Newcastle sex grooming network
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
in which ways?
ElizabethofYork
Old Crone
Vulnerable girls and women being plied with alcohol and drugs and passed around among groups of men.
Vile.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
yeh, i gathered that was at the core of the case - i wondered whether whether bimble had seen other similarities
krink
I'll do it this afternoon
one similarity is that some of the victims were in the care system.
Operation Sanctuary: Newcastle child sex network convicted - BBC News
Operation Sanctuary: Newcastle child sex network convicted - BBC News
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Cheers
bimble
floofy
urbanspaceman
Well-Known Member
On abuse it's time to call a spade a spade
Not just Farage, Trevor Phillips weighs in today. And, at the risk of committing thoughtcrime, now so will I. The BBC used an adjective to describe this gang, presumably to indicate some shared and collective attribute. The adjective was "Asian". This is incorrect - some of the members were Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi. Being of 50% Hindu-Indian heritage myself, I get really tired of hearing about "Asian" rape gangs. I imagine Japanese bankers and Malaysian doctors do as well. There exists a more accurate descriptive adjective.
Not just Farage, Trevor Phillips weighs in today. And, at the risk of committing thoughtcrime, now so will I. The BBC used an adjective to describe this gang, presumably to indicate some shared and collective attribute. The adjective was "Asian". This is incorrect - some of the members were Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi. Being of 50% Hindu-Indian heritage myself, I get really tired of hearing about "Asian" rape gangs. I imagine Japanese bankers and Malaysian doctors do as well. There exists a more accurate descriptive adjective.
not-bono-ever
meh
or "cunts"
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
I do think it's harmful to be labelling the perpetrators' ethnicity like this, but Iran, Iraq and most of Turkey are in Asia, so it's not 'incorrect' in that way.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
That fence must be comfy for you to sit on it so
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