"Married father-of-two Arshid Hussain was even caught with the half naked schoolgirl under his bed but documents revealed that police arrested her - and let him go."
8/26/14, "Revealed: How fear of being seen as racist stopped social workers saving up to 1,400 children from sexual exploitation at the hands of Asian men in just ONE TOWN," UK Daily Mail, by Mia De Graaf, Amanda Williams
So. Yorkshire government building |
"The sexual
abuse of about 1,400 children at the hands of Asian men went unreported
for 16 years because staff feared they would be seen as racist, a report
said today.
Children
as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of
men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, the council
commissioned review into child protection revealed.
And shockingly, more than a third of the cases were already known to agencies.
But
according to the report's author: 'several staff described their
nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for
fear of being thought racist'.
Professor
Alexis Jay, who wrote the report, condemned the 'blatant' collective
failures by the council's leadership....
The landmark report which exposed widespread failures of the council, police and social services revealed:
- Victims were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, terrorised with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and told they would be the next if they spoke out;
- They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated;
- One victim described gang rape as 'a way of life';
- Police 'regarded many child victims with contempt';
- Some fathers tried to rescue their children from abuse but were arrested themselves;
- The approximate figure of 1,400 abuse victims is likely to be a conservative estimate of the true scale of abuse.
The
lack of reports was partly down to a fear of being racist, Prof Jay
wrote, as the majority of the perpetrators were described as 'Asian
men', and many were said to be of Pakistani origin.
One young person told the inquiry that 'gang rape' was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham where she lived.
Prof Jay said the first of these reports was 'effectively suppressed' because senior officers did not believe the data.
The other two were ignored, the professor said.
Fears had also been raised by schools over the 16 years but the alerts went uninvestigated.
Teachers
reported seeing children as young as 11, 12 and 13 being picked up
outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones and
taken to meet large numbers of unknown men in Rotherham or other local
towns and cities.
The
majority of victims believed the perpetrators to be their boyfriend who
gave them gifts, alcohol and drugs. Some of the victims still maintain
they were not groomed or abused.
Analysing
the case studies, Prof Jay said many of the children came from
dysfunctional families, had parents with addictions, and had suffered
domestic or sexual abuse as a child.
Some had serious mental health problems.
Councillors seemed to dismiss previous reports as a one-off problem which they hoped would go away, according to Prof Jay.
She said: 'Others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.'
The
spotlight first fell on Rotherham in 2010 when five men, described by a
judge as 'sexual predators', were given lengthy jail terms after they
were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.
The
five men - Umar Razaq, Adil Hussain, Razwan Razaq, Zafran Ramzan, and
Mohsin Khan - preyed on their victims over several months and threatened
them with violence if they refused their advances.
One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.'
The
men, all British-born Pakistanis, attacked the four girls in play
areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard....
The spotlight fell on Rotherham in 2010, after Laura Wilson, 17, was murdered for bringing shame on the families of two
Pakistani men who had used her for sex.
Laura, 17, had been groomed by a string of British Pakistanis before she was stabbed and thrown into a canal to die for informing her abusers' families of the sexual relationships.
Her killer Ashtiaq Asghar, who was 18 at the time, was given a life sentence and will serve a minimum of 17-and-a-half years after he pleaded guilty to murdering Laura in October 2010.
In 2012, the council's Safeguarding Children Board published a serious case review but key passages which reveal they knew she was at particular risk from 'Asian men' had been blocked out with black lines.
The council went to court in an attempt to tried to suppress the hidden information after a uncensored copy of the report was leaked to the Times newspaper but they abandoned legal action.
The uncensored report confirms that Laura, identified as Child S, had dealings with 15 agencies and identified 'numerous missed opportunities' to protect her....
She had also been referred to a child sexual exploitation project just three months after her 11th birthday. Another censored passage reveals that Laura had been 'mentioned' during a 2009 police inquiry that eventually led to the conviction of five Pakistani men for sex offences against three underage girls.
While the published report mentioned the fact that a friend, who Laura knew when she was 10, was 'thought to have become involved in sexual exploitation', it concealed the succeeding passage which read: 'with particular reference to Asian men'.
In
August 2013, four women launched legal action against Rotherham council
over 'systematic failures' to protect them from 'sexual abuse by
predatory men when they were children' according to their lawyers.
On one ocassion married father-of-two Arshid Hussain was even caught with the half naked schoolgirl under his bed but documents revealed that police arrested her - and let him go.
Rotherham, South Yorkshire, has become known as Britain's under-age sex capital, after a string of high profile cased where authorities have let down vulnerable children.
In another shocking case, reported in 2012, a 13-year-old girl told police how she had been groomed and raped by an Asian sex gang.
She wrote a harrowing letter to herself at the age of 14 addressed to her alter-ego Michelle, in which she wrote, 'I feel like the Asians really hate me even when they say they love me'.
The girl, who told police in 2003 about the rape that took her virginity and the time five men queued outside a bedroom to demand sex from her, added, 'They took all my dreams and my life away from me.'
Following
the 2010 case, The Times claimed that details from 200
restricted-access documents showed how police and child protection
agencies in the South Yorkshire town had extensive knowledge of these
activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted.
The allegations led to a range of official investigations, including one by the Home Affairs Select Committee....
One victim
of child sex abuse in Rotherham was trafficked for sex to Leeds,
Bradford and Sheffield by the time she was 15-years-old and was doused
in petrol and threatened with being set alight.
The girl, referred to only as Child B in today's report, was threatened with being
forced into prostitution, her older sibling was taken to hospital, and the windows of their house were shattered.
The report said she was 'groomed by an older man involved in the exploitation of other children'.
The
report said: 'Child B loved this man. He trafficked her to Leeds,
Bradford and Sheffield and offered to provide her with a flat in one of
those cities.
'A child protection referral was made but the social care case file recorded no response to this.'
The report detailed how 'within just a few months Child B and her family were living in fear of their lives'.
The
report said: 'Child B and her mother refused to have anything more to
do with the police because they believed the police could do nothing to
protect them.'
It added: 'Child B had been stalked and had petrol poured over her head and was threatened with being set alight.
'She took overdoses. She and her family were too terrified to make statements to the police.'
The report said the teenager was homeless by the time she was 18.
It
concluded: 'She referred herself to children's social care and was
given advice about benefits. No further action was taken. This child and
her family were completely failed by all services with the exception of
Risky Business (a local support group).'
A girl referred to as Child D was 13 when she was groomed, raped and trafficked by a violent sexual predator in the town.
'Police and children's social care were ineffective and seemed to blame the child,' the report said.
It
said: 'An initial assessment accurately described the risks to Child D
but appeared to blame her for "placing herself at risk of sexual
exploitation and danger".'"...
Image: "Warnings: The report comes after two others done between 2002 and 2006 which 'could not have been clearer'," google
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