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X GANG: 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. Adil Hussain and Razwan Razaq were jailed in 2010 for abusing children in Rotherham, Umar Razaq was another of the five-strong sex gang jailed and placed on the sex offenders’ register. Jailed: Zafran Ramzan, 21, was jailed for nine years and Mohsin Khan for four in the same case
LONDON – At least 1,400 children as young as 11 were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in a UK town, mostly by South Asian men of Pakistani-British origin, between 1997 and 2013, a report has found highlighting the failures of the political leadership to prevent such incidents.
Children were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked from other cities in the UK to Rotherham, it said.
According to the damning report, the sexual abuse went unreported for 16 years because staff feared they would be seen as racist.
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 know 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’.
The report said: “By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims.” The report, commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council, revealed there had been three previous inquiries.
Council leader Roger Stone said he would step down with immediate effect.
Stone, who has been the leader since 2003, said: “I believe it is only right that as leader I take responsibility for the historic failings described so clearly.”
“Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist,” Alexis Jay said, a former chief social work advisor to Scottish government.
The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled “racist” if they focused on victims’ description of the majority of abusers as “Asian” men.
Jay, who wrote the latest report, said there had been “blatant” collective failures by the council’s leadership, senior managers had “underplayed” the scale of the problem and South Yorkshire Police had failed to prioritise the issue.
Jay said: “No-one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.”
Revealing details of the inquiry’s findings, Jay said: “It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered.” The inquiry team found examples of “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.”
Professor Jay condemned the ‘blatant’ collective failures by the council’s leadership, concluding: ‘It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered.’
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.
In two cases, fathers had tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused – only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.
And one child declined her initial offer to give a statement after allegedly receiving a text from a perpetrator threatening to harm her younger sister.
The failures happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 ‘which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham’.
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.
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.
