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Fear of racism accusation prevented sexploitation arrests printable version

28 Aug 2014: posted by the editor - United Kingdom

Fears of accusations of racism allowed Asian men in Rotherham and elsewhere to continue raping, sexually abusing and threatening teenaged girls with violence over a 16-year period. Over 1,400 girls are believed to have been victims of five men operating the sexploitation ring and named as Umar Razaq, Adil Hussain, Razwan Razaq, Zafran Ramzan, and Mohsin Khan.

An in-depth report on the case, by Professor Alexis Jay, a former president of the Association of Directors of Social Work found:

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 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. 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'.

Professor Jay, who wrote the report, 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."

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Tags: Rotherham sexploitation

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