Policeman, councillors linked to sex abuse
A CORRUPT police officer and two councillors have been accused of having sex with victims of one of Britain’s worst child abuse scandals, The Times has revealed.
Claims relate to politicians and a constable in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where an estimated 1400 girls were subjected to serious sexual offences over 16 years.
The explosive allegations were revealed on the day that longawaited findings from an independent inspection of the local authority are due to be published. The report is expected to make damning criticisms of the council, which risks being stripped of its powers.
Complaints against the two Rotherham councillors are understood to have been sent to the National Crime Agency, which is investigating child sex crimes in the town. One of the councillors is still serving.
Allegations against the police officer, who is also said to have regularly passed information to abusers targeting vulnerable children for sex, have separately been referred to Britain’s police watchdog by the South Yorkshire force.
A second officer is accused of neglect in his duty because he allegedly failed to take appropriate action after receiving intelligence about his colleague’s conduct. The claims are being assessed by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
In 2012, when The lished confidential Times pubdocuments revealing that police officers and council officials had known for at least a decade that girls in Rotherham were being groomed, pimped and trafficked by men with virtual impunity, the local authority’s response was to demand a criminal inquiry into the leaking of the documents.
The council threatened High Court action to block another story, and also hired lawyers to expose the ‘‘security breach’’.
Rotherham gained international notoriety last year when an inquiry by Alexis Jay found that hundreds of girls, some as young as 11, suffered ‘‘appalling levels of crime and abuse’’ from 1997 to 2013.
Children were said to have been abducted, trafficked to other towns, beaten, threatened, and in some cases forced to witness rapes. The men involved were ‘‘almost all’’ of Pakistani origin.
Senior police officers and council officials were said to have known of the abuse, yet chose to ‘‘disbelieve, suppress or ignore’’ evidence of multiple crimes.
In the public outcry that came after the Jay report, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles ordered an independent inspection of Rotherham’s council, which was led by Louise Casey, the director-general of the government’s troubled families programme.
Sources expect Casey’s report to be scathing in its verdict on the council’s overall performance and the provision of safeguarding services to children and young people.