The abuse is still going on – and now it’s even WORSE
SUE REID broke the story of sex gangs preying on young white girls. This week one victim took her round Rotherham and pointed out her attackers still swaggering the streets...
‘If they played the race card, police melted away’
evil, and all decent-minded Muslims will be appalled by this week’s revelations about a minority who flout the law so egregiously.
Meanwhile, the cry has gone up from Rotherham’s Pakistani community that they had simply no idea of the horrors going on under their noses. But it is not just a question of race that makes this scandal so disturbing.
One of the wicked myths perpetuated by the local instututions in Rotherham (and many other towns and cities where sex gangs roam today) is that abused girls are the progeny of feckless parents, or are sexually precocious youngsters in the care system.
This is far from the truth: the majority come from decent, loving homes. Under a third of the 1,400 girls attacked in Rotherham were in care (many placed there at the desperate request of their parents to protect them from the gangs, which then, sickeningly, traced their victims through Facebook or mobile phones, and sold them for sex again).
Shockingly, this week’s Jay Report says that such sexual exploitation now offers ‘career and financial opportunities’ to young south Asian men in Britain.
Trading girls is a far more lucrative organised crime than trading drugs. Scotland Yard says one victim can generate £300,000 a year for those exploiting her.
Another disturbing aspect of the Jay Report is the ‘prominent role’ of taxi drivers in the Rotherham scandal. Indeed, another youth worker in the town told me recently that some of the men who abuse the young girls ‘ drive into Rotherham from all over England — Manchester, Derby, Birmingham, and even further away — often in their own taxis’.
The minutes of a Rotherham Council child safeguarding meeting in 2010 — a year when hundreds of girls were attacked by gangs — recorded that several victims had spoken of abduction or sex attacks by taxi drivers. Other girls, in other years, told the council similar terrifying tales.
Yet only four drivers, all from different firms, have had licences revoked by the council since 2009 in connection with child sexual exploitation.
Just one was arrested for sex offences and supplying drugs to a 15-year- old girl, but he was never charged by police.
Professor Jay says she interviewed 24 Rotherham girls, now aged 14 to 25, and they ‘all avoided taxis if possible’.
‘The girls described how on occasions they would be [driven] the longest, darkest route home,’ wrote Professor Jay. ‘One said the driver’s first question would always be: “How old are you, love?” All talked about the conversation quickly turning flirtatious or suggestive, with references to sex.’
So why were licences of the suspected drivers never removed by the authorities, and why did the police not arrest them?
The Jay Report confirms that the police, social workers and council leaders ‘tiptoed’ round predatory gangs, even as their behaviour grew more blatant. Was this because of political correctness and a fear of being called a racist?
And Emma Jackson, who is now 25, tells a revealing story about what happened to her when she was 13 and out with Tarik, plus his sidekicks, at the Rotherham shopping centre.
It was near closing time, about six at night, too late, one might think, for a 13-year-old to be on the streets with a group of men ten years her senior.
‘A couple of beat bobbies came up to us and asked me for my name, my age, and my address,’ she recalled this week. ‘I had been taught to tell the truth by my parents, so I didn’t make up anything. I gave them the correct details.’
What happened next was extraordinary. Tarik began to take charge. He told the two policemen to arrest him or stop bothering Emma and his group of friends. He said if they did not ‘p*** off’, he would take their badge numbers and make a complaint for racial harassment against them.
Emma says: ‘The policemen just walked away. They did not drive me home, they did not contact my parents, they did nothing to protect me. I never heard anything from them.
‘It was always the same. If the perpetrators played the race card, then the police, the social services, they melted away.
‘It meant Tarik and these other men grew arrogant. They acted with complete impunity. They believed they were above any law.
‘ When I was with them, they openly boasted they would never be arrested, and girls I help now tell me the men who sexually exploit them boast the same thing today.’
She adds: ‘The men doing these dreadful things to girls and children think they are more powerful than God. A blind eye was turned by the authorities over many years. It is close to a deliberate cover-up, which has put hundreds of girls in danger. They are still in danger today.’
Which is presumably why, despite the shocking exposure of their sex crimes, so many are still cruising the streets — and looking out for the next piece of what they regard as no more than easy meat.