ROTHERHAM SCANDAL: Scared abuse victims not reporting crimes over fear of losing children

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As part of a Rotherham investigation series being revealed this week, Express.co.uk has learnt how victims of industrial scale child sexual exploitation (CSE) in the Yorkshire town have been left too scared to go to the police because council workers are more interested in taking their children off them than offering support, it has been claimed. 

Campaigners and victims have told this website that social workers are threatening to take children away from grown women even if they come forward to report sexual abuse that they suffered as a child. 

In some cases the children are the result of the sexual abuse they suffered, but in many they are the result of loving relationships they have established long after their initial ordeal. 

Council workers have been accused of using the excuse that victims have been mentally scarred to prise children from their families and put them in care. 

Rotherham Borough Council said the idea that children were removed from their parents based on previous abuse was a “distressing misconception” and stressed: “We would urgently reassure people that this is not the case.” 

But the revelations will raise fears of warped priorities amongst Rotherham’s council workers, who have been savaged over the politically correct culture which allowed at least 1,400 girls to be abused by predominantly Kashmiri men over a 15-year period. 

A report into the scandal revealed that authorities were terrified of being branded racist for linking the ethnicity of the perpetrators to the abuse, even going as far as to tipex out the word “Pakistani” on official documents.

And now an investigation by express.co.uk has established that senseless officialdom could be deterring hundreds of girls still suffering abuse at the hands of the grooming gangs from coming forward to speak about their ordeals. One victim, who now works with girls subjected to abuse, revealed that “about 25%” of the victims she knows are refusing to go to the police over fears that social services will take away their children. 

Express.co.uk heard accounts of social workers threatening to take away children from victims of abuse almost immediately after birth. 

And in January a trial at Sheffield Crown Court heard that staff at Rotherham Borough Council had threatened to take one victim’s children away for speaking out about her abuse. 

The girl, whose bravery in coming forward exposed the scandal of grooming in Rotherham to the world, said she was contacted by council workers who ordered her to stop doing media interviews or risk losing her children.  She told the jury: “At one point I was going to stop. I felt like I was being blackmailed by Rotherham Borough Council saying they were going to take my kids from me. But the more I did speak out, the more people did come forward and it was really helping the situation – things were improving.”

And one child abuse campaigner told this website: “It can be children that they’ve had afterwards. We’ve had a few that have been put on assessment for no other reason than they were involved in CSE as children.” 

One father of a victim – who eventually did agree to give evidence against her abuser – said many of the girls believe the authorities have the wrong priorities.  “We’ve been portrayed as bad parents who don’t care about their kids, who are in the pub all the time and that’s the exact opposite that we were and that hurts. It hurts that because we love our kids, we see them every day and I hate it that people out there are thinking we’re just parents who can’t be bothered with their kids and put them in children’s homes. As bad as it got, not once did we think about not letting our daughter come home. I don’t know if that’s authorities trying to take the heat off themselves by giving that impression.”

Lawyer David Greenwood, who represents dozens of victims, agreed that the fear of having children removed was something he heard time and time again. He said: “That has definitely been a factor at some points in the investigation. Some girls have expressed that fear that they still don’t trust the council to make good decisions on whether their children should stay with them or not.” 

The history is in Easy Meat by Peter McLoughlin, available here and published by the New English Review Press.

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2 Responses

  1. Could not the Mothers' Union in the UK step forward in force to support these abused young girls and women and to make some noise and exert pressure on their behalf?  And to assist them to keep their children?  Has a copy of "Easy Meat" been sent to MU headquarters in London, and to the heads of each MU national body, world-wide?

    (I confess that although I should have sent a copy to the head of MU Australia with a suitable covering letter, I have not yet done so.  Mea culpa).

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