Report into Rotherham police failings ‘lets down’ grooming survivors

A long £6m investigation into multiple police failings during the Rotherham grooming scandal “lets down victims and survivors” by failing to identify any individual accountability, a police and crime commissioner has said.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) on Wednesday published what it described as its overarching report from Operation Linden, the name given to a series of investigations it carried out into how South Yorkshire police responded to allegations of child sexual abuse and exploitation between 1997 and 2013.

It is estimated that more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham across the 16-year time span.

The report concludes that the force failed to protect vulnerable children. The IOPC carried out 91 investigations into police failings covering 265 separate allegations made by 51 complainants. In total, 47 officers were investigated, with the IOPC concluding eight had a case to answer for misconduct, and six for gross misconduct.

Not one officer lost their job as a result of the process and the most severe sanction was a written warning.

The new report outlines in grim, “uncomfortable to read” detail the repeated police failings in their handling of allegations in Rotherham. It found that time and again police officers were not fully aware of, or able to deal with child sexual abuse and exploitation offences. Officers repeatedly lacked empathy, with some seeing children as “consenting” to their exploitation.

One parent concerned about a missing daughter said they were told by an officer “it was a ‘fashion accessory’ for girls in Rotherham to have an ‘older Asian boyfriend’ and that she would grow out of it”.

Another parent was told by an officer investigating the rape of his 15-year-old daughter in a Rotherham park that the incident would teach the child a “lesson”.

> This is grooming and exploitation on an industrial scale mostly by Asian gangs... <

In the UK, “Asian” almost always means “Muslim”.

So, yeah. Asian gangs in the UK did some monstrous things. But we’re sure not talking about Chinese or Japanese gangs here.

I suspect almost all of the victims came from lower working class backgrounds. These people are regarded by the middle and upper classes as whit nxxxxxx and unworthy of any consideration, certainly beneath ‘respectable’ Pakistanis. Class structures in the UK are fierce and the deindustrialization of the UK delivered a true body blow to the working class, many of who already had severe family dysfunction issues. Also, many working class girls find their Brit counterparts disgusting. Think Andy Capp without the laughs. So Paki guys have that advantage. Britainis, in many ways, really a sad country today. Margaret Thatcher’s reforms really did not have long term positive results. I couldn’t figure out what some Conservative Englishmen I knew when they alluded to this in conversations twenty years ago. ‘People have to have some sort of jobs or they just go crazy. Paying people a bare subsistence to do nothing produces s lot of crazed drugged out people.’ When I went to Sheffield/ Newcastle on business I saw right out in public what they meant. I saw 12 yr old girls wandering around drunk on their ass or stoned in the middle of the day. There was a , by British terms, bad heatwave at the time and a number of these girls seemed to be half dressed (panties and a light tee). This is relevant to the US as a combination of destruction of production businesses and lots of dope are turning or have turned a big piece of middle America into the same sort of material and spiritual wasteland. I don’t know the answer I just know the soulless wilderness is growing.

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