The Rotherham scandal is even worse than we imagined

‘We’re forgotten children. We’re dirty little secrets. That’s how they look at us.’ Shockingly, the brave woman who uttered these words is not referring to the mainly Pakistani-heritage men who raped her and other young girls in Rotherham, South Yorkshire over the course of several decades. She is talking about her town’s police officers. Five women have this week gone public with their allegations that the very people who should have been protecting vulnerable girls and arresting their abusers were not only complicit in silencing victims and appeasing perpetrators – they raped, threatened and violently attacked grooming-gang victims, too.

The accounts of these women, who are now pursuing a legal case against South Yorkshire Police, are horrifying. One victim of Rotherham’s so-called grooming gangs claims she was raped at the age of just 12 by a serving police officer. ‘He knew where we used to hang out, he would request either oral sex or rape us in the back of the police car’, she told the BBC. The officer allegedly threatened to hand her back to her abusers if she complained. ‘In a world where you were being abused so much, being raped once [each time] was a lot easier than multiple rapes, and I think he knew that’, she said. When, aged 15, she was forced into an abortion, a social worker contacted the police. But the officer who interviewed her, she says, was the same one who had been abusing her. She claims he ripped up her statement in front of her.

Thirty women in total have provided written testimonies alleging they were abused by Rotherham’s serving police officers at the very same time they were being exploited by mainly Pakistani-heritage men in the town. They claim policemen supplied drugs to rape-gang members and had sex with girls in exchange for drugs and money. Three say they were beaten by officers, including one in a police cell. Most of these women were in their teens at the time. One was just 11 years old.

Tragically, it was precisely because the girls had been victims once that they were so easily targeted a second time. One says she was in care at the time she became a victim of the rape gangs. She often ran away and, when she was found, she would be raped by a police officer in a squat, she told the BBC. ‘He knew we wouldn’t be missed. He knew we wouldn’t be reported. He knew we wouldn’t be able to say anything. He knew that he had the upper hand’, she said.

The vulnerability of these girls and their ‘low status’ in the eyes of many social workers, teachers, politicians, journalists and, other than a tiny number of honourable exceptions, even feminist campaigners meant they could be abused without fear of consequence by both grooming gangs and police officers. A desire not to question the ideology of multiculturalism and risk disrupting community relations protected mainly Pakistani-heritage rapists. But it was a sheer contempt for white, working-class girls that meant they were never taken seriously by those in authority and, they now allege, further abused. The shame of Britain’s grooming-gangs scandal, it seems, is not simply that political correctness was prioritised over safeguarding children, but also that corrupt police officers sought to protect their own access to sex with young girls.

Since the women have come forward with their accusations, three retired police officers have been arrested on suspicion of historic sex offences and a criminal investigation has been opened into the involvement of the police in the Rotherham grooming scandal. This should have happened decades ago. That South Yorkshire Police now claim to have a dedicated team of detectives all pursuing lines of inquiry is too little, too late. Why should they be trusted to investigate themselves in the light of such serious accusations? That what amounts to an internal inquiry is even being suggested is astonishing. It demonstrates yet more contempt for Rotherham’s victims of rape and abuse.

Professor Alexis Jay, whose decade-old report first shone a light on the industrial-scale rape of young girls in Rotherham, has said an investigation into South Yorkshire Police should be be run by an independent police force or His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services. The alleged victims are justifiably angry at the proposal of Rotherham officers to mark their own homework. In a statement issued through the solicitors representing their case, they say: ‘Those that have suffered abuse in Rotherham have no faith that South Yorkshire Police will do a thorough job of investigating alleged abuse by their own officers.’ Since learning that the force will be responsible for the inquiry, some women have withdrawn their testimonies.

The women of Rotherham have been failed repeatedly: by the social workers and carers that should have protected them, by the police who should have arrested rapists instead of perpetrating more abuse themselves, and by middle-class campaigners and commentators who were all too ready to look the other way in order to preserve the ideology of diversity and champion less ‘problematic’ victims. The inquiry into South Yorkshire Police cannot be just another addition to this long list of failings.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/