Child sex abuse inquiry refused to probe Rotherham and Rochdale grooming gangs as it’s ‘scared of being called racist’
A CHILD sex abuse inquiry reportedly refused to probe Rotherham and Rochdale grooming gangs as it is ";scared of being called racist".
Victims and experts slammed the "selective" decision making throughout the £143million inquiry as "cowardly",
Sammy Woodhouse, a victim of a Rotherham gang, blasted the public inquiry has "not placed survivors at the forefront" of the probe.
She said: "If you are going to get to the root of gang-related child sexual exploitation you need to go right to the heart of it.
"They are trying to bury what happened in places like Rotherham and Rochdale because they’re scared of being called racist.”
And Sarah Champion, a campaigner for child victims, questioned the decision to not hear evidence on the northern grooming networks.
She said: "It’s more than a missed opportunity. So many survivors pinned their hopes on this inquiry getting to the truth.”
Since 2011 gangs have been convicted for grooming in areas such as Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Burnley, Leicester, Newcastle, Peterborough, Dewsbury and Halifax.
Many investigations found grooming gangs targeting and abusing teenage girls, largely by men and often involving people from south Asian backgrounds.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) is attempting to find out "what went wrong and why" in previous failures to protect children from sexual exploitation by "organised networks".
'MISSED OPPORTUNITY'
It chose not to hear evidence from survivors or experts in two weeks of public hearings, focusing on six areas in England and Wales as "they represent a range of sizes, demographics and instituional practices"
These spots are St Helens, Tower Hamlets, Swansea, Durham, Bristol and Warwickshire.
None have currently seen a large scale prosecution of a grooming gang similar to those found in Rochdale or Rotherham.
Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester police officer who exposed the alleged cover-up of grooming gang crimes said the probe was “too frightened to open the hornet’s nest”.
Rotherham and Rochdale's grooming gang past:
THE South Yorkshire town of Rotherham was embroilled in a child sex abuse scandel from the late 1980s until the 2010s.
Five British-Pakistani men were the first from a grooming gang to be sentenced in 2010 for sexual offences against girls aged 12-14.
In August 2014 an inquiry commissioned by Rotherham Council found around 1,400 children had been abused between 1997 and 2013.
The majority of abusers were found to be predominately British-Pakistani men - with the number of victims increasing in 2018 to more than 1,500.
Seven more men were convicted in 2018 of sex crimes between 1998 and 2005.
A £90m inquiry - Operation Stovewood - has identified 1,523 potential victims and is investigating allegations against 426 people, of whom 151 are designated suspects.
So far four people have been convicted under Operation Stovewood, with a further 24 suspects charged and 68 interviewed under caution.
The investigation has recorded 648 grooming crimes over a 16-year period.
In Rochdale, Greater Manchester, 19 men have been convicted after 47 girls were found to be victims of sex abuse, and last year it emerged up to 1,000 children could be victims of a huge sex ring in Telford - seven men were convicted over the abuse in 2013.
And in December four members of a grooming gang, also from Telford, were found guilty of abusing a 12-year-old girl.
In 2018 a group of 20 men from a grooming gang were convicted of more than 120 offences against 15 girls in Huddersfield.
In July this year a number of suspects were arrested in a new Rochdale grooming investigation.
And Nazir Afzal, former chief crown prosecutor who worked to bring members of a Rochdale grooming gang to justice, called it a "nonsense", adding: "With the other strands of this inquiry it’s been about looking back at what went wrong to see what we can learn from those mistakes.
"This section decided it was going to look forward, but you can’t move forward without looking back at the failures.”
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Henrietta Hill, QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, said the it “carefully considered the extent to which, if at all, it should focus on areas such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford, all of which have attracted public attention”.
She added, it was felt “more appropriate” to look more closely at “different areas, not least because it was intended that this was a forward-looking investigation building on analysis that’s already been done”.
The inquiry's findings will be published throughout next year with a final report due in 2022.
