Councillors in Rotherham were told about the abuse and rape of children in the northern town at a seminar almost a decade ago but were told to keep it “confidential” to avoid jeopardising police investigations, it emerged yesterday.
The disclosure came at an angry council meeting in Rotherham when a member of the public questioned why councillors had failed to act on information about child sexual exploitation.
A report by Professor Alexis Jay published last week found that 1,400 children had been sexually abused over a 16-year period. She wrote that in April 2005, 30 elected members had attended a seminar on the sexual abuse of children and that the “explicit content” meant that after this “few members or senior officers could say ‘we didn’t know’.”
Responding to a question about why he had not acted, Ken Wyatt, a Labour councillor, said: “”Yes, we knew that it was happening, especially from that seminar.”
But he said “it was not at the scale we have subsequently found out”, and added that they’d been asked to keep the seminar “confidential” to avoid disrupting police inquiries. Another councillor said she had also been told not to speak out about what they had learned in the 2005 session.
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The Labour-run council’s deputy leader, Paul Lakin, said he was “appalled” by the contents of Professor Jay’s report and again apologised to the victims.
His comments came as David Cameron told MPs that social services officials should face the sack if they fail to protect children from abuse.
Outside the meeting, protesters included a 17-year-old victim who accused police in Rotherham of failing to prevent her from being groomed and raped by several men from the age of 12.
“Foster carers used to drop me off to meet a specific man who was 23-years-old when he started doing that to me,” she said.
The teenager described one occasion where police officers had discovered her with the offender.
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“Police raided where I was staying with him because I was missing to the local authority, but they arrested me and not him.
“It [apparently] wasn’t clear to them that he’d been abusing me, even though I was stood there naked.
“That wasn’t clear enough to them. He was already on the sex offenders register.”
She said that none of the men who abused her have ever been arrested or prosecuted.
“If something was going to be done about it, it would have been done ages ago when they first found out it was happening,” she added.
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The girl was there with her mother who added: “The police knew about it. Every time we asked for help she either got moved away or got arrested. Sex offenders walked free.”
Sheffield City Council yesterday passed a vote of no-confidence in Shaun Wright, the embattled South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner who was previously the senior councillor responsible for children’s services in Rotherham.
One Labour councillor in Sheffield, David Barker, was photographed checking the score of a cricket match on his mobile phone while his other councillors called for Mr Wright to resign.