Rotherham has a longstanding problem with the sexual exploitation of young girls by older men of Pakistani heritage. This problem, the town’s safeguarding children board said in a report published last week, “can only be addressed by acknowledging it”. Quite so. Yet the board chose to censor much of that same report, in particular the references to child sexual exploitation and the fact that in the town such exploitation is organised and perpetrated by men of Pakistani heritage. It would seem that the Rotherham board has a strange definition of “acknowledging” a problem.
The report resulted from a serious case review into dealings that the board’s constituent agencies had had with Laura Wilson, the 17-year-old murdered by Ashtiaq Asghar in 2010. Laura had been referred to a specialist child sex exploitation unit at the age of 11. She was known to be at risk of abuse by men of Pakistani origin. She was made pregnant by one such man when she was 16. Yet the board chose to limit its review to only the final two years of Laura’s life and not to investigate the likelihood that she had been a victim of sexual exploitation by British Pakistanis, exploitation that culminated in her murder. The claim made by Alan Hazell, the board’s chairman, that “at no stage did we have any evidence that Laura was involved in child sexual exploitation” does not survive a moment’s scrutiny. Nor does it suggest a problem being acknowledged, but the opposite.
Two years ago Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, ordered that serious case reviews be published. Nonetheless, the Rotherham board asked Mr Gove’s department for permission to keep its entire review into Laura Wilson secret. Mr Gove refused. The board then published the redacted version. When the board learnt that this newspaper had discovered details of those redactions, Rotherham council threatened an injunction to prevent us sharing the information with our readers. Using the courts to suppress facts concerning a problem of significant public interest is a funny way to demonstrate that you are acknowledging that problem.
In the event, under pressure from Mr Gove, Rotherham dropped its injunction threat. Not before, however, barristers had been instructed, a waste of money on which the council taxpayers of the town might like to reflect. The citizens of Rotherham will surely also note that rather than disseminate facts pertinent to the wellbeing of the town’s children, their own council has made every effort to keep those facts secret. Mr Gove wants the report to be published “as fully as possible”. We look forward to Rotherham complying.
In her short life, Laura came into contact with 15 agencies that exist wholly or partly to help children like her. Given such extensive contact, Mr Hazell’s claims that no one “could have saved Laura from what ultimately happened to her” is a curiously fatalistic one. What “ultimately happened to her” was a direct result of what actually was happening to her, which these agencies failed to prevent and have since tried to conceal.
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Laura’s murder was not inevitable. Saving her is exactly what could, should and quite probably would have happened had these numerous agencies acknowledged her plight. But they didn’t acknowledge it then and they still don’t now. Those charged with her care repeatedly failed Laura Wilson in life and are failing her again in death.