One Woman’s Crusade for U.K. Town’s Young Rape Victims
Jayne Senior’s child-abuse reports, ignored for years, now deepen a national soul-searching
More than 1,400 girls were allegedly abused by a gang of pedophiles in Rotherham, England, over a 15-year period. Whistleblower Jayne Senior explains how the men would prey on their victims. Video/Photo: Mark Kelly/The Wall Street Journal
By
May 22, 2015 3:49 p.m. ET
MARGARET COKER and
ALEXIS FLYNN
ROTHERHAM, England— Jayne Senior worked for more than a decade to expose rampant child sexual abuse in this rusting steel town in South Yorkshire, but she met mostly indifference and scorn from authorities.
The youth-charity director amassed evidence that a network of pedophiles “groomed” nearly 2,000 girls in her hometown, creating emotional bonds with them before raping them. Police largely dismissed her reports. In 2011, town hall revoked her funding.
Things seemed to change last August, when an independent investigation confirmed the widespread sex abuse Ms. Senior identified, concluding that at least 1,400 girls in Rotherham had been sexually abused from 1997 through mid-2013, allegedly by a gang from the Pakistani community. The police commissioner, town-council leader and child-services head resigned. After its own probe, the U.K. government in February ordered outside administrators to take over the town’s management.
The U.K.’s National Crime Agency is now examining the Rotherham cases. The national police-internal-affairs agency is investigating misconduct allegations against at least 42 officers who worked in Rotherham and the surrounding South Yorkshire police district. The NCA says it is determined to bring all offenders to justice. The police agency declines to comment on misconduct allegations.
Yet despite national attention on Rotherham, police have made only three arrests since last fall among the dozens of gang members identified as alleged perpetrators; the three haven’t been charged. Since Ms. Senior began reporting assaults in 1999, only five men have been convicted in cases she reported.
“Now everyone knows what is going on in Rotherham,” says Ms. Senior, publicly revealing her identity as the town’s abuse whistleblower for the first time, but “these men are still at large.”
Rotherham is the centerpiece of a British national soul-searching about how its society and institutions could allow such abuse to continue for years. Home Secretary Theresa May, the country’s top law-enforcement official, described child sex abuse as “woven, covertly, into British society.”
Multiple pedophilia scandals have emerged since the 2011 death of British television celebrity Jimmy Savile. He denied being a pedophile, but recent police investigations indicate he was a serial sex
abuser.
British police, including Scotland Yard and the NCA, have at least 17 operations investigating historic allegations of sex abuse at children’s homes, hospitals and other institutions, up from two in 2011. The probes include politicians alleged to have participated in a 1980s pedophile ring and whether authorities helped cover up those allegations.
Since last summer, officials from two other British towns have announced that local authorities long ignored pedophile gangs similar to what Ms. Senior identified in Rotherham.
The Rotherham scandal stands out for the sheer number of victims, but it bears many hallmarks of other scandals: The abused were young, often from working classes; they faced contemptuous authorities who declined to pursue evidence and largely ignored advocates who defied a British deference toward the establishment.
The Rotherham inquiry published in August concluded that town leaders and police dismissed allegations of sex abuse in part because they deemed the girls to be willing participants, often calling them “slags,” slang for promiscuous women.
“Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers,” says the August study’s author,Alexis Jay, who interviewed more than 100 people and reviewed town documents and email. And police, she says, “dismissed the girls as unworthy of their protection.”
Her Jay Report paints a picture of an entrenched bureaucracy willfully turning a blind eye while snubbing an advocate they considered a gadfly. Some victims’ parents also allege police complicity in the abuse; among issues forwarded to the police-internal-affairs agency for review are possible links between individual officers and the alleged abusers, says a person familiar with the review.
The Jay Report noted perceptions that local police and town leaders hadn’t confronted the alleged perpetrators from the Pakistani community for fear of being branded racist. According to the report: “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.” Still, Ms. Jay says the problem wasn’t that police were under pressure to be politically correct, but that police didn’t prioritize sex crimes for investigation.
The Pakistani community in Rotherham, around 3% of the population, has been established for decades as part of the steel workforce. Police say that by the early 2000s, an ethnic-Pakistani criminal gang had gained control of the region’s crack-cocaine trade.
Ms. Senior began documenting abuse in 1999, when, as a bored stay-at-home mother, she started a youth organization funded by a town grant. She named it “Risky Business,” after the Tom Cruise movie favored by several girls she was mentoring.
‘Grooming’ for abuse
Many girls told her stories about British-Pakistani men befriending them after school in arcades, fast-food restaurants and parks. The men would pick them up in expensive cars, buy them gifts like cellphone cards and ply them with alcohol—and, they said, eventually rape and sometimes prostitute them.
The girls were describing what is often called “grooming,” the psychological process pedophiles use to establish a bond before assault. But when Ms. Senior attempted to report the allegations, she found police and town officials unreceptive.
Over the next years, the numbers of abuse cases she documented and reported rose to more than 100 a year. Until 2009, police didn’t forward to prosecutors any child-sex-abuse case to which Ms. Senior had alerted them, according to prosecution statistics.
In one case, when a 12-year-old girl reported being raped, Ms. Senior concluded a group of men was routinely abusing her and others. She reported the allegation to Rotherham’s child-protective services. The agency opened a file on the girl, but Ms. Senior says they didn’t protect her from further abuse. The agency didn’t respond to inquiries.
Around the same time, police questioned the girl after finding her drunk in a car with an adult, says a person who read the police file on her. The man had indecent photos of the girl, but the officer left them without taking action.
Several months later, police found her in a derelict house with a group of men and arrested her for being drunk and disorderly—but didn’t arrest the men—says this person. Police didn’t pursue a case against the girl. The girl became pregnant from one of her abusers, but police didn’t investigate because they judged the girl had consented to sex.
The U.K. age of consent is 16. Ms. Senior says the majority of the girls she tried to help were between 12 and 16.
One victim’s father believes someone in the police tipped off the abuser gang when he sought authorities’ help. His daughter says her grooming began at age 12, when a group of British-Pakistanis befriended her at a strip-mall arcade.
Rapes started when she was 13, usually after school. She told her mother at age 15 after a gang rape left her too injured to walk. Her parents called the police, to whom she gave her clothes as evidence.
Days later, the police told them the clothes had been lost and prosecutions would be difficult. Soon after, the alleged rapists showed up at her home, threatening to beat her and rape her mother for going to the police, the family says. The family dropped charges and moved out of town. The men weren’t charged in the incident.
The U.K.-government inquiry published in February found South Yorkshire police had a “phenomenally low conviction rate” for non-familial child sexual abuse.
Police decline to discuss specific allegations. “Tackling child sexual exploitation and bringing offenders to justice is a priority for South Yorkshire Police and a great deal of progress has been made over recent years,” a spokeswoman for the force says. “We treat victims of child sexual exploitation with the utmost sensitivity.”
Ignored evidence
Ms. Senior wasn’t alone during the decade in concluding Rotherham police ignored evidence. In 2002, the force hired a narcotics analyst, Angie Heal, to map the growing regional drug trade. She discovered Ms. Senior had some of the best intelligence for her work.
Ms. Heal saw links between Ms. Senior’s database about child sex victims and new British-Pakistani gangs she identified as running the town’s crack-cocaine trade.
Ms. Heal says she reported these links in dossiers every six months from 2002 through 2006, when she left the force in part because her superiors weren’t acting on her information on either drugs or sex abuse, she says.
“The situation couldn’t have been clearer,” says Ms. Heal, who works with children for neighboring Sheffield. “Drugs gangs who were a clear danger to public safety were also a danger to young girls.”
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