Thousands of Vulnerable Children Go Missing from Britain's Protective Services, Oxford officer was silenced over sex abuse fears, New lawsuit alleges sexual abuse in Fort Worth Catholic Diocese

Thousands of Vulnerable Children Go Missing from Britain's Protective Services
By Leah McGrath Goodman  March 3, 2015

A general view showing housing in Rotherham on September 1, 2014 in Rotherham, England. South Yorkshire Police are launching an independent investigation into its handling of the Rotherham child abuse scandal and will also probe the role of public bodies and council workers. A report claims at least 1,400 children as young as 11 were sexually abused from 1997- 2013 in Rotherham Care Homes but no council staff will face disciplinary action.

Many of the child sex abuse scandals that have shocked Britain in recent years involve victims who were supposed to be under the protection of the state—children identified as at risk by child protective services and in the care of local authorities.

Many in Britain have characterized the abuses as a thing of the past. Surely such horrors could never happen today. But an analysis of the most recent official data shows that each year the government loses track of around 2,000 vulnerable children in care, even as reports of human trafficking inside the country are on the rise....

Bad record-keeping has been a feature of the abuse scandals. Last autumn, a review by the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that between 1979 and 1999, the U.K. Home Office had “lost or destroyed” 114 files relating to reported child abuse by high-ranking people, including senior politicians. The review came after a report last year from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, revealed that at least 1,400 minors were subjected to widespread, organized child-sex abuse from 1997 to 2013, including many who were in care....

The U.K.’s Human Trafficking Centre’s latest assessment shows a total of 2,744 people, including 602 children, reported as trafficked for exploitation in the U.K. in 2013, up 22 percent from 2012. The organization stresses that the numbers reflect only what’s been reported and are rough figures. Not all reports indicate confirmed trafficking, but, at the same time, the totals could be much higher, as not all incidents are reported. Victims were forced to work in brothels, hotels, private homes or on the street as sex workers, and also forced into domestic servitude or to work on building sites or in farms and factories....
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/britains-missing-children-310701.html

Oxford officer was silenced over sex abuse fears

Police treated abuse victims as if they were 'wayward girls', report says
Paul Peachey Tuesday 03 March 2015

A council worker who wrote a series of increasingly exasperated emails warning of child abuse by Asian men in Oxfordshire was silenced after an official complaint by senior officials about his attitude, it has emerged.

Details came to light in a report published yesterday revealing that 373 girls were likely to have been victims of grooming, rape and trafficking after police and social services failed to take victims and their own staff seriously.

The worker, an ex-detective, raised repeated concerns with the director of children’s services and other officials at the county council in 2007 after seeing a 13-year-old in bed with an adult. He also reported a stream of men going into a flat every night and emerging in the early hours.

But instead of dealing with his complaints, a senior council official complained about his behaviour and his manager made an unreserved apology for the “unprofessional way” in which he had acted....

The serious case review, produced by Dr Alan Bedford, found that children as young as 12 were treated by police as “wayward girls”, complicit in their own abuse, despite being groomed by adults who had ensnared them through drink, drugs and menace.

One detective reported that a 14-year-old girl had initiated sex with two adult men, and reports used the term “boyfriend” for men in their 30s seen with girls as young as 13....

The report said the victims’ accounts were often ignored or seen as exaggerated when they did come forward to authorities....

In one incident, a girl told of how she turned up at a police station after 2am covered in blood after a sex attack. “They dismissed me as being naughty, a nuisance. I was bruised and bloody,” she told the report.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/oxford-officer-was-silenced-over-sex-abuse-fears-10083504.html

New lawsuit alleges sexual abuse in Fort Worth Catholic Diocese By Elizabeth Campbell 03/05/2015
FORT WORTH

A man who lives near Spokane, Wash., is suing the Fort Worth Roman Catholic Diocese saying he was sexually assaulted in the 1990s by a priest who was his seventh-grade history teacher at a Catholic school in Wichita Falls.

The victim, identified in court documents as John Doe 117, also named Fort Worth Bishop Michael Olson in the suit filed this week in Tarrant County district court.

The victim is seeking over $1 million in damages for emotional anguish, medical expenses and diminished earning capacity because of what is described in the suit as a “sadistic ritual of sexual abuse” by the late priest John Sutton.

Sutton, who died in 2004, told the student that if he told anyone of their encounters that “I have the power to ruin your life,” according to the suit....
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-worth/article12653882.html