Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says 1,400 Children in Rotherham, England, Were Sexually Abused, Report Says

Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says 1,400 Children in Rotherham, England, Were Sexually Abused, Report Says
By KATRIN BENNHOLD AUG. 26, 2014

LONDON — A report released on Tuesday on accusations of widespread sexual abuse in the northern England city of Rotherham found that about 1,400 minors — some as young as 11 years old — were beaten, raped and trafficked from 1997 to 2013 as the local authorities ignored a series of red flags.

Some children were doused in gasoline and threatened with being set on fire if they reported their abusers, the report said, and others were forced to watch rapes and threatened with the same fate. In more than a third of the cases, the victims appear to have been known to child protection agencies, but the police and local government officials failed to act....

Alexis Jay, the author of the report and a former chief inspector of social work, said that vulnerable girls as young as 11 and largely from disadvantaged backgrounds had been brutalized by groups of men.

“They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated,” she wrote.

The report described the failures of the political and police leadership as blatant. Even as social workers reported that the sexual exploitation of children was becoming a serious problem in Rotherham, senior managers in the local authority and South Yorkshire police ignored them. When victims came forward, Ms. Jay said, the police often regarded them “with contempt.”

Three earlier reports, published from 2002 to 2006, detailed the abuse, and according to Ms. Jay, “could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham.” But the first one was “effectively suppressed” and the other two “ignored,” she said....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/europe/children-in-rotherham-england-were-sexually-abused-report-says.html

Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997 – 2013)
Independent inquiry CSE in Rotherham
    Information relating to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham
http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham


27 August 2014
Rotherham child abuse: Calls for police commissioner to quit
....Rotherham abuse
1,400 children were abused, 1997-2013
+ 30% of victims were already known to social services
157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation made to police in 2013
9 prosecutions were made
Source: Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham

Key findings of the report
    Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple attackers, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.

    The "collective failures" of political, police and social care leadership were "blatant" over the first 12 years covered by the inquiry.

    Police were said to have given child sex exploitation no priority, regarding many child victims "with contempt" and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.

    The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the majority of the reported victims were young white girls. The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled "racist" if they focused on victims' descriptions of the majority of abusers as "Asian" men.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28947707

Organised Abuse and Testimonial Legitimacy

Organised Abuse and Testimonial Legitimacy
Michael Salter

This paper will discuss the relationship between sexual abuse, invalidation and testimonial legitimacy with a particular focus on organised abuse. Using qualitative data drawn from a study of adult survivors of organised abuse, the paper emphasises how strategies of invalidation, disbelief and minimisation are embedded in children’s experiences of organised abuse as well as in the response of others to organised abuse throughout their lifespan.

This analysis troubles the distinction between everyday and legalistic notions of credibility and emphasises instead how the denial of testimonial legitimacy to children and women in a range of contexts is underpinned by relations of power that compound the gendered risks and
harms of sexual abuse.

The findings of this study suggest that the denial of testimonial legitimacy is a serious barrier to the wellbeing and safety of victims of sexual abuse, such as those disclosing organised abuse, whose life histories render them particularly vulnerable to strategies of invalidation.

Background to the Research

Although most incidents of sexual violence involve one victim and one perpetrator, a significant proportion of victims report experiencing victimisation by more than one perpetrator (Kellogg and Hoffman 1997;
Horvath and Kelly 2009; Harkins and Dixon 2010). In the case of child sexual abuse, victimised children and adults reporting multiple perpetrators have typically experienced more severe victimisation than victims reporting one perpetrator (Finkelhor and Williams 1988; Long and Jackson 1991; Casey and Nurius 2005) and they exhibit greater psychological distress and mental illness (Briere and Conte 1991; Leserman et al
1997; Steel et al 2004).

Some of the most acutely ill survivors of multi-perpetrator sexual abuse disclose what La Fontaine (1993) has defined as ‘organised abuse’; that is, incidents of child sexual abuse that involve multiple adults acting in a coordinated way to sexually abuse multiple children.

Health and welfare workers in diverse contexts have reported contact with adult and child clients with histories of organised abuse (Creighton 1993; Bibby 1996; Cooper 2004), including clients disclosing sadistic, ritualistic or otherwise extreme experiences of sexual abuse (Sinason 1994; Noblitt and Perskin Noblitt 2008; Sachs and Galton 2008).

conference presentation at
ANZCCC: The Australian and New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference 2010
Institute of Criminology, Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney
http://sydney.edu.au/law/criminology

full paper at
http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/7372/1/Salter_ANZCCC2010.pdf