Comment: It needs to be said: the UK has a culture of paedophilia in high places. And it's not the only country. While news of this latest scandal makes the headlines, the high-profile investigation into paedo MPs continues. As Tony Gosling writes for RT, the problem is systemic and inquiries are set up to fail. The child abusers run free. Make no mistake, these are the same sorts of people running western civilization into the ground, fomenting chaos in the Middle East, and demonizing Putin in order to make the way clear for criminal oligarchy and psychopathic license.


roger stone
© Ross ParryRoger Stone, leader of Rotherham council, who has stepped down from his position.
The putrid mess that oozes from the 160 pages of Alexis Jay's report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham is so thick that one gags rather than read the words.

Children in the town were systematically identified by gangs as vulnerable, seduced with drugs and drink, brainwashed into believing they were in a relationship with an adult and then used for sex, often raped before sometimes being trafficked to nearby cities to work as prostitutes.

The brutal violence that surrounded this depraved process was shocking. Children who refused to acquiesce to ever more macabre demands were doused in petrol, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and told they would be next if they told anyone.

While some of this will be familiar to a British public which has been appalled by the revelations tumbling out of high-profile child abuse cases since 2010, Jay's report lays bare a mephitic hole in Yorkshire.

Over 16 years, she says, a "conservative estimate" is that 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the town. Girls as young as 11 were gang-raped by men.

This level of abuse appears to make Rotherham the nation's child sex exploitation capital. If the town's experience was replicated across the country, England would have 19,000 children criminally abused by gangs every year. The children's commissioner thinks that at the moment the figure is about 2,000.

It's not as if there was a lack of evidence of a growing problem on Rotherham's streets.

Internal reports from a decade ago revealed "links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality".

Schools raised the alert about children being picked up "by taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown males".

What allowed these crimes to continue was not just that abused children were cowed into silence or mentally enslaved by older men, but that even when they spoke out they were met by a culture of disbelief from the authorities.


Comment: While there may be a 'culture of disbelief' among some, the refusal to help is often because those very authorities are engaging in similar acts of base criminality.


Time and time again, police and social workers appear to talk of mothers being unable to deal with children "growing up".

In one instance, a girl of 12 was groomed, raped and then trafficked. The authorities "blamed the child ... for placing herself at risk".

In another case an 11-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted, then a year later found drunk in a car with a suspected abuser who had taken indecent pictures of her on his phone. She was declared to be at "no risk of sexual exploitation".

Many of the children came from poorer backgrounds and troubled homes and were in care. The suspicion is that council officials and police officers considered them part of an underclass who were not so much the victims of crime as authors of their own misfortunes.

That the local administration and police knew about the problems and chose not to prevent them clearly shows something is rotten in Rotherham.

Even today, young people are afraid to use taxis in the town, preferring to catch buses than be taken on the "longest, darkest route home" and be peppered with "flirtatious or suggestive" conversation about sex.

What made South Yorkshire perhaps more politically charged is that in many cases the victims were underage white girls and the perpetrators were Asian men.

There were other abuse cases - in Oxford and Telford - with the same mix of ethnicities.

The far right had a field day with slogans which cast Muslim men as dangerous paedophiles. The tabloids leapt on remarks made in 2012 by the judge in a widely reported Rochdale case, Gerald Clifton, who in sentencing nine Asian men for 77 years for abusing and raping up to 47 girls said: "I believe one of the factors which led to that is that they [the victims] were not of your community or religion."

Andrew Norfolk, the Times's dogged and brilliant reporter who broke the story in Rochdale, has always said the "overwhelming majority of child abusers in this country are white men acting on their own".

However, his own analysis was that race was important to discuss because council staff feared "treading into a cultural minefield".

The report accepts that the concern of being labelled a racist did mean people pulled back from probing too deeply.

However, there must be an acceptance that perpetrators were criminals rather than Muslims. Surely the crime of a young girl being raped should have led officials to act, whatever the colour of the skin of her assailant?

What is clear is that the rot is more than the sum of individual abuses. It is the perception of a cosy, indifferent bureaucracy - social workers, councillors and police officers who could not face up to do something about terrible crimes partly because of their prejudices about the poor and partly because they were concerned about being labelled as prejudiced against Asians.

The effect is that the scandal goes beyond its shocking details and raises the question: just how are poor and vulnerable children being looked after in England?