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The Awful Truth: We Know Nothing About Child Abuse in This Country
(Image by Marta Parszeniew)
It’s hard to keep track of the UK’s recent series of scandals. Cases skip by week after week – Fernbridge, Fairbanks, Yewtree – the peaceful, bucolic names at odds with the collections of human misery and suffering they aim to catalogue. Rotherham is the latest, an industrial Yorkshire town once famous for its iron, now notorious for the sexual abuse of at least 1,400 children by gangs of men over the past 16 years.
Professor Alexis Jay led the investigation that exposed the scale of what had taken place in Rotherham. “It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered,” she writes. “They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”
In many ways, the first line of her report is the most disturbing. “No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years.” Jay’s “conservative estimate” was 1,400. But that was little more than a guess, for one large-ish town in one part of Yorkshire. And as she notes: “This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day.”
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