Voices of Rotherham: Jay Report 10 years on

A decade on from the shocking report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, it’s claimed progress has been made – but there is still work to do.

The Jay Report was an independent inquiry which found at least 1,400 underage girls had been abused between 1997 and 2013.

The report criticised Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police for failing to protect the victims.

All this week we’re hearing from people involved in tackling the issue of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham about what’s changed over the last decade, and what challenges still remain.

THE SURVIVOR: ‘CHILDREN ARE STILL CRIMINALISED FOR BEING EXPLOITED’

Survivor and whistleblower Sammy Woodhouse, who helped expose criminals when she gave an anonymous interview to a national newspaper 10 years ago, says children are still being forced into a life of crime.

“I don’t think children are being protected or supported enough. I don’t think we have enough funding, I don’t think our policy and law is strong enough. And I think there’s a lot more that needs to change.

“There are still children being criminalised for being exploited. There are still people like myself who are left with a criminal record and are still trying to fight the system for that.

“What we also have to recognise is that women are involved in this. They are recruiting women to facilitate grooming of children. What we also have to recognise is that children are recruited for grooming gangs as well.”

THE MP: EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS, TACKLING RE-OFFENDING AND POSTCODE LOTTERY ON VICTIM SUPPORT

Rotherham MP Sarah Champion has campaigned extensively to tackle CSE over the last decade. She warns there is still a lot more to be done in several areas.

“Child abuse is as rampant as it ever was, but the two areas where it’s becoming completely out of control is peer on peer abuse and online,” she says.

She’s previously campaigned for better education in schools and in June 2017 the government agreed to an amendment stating that every primary school child would be taught about healthy relationships. But seven years on, Sarah says that still hasn’t been rolled out extensively:

“You have to make sure people from the youngest age know how to protect themselves. And also let’s try and prevent people becoming abusers in the first place by respecting each other and understanding what boundaries are.”

Sarah also thinks more work needs done to make sure offenders don’t go on to re-offend when they come out of prison:

“Unless as a society we put some really strong interventions around those individuals, as far as I’m concerned they continue to be a risk.

“What also happens is most of the offenders we know about from the Jay Report were actually Rotherham-based, so of course they’re going to go back to Rotherham when they come out of jail.

“And I’ve dealt with a number of survivors who weren’t told their offender was about to be released. Putting a restraining order on someone doesn’t mean you’re not going to bump into them in Tesco’s, and that is happening. And I find that incredibly concerning.”

Another issue she raises is the postcode lottery when it comes to accessing support services.

“Where you are in the country decides whether you have access as a survivor to specialist services,” she explains.

“Most of them now are commissioned by individual police and crime commissioners. I think wherever you are, you should have access to high quality services. And the economic cost of victims not having those services is infinitely more to society.”

APNA HAQ: BRITISH-PAKISTANI GIRLS ‘INVISIBLE AND SILENCED’

Rotherham charity Apna Haq supports women from black and minority ethnic backgrounds and says British-Pakistani girls were largely missing from the narrative when the Jay Report was released.

The narrative focused on white girls being abused by groups of predominantly Asian men. But whistleblower Jayne Senior and Apna Haq founder Zlakha Ahmed estimated 10 per cent of the victims were British-Pakistani.

Aaliya Malik is a girls and young women’s worker at the charity and says by missing British-Pakistani women out of the conversation, victims still don’t feel like they will be believed if they come forward.

“If you don’t see someone like you speaking out, you think well maybe if I speak I’ll be silenced. Because how likely is it that it’s happening to someone like me? It was happening, but there was no light shed on it.

“The girls want to tell their stories, they want to say what’s happening. But they want to say it anonymously. For me to even speak to any of the girls it was ‘this has to be completely anonymous.’

She wants to see a system where information and intelligence could be collected in a better way to encourage people from minority communities to report things without having to be identified.

“Even if the girls don’t want to say their name, they can say maybe the perpetrators’ name,” says Aaliya.

“And if there’s enough cases that match there should be something done. Organisations like us should be able to put that onto a police system.”

Looking to the future of tackling CSE, Zlakha also raises the issue of funding for charities like theirs:

“As an organisation, we’re still in the position where we only have half the funding we need to carry on.”

THE COUNCIL: ‘COMMUNITY INTELLIGENCE HAS DOUBLED’

Leader of Rotherham Council Chris Read says the Jay Report was ‘shocking and appalling’.

“Clearly we couldn’t go back and change the terrible things that had happened, but we could make every effort to make the future brighter and prevent it from happening ever again,” he says.

“There have been huge changes in the way that we respond. If you go back to Alexis Jay’s report, you see a culture that doesn’t understand child sexual exploitation and wasn’t taking it seriously.

“We’ve transformed the way our children’s services works.”

Darren Downs is responsible for scrutinising the council’s safeguarding of children in Rotherham and agrees that things have fundamentally changed:

“If we do get information and intelligence when a crime has taken place we will be relentless in pursuing the offenders, getting them into custody and making sure we get justice for the victims and survivors.

“Rotherham are now nationally seen as one of the leaders in this activity. Very responsive with a massive amount of scrutiny across the whole partnership.

“One of our key aims is around prevention and the amount of community intelligence coming in in the last three or four years has doubled. Which is brilliant because it means the communities have got a bit of faith in us, they’ve got some trust in us.

“We’re continuing to push for more community intelligence, more information. Talk to us, tell us what’s happening, what your concerns are. And we will educate communities, professionals and the children around what to look for and how to keep themselves safe.”

Councillor Read says the challenge now is children being approached online typically by individual perpetrators rather than groups of men acting together.

“So very much moving away from on-street grooming, although those things can and do still happen. But the model has definitely shifted.”

THE POLICE: ‘TRUST AND CONFIDENCE HAS SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED’

South Yorkshire Police says the force has ‘worked hard’ over the last decade to rebuild community trust, and now works with other agencies to share information to better protect children.

It also says it identifies and records emergency trends and shares the information with the public, including data on the ethnicity of those involved.

“We recognise across not just South Yorkshire Police but in policing that we let a lot of people down, and we can’t get away from that,” says Rotherham’s District Commander, Chief Superintendent Laura Koscikiewicz.

“We were all horrified. And we’ve worked hard nationally and locally to make sure that won’t happen again.

“I do believe trust and confidence in police has significantly increased. And we do lots of work to listen to the voices of those victims to understand how it feels for them so we can continue to learn.”

THE NATIONAL CRIME AGENCY: ‘THE WORK ISN’T DONE’

The Jay Report led to the launch of Operation Stovewood, the NCA’s investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham which remains the biggest of its kind in the UK. It has more more than 200 arrests and identified more than 1,100 victims.

“One of the lasting legacies of Stovewood will be everybody working together,” says Phillip Marshall, the senior investigating officer responsible for Op Stovewood.

“The partnership has developed to ensure we have delivered a victim-focused investigation.

“Operation Stovewood identified learning for all agencies involved, not just in Rotherham but at a national level.”

At the start of this year the NCA announced it would no longer adopt any new investigations as the Operation moves into a new phase.

Any new allegations are now investigated by South Yorkshire Police and Phillip believes the force is now in a much better position to pick up this work:

“They have improved their processes, they have improved their systems, and I believe the community can have confidence in the future in their standards of investigation.”