Evidence 
of abuse made known
in 1990s

According to yesterday’s report, a council youth service called Risky Business had alerted local police and social services to the problem around the middle of the 1990s, yet evidence was “disbelieved, suppressed or ignored”.

It took until 2010, when five men, described by a judge as “sexual predators”, were given lengthy jail terms after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex in Rotherham for the issue to be thrust into the spotlight.

The prosecution was the first of a series of high-profile cases in the last four years involving the widespread exploitation young girls in towns and cities across the UK.

Following the 2010 Rotherham case, The Times claimed that details from 200 restricted-access documents showed police and child protection agencies in the town had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted. The allegations led to a range of official investigations, including one by the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Last year, South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner (PCC) Shaun Wright, who was Rotherham Council’s cabinet member for children and young people from 2005 to 2010, said there had been “a failure of management’’ at South Yorkshire Police as he responded to a Government watchdog’s report on his force.

The report concluded: “No-one knows the true scale of child exploitation in Rotherham. Our estimate is approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period from 1997 to 2013.”