Rotherham grooming gangs: Reform 's Richard Tice is right

Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice has said he believes the child sexual exploitation grooming gangs scandal could be worse than the infected blood or Post Office scandals. (PA)

Though it runs to some 159 pages, it is remains the case that, even after the passing of more than a decade since its publication, the very first line of Professor Alexis Jay’s shocking report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham remains its most pertinent: no one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years.

Her 2014 report, then, reckoned that ‘at least 1,400’ children had been sexually exploited, made to witness brutal sex crimes and subjected to heinous mental and physical torture with threats made to the lives of victims should they dare to tell a soul.

There are journalists at The Yorkshire Post whose work has led them to conversations with survivors whose lived experience will haunt them forever. Children trafficked across the north of England to be raped and abused by gangs of deviant criminals on an industrial scale, emboldened by a sense of impunity imparted by an inert, ineffective, uninterested phalanx of public leaders and their levers.

Jay’s report found evidence of police officers turning up to rape houses where children were in the clutches of multiple paedophile perpetrators, addresses that distraught and desperate fathers had descended upon in order to rescue their daughters, only for the fathers to be the ones arrested and detained. Self-evidently, serious structural failings led to one of the darkest chapters in the county’s history. Without the courage of survivors, and that alone, without question the true scale would be even more unclear than it is today and we must all pay tribute to their bravery.

And it is precisely because of that incredible courage that this newspaper supports renewed calls for a further inquiry into the grooming gangs’ activities. The next executive summary’s opening line on the matter must read: we now know the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

Rotherham grooming gangs: Reform 's Richard Tice is right - survivors deserve the truth