Stolen Childhoods: The Grooming Scandal Panorama

a rapid reaction force for the region, which Moscow warns would be

a threat to its national security. Time now for Panorama's Stolen

Childhoods: The Grooming Scandal. Young voices ignored. He'd tell me

to lay down. I told him I didn't want to. He said, well, I've got to.

Children targeted, groomed and sexually exploited by older men. It

needs to stop. Children are getting hurt. Children are getting abused.

Three key warnings dismissed. Those who made them speak out. I wanted

things that kept coming back, it was "Where's your evidence?" I was

thinking, isn't that your job? And disturbing findings suppressed. I

was subjected to the most intense personal hostility. I have never

seen back covering like it. The abusers who remain free. We identify

one of them. I don't understand why my life's been affected and his

hasn't. The police and council in Rotherham finally called to account

for failing children. They were raped by multiple perpetrators. They

were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England. They

were abducted, beaten and intimidated. Tonight, Panorama

investigates the scandal that has devastated the lives of more than

1400 children in just one town. This is a story of stolen

childhoods, of abuse dismissed and ignored for years. Each time Emma

Jackson tells professionals about what happened, she wants to open

eyes so those at risk today are protected. I was a child and I

didn't know what I was involved in or what I was doing or what risks

that I was taking. We're protecting Emma's identity and that of most of

the girls and their families who've talked to us about sexual

exploitation. I would get picked up. I would go into town and people

would pull up in cars. I'd have to have sex with them or do whatever

they wanted. Then they'd drop me back off. Another might come. That

was my life. That was 11 years ago. She did try to tell the police what

had happened to her. She was just 13, confused and vulnerable. They

were pushing my head on the floor and grabbing my head and pulling me

by my hair. I were saying that I didn't want to do it and stuff. They

said, "Of course you want to do it." He didn't like girls saying no to

him. He didn't accept it when they said no. She describes being abused

by one man with his friends watching, egging him on. He said I

were a white. And he punched me in the mouth. He said he had had enough

of me. He said if I opened my mouth again he would do it harder. Emma

was just one of at least 1400 children groomed and targeted for

sex by older men, here in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. I was

going on a weekend with my friends, I started talking to some young

boys. I built a friendship with them. As time went on they

introduced older people. They just seemed to get older and older. She

was being groomed. The child psychiatrist who treated Emma says

it was like brainwashing. She was totally enthralled to those people.

They had her under their thumbs, you know, absolutely, enslaving her to

do everything that they wanted. For do everything that they wanted. For

the first time Emma was keeping secrets from her parents. She was

soon out of her depth. I wasn't mature enough to think about sex or

anything like that. One evening she was singled out. We went up to the

outdoor market stalls and then my main perpetrator took me away from

my friend and the other man, and the next thing I knew he was raping me.

In Rotherham, the exploitation of young girls by older men was first

talked about in the 1990s. Back then, this abuse was labelled child

prostitution. A youth organisation was set up by the council. It was

called Risky Business. It became a place where victims felt listened

to. They described their experiences to a researcher involved in a Home

Office project. She's asked not to be identified. The workers in that

project were the only people that those young people trusted, that

were telling the complete story to and some of the stories that I heard

very early on were just so graphic that I don't think I will ever

forget them. We've spoken to nearly 20 families where children have been

exploited. Their stories are shocking, often violent. Here in

Clifton Park, girls describe being forced to go from abuser to abuser.

Others talk about being trafficked to places like Manchester, Bradford

and Bristol to have sex with strangers. Most, though not all, of

the girls asking for help were white. For many years, Risky

Business passed vital intelligence about their abusers to the police

and Social Services. Among the men named was Arshid Hussain, known as

Ash or Mad Ash. He has convictions for violence and intimidation. In

1999, he was targeting a girl who we're calling Isobel. I'd just

turned 14. He was very polite. He had good manners. He was very kind

to me and my friends. What did you know about him? He was into some

things he shouldn't be. What do you mean? He was into drugs and

violence. He drove flash cars and dressed smartly, had a wife and

children at home and was 24 when he began to abuse 14`year`old Isobel.

My mum and dad were trying to stop things. My parents went to his

house, to the police, to the authorities and he just continued

it. They must have been desperate? The authorities said because I was

consenting to it there was nothing they could do. Even though you were

14 years old? Yeah. Over the next two years, she became pregnant

twice. Once while in the council's care. Social workers often referred

to Arshid Hussain as her boyfriend, even though they viewed him as

dangerous. When I was pregnant, they had concerns for the baby because

they said he was a violent man. A baby shouldn't be around a man like

that, then why was I allowed? Because you were still a child.

Yeah. Information gathered by the Home Office researcher showed Isobel

was one of 18 girls who described Arshid Hussain as their boyfriend.

All were said to be under 16. In 2002, the researcher identified

nearly 270 girls in Rotherham being exploited by a number of men. I was

collecting data on who the perpetrators were, what cars they

were using, their grooming methods, their offending methods. I was

collating information on professional responses. One of the

cases she examined was Isobel's. She was going missing for weeks,

sometimes months. Once, when police raided a house she was hiding in,

they found Arshid Hussain. Me and him was upstairs in a bedroom and we

was being intimate when the police raided it. They would have seen me

with just some pants on, but under the bed. `` run under the bed. They

would have seen him pulling some jogging bottoms up and heading

towards the corner of the room. Would it have been obvious what had

been going on? Yeah. That was the first time I ever saw him scared. I

think he honestly thought, this is it, I'm going to get arrested. Now

15, it was Isobel who was arrested, not Arshid Hussain. I was given a

truncheon by him and he told me to save it. I was arrested for having a

dangerous weapon. What happened to him? Nothing, he just went about his

daily business. This man has been having sex with this under`age girl.

That's a case that should be prosecuted. I don't understand why

the police or Social Services took it upon themselves to excuse that

behaviour. Isobel says Arshid Hussain was stopped by police on

many occasions with her next to him. Even if the police was looking for

him for something, he would be able to turn around, which he did plenty

of times and say, "I'll play the race card, so they let me off." A

quarter of a million people live in Rotherham. While most are white,

about 8% come from different ethnic backgrounds. There's a well

established Pakistani heritage population. When the Home Office

researcher began to share her findings with the council, she told

them most of the perpetrators being named were from that community. She

was taken aback by the response from one official. She said you must

never refer to that again. You must never refer to Asian men. And her

other response was to book me on a two`day ethnicity and diversity

course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues. In 2002, the draft of

her final report was sent to the Home Office and the

council on a Friday. She says that weekend the Risky Business office

had unwanted visitors who let themselves in. They'd gained access

to the office and taken my data. Out of the number of filing cabinets,

there was one drawer emptied and it was emptied of my data. Who do you

think would have done that? It had to be an employee of the council.

Rotherham Council says it's unable to find anyone who recognises this

series of events. The researcher then came under pressure to change

her findings. She wouldn't. This report, written more than a decade

ago, was given to both the council and police. It clearly should have

led to action. But here it says, "Responsibility was continuously

placed on young people's shoulders rather than with the suspected

abusers." When the issues were raised with senior officials, the

response was "defensiveness and hostility". Her report was never

published and the council even tried unsuccessfully to sack her. I was

subjected to the most intense personal hostility. There were

threats made from a range of sources. I've never seen back

covering like it and I still feel extremely angry about that. The

response, in a nutshell, was that she was punished for speaking truth

to power. Alexis Jay carried out the independent review that, last week,

revealed the damage done by not tackling exploitation in Rotherham.

If they had taken account of the content and been less concerned with

their own images, then a great deal more might have been done at an

earlier stage. There would soon be more warnings. In the meantime, the

abuse continued. In 2003, it was 13`year`old Emma who was being

abused. They started to use me more and more. I was just seen as trash

really. Emma's mother knew something was wrong when neighbours told her

they'd seen two men hanging around the house. She asked her daughter

about it when she got home from school. That's when she just broke

down and just kept saying, "They're raping me. They're raping me." I

couldn't believe it. My reaction, I rang 999. It were just devastating.

And the sergeants came into me and said, "Do you realise who your

daughter has got involved with? We can't deal with it. We have to get

the Serious Crime Squad." Emma was able to provide important evidence.

He made me take my coat off and lay it on the floor. Then he told me to

lay down on the floor and I told him I didn't want to. She'd hidden the

clothes she was wearing on the different occasions when she was

rained. She gave them to the police. `` raped. She didn't want me to see

them. She'd hid them. She went and got them out and there were like six

bags of clothes. There was a cream coat that had blood all over it.

They took all these clothes away. But the police lost the coat and the

rest of the potential DNA evidence. Emma then began to get threats from

her abusers. Feeling frightened and unsupported, she withdrew her

allegations. I was very confused, and basically, I just wanted to go

back to my life before and get rid of it all. It wouldn't be long

before her exploiters withdraw her back into their world. That year,

2003, the authorities received their second clear warning about the

seriousness of what was happening. It came from Dr Angie Heal. She was

employed by South Yorkshire police to look at drugs crime. In

Rotherham, she quickly identified links to sexual exploitation. It

really didn't make any sense as to why there weren't major police

operations that were being launched to investigate these issues. So she

decided to write a report on the problem. Some of the police officers

for the report gave information about circumstances in which young

people were being found, the levels of abuse and violence and rapes that

were happening. Her report was sent to senior police officers in South

Yorkshire. And Rotherham council managers. She pointed to the lack of

convictions. And to the police, named names. I didn't hold back on

what I was reporting. And what actually happened? I don't think

anything happened at that time. One of the things that kept coming back

was, where's your evidence? I was thinking, isn't that your job to

collect evidence? It was another warning dismissed. But the wider

community was also getting worried. For many years, Jim Stevens ran a

charity for homeless young people in Rotherham. His staff saw men

targeting 16 and 17`year`old girls and boys at hostels. They told the

police. And the council. We were getting responses from quite senior

people within Social Services particularly and Safeguarding that

there wasn't actually a problem in Rotherham at that time of any kind.

And whenever we raised the issue of sexual exploitation we were

considered to be unprofessional alarmists. However strong the

denials, there was no let up in the abuse. The parents of yet another

girl found themselves constantly on the phone to police. Reporting her

missing. I've really lost count of how many times I would phone them in

a week, it just depended, sometimes probably twice a day. Only now is

their daughter able to describe how the people meant to protect made her

feel. They try and make you feel ashamed and like it is your fault.

That I were just a naughty child, and that I got bad behaviour.

For four years, the family existed on a knife`edge. She went from a

normal 13`year`old, reading books, Harry Potter books, stuff like that,

she used to love it, into when police were fetching her back, she

used to be dressed differently. She looked like she was going out

clubbing. They were taking her away from us and we had to deal with it

like, well, no you're not, you're not having her, we're going to fight

back, we're going to change, keep changing her back so that they knew

that there was somebody at the other end not letting them win and have

our daughter. By now, this abuse had been blighting Rotherham for nearly

a decade. At the end of 2004, the council finally appeared to be

waking up to the problem. And sexual exploitation was discussed at an

important meeting. We invited ourselves, we gate`crashed the

meeting. It was chaired by the leader of the council. There were

lots of heads of department there, there were senior social workers,

people from police, from the youth service. They were given details of

how girls were being groomed and exploited in Rotherham. Council

leader Roger Stone appeared to some visibly shaken. He was very angry.

He was shocked and I remember him saying, we're not having this, this

has to stop. We were very, very optimistic after the meeting. For

the first time, the statutory sector had seemed to recognise the issue

and make a commitment to do something about it. But little

seemed to happen. And finally their patience ran out. More than 30

voluntary organisations wrote a joint letter to the council's then

chief executive. We felt, right, let's go to the top, let the Chief

Executive explain to us why there has been such a bad lack of

progress. What was the response to your letter? We didn't get a

response. So, why did it appear nothing was being done? At a council

meeting in 2005, Roger Stone seemed to offer an explanation. The leader

said we have to tread carefully on this because we don't want to upset

the community. We had been told at the previous meeting that the

perpetrators were Asian men and because of that and only because of

that, I assumed the leader meant the Asian community. Mr Stone has told

Panorama he can't remember what he said more than a decade ago but

insists he did take action. Elsewhere, parents were also

challenging the police. I said, well why can't you investigate what's

going off now? And all I got after that was, I've told you, we can't

because of racial tension. When this, it wasn't about race, this.

This is about adults, some adults were doing to some children which

left us devastated because we've got nowhere else to turn. And in 2006,

another report from Angie Heal raised the issue. She said some

workers in the town feared the abusers' ethnicity was one reason

for a lack of police investigations. It was a third detailed warning

about Rotherham's problems. There was issues of ethnicity, and some

people felt that ethnicity was a barrier to investigating, that it

was seen to be too sensitive an issue. If there had been direct

engagement with the Pakistani heritage community and not through

the conduit of the traditional I have to say male domination of the

Imams in the mosques and elected members in the council, a lot more

might have been done much sooner. Within Rotherham's Pakistani

heritage community, there is bewilderment about why that wasn't

done. I think also it was the lack of services response to what was

going on. Turning a blind eye. And some ask what message the lack of

investigations sent? Abuse is abuse, and you should never, ever shy away

from pinpointing abuse. In terms of those men who perpetrated against

white young girls, they will have been abusing internally within their

own communities. And it's about time that we started to recognise and

prosecute. Without prosecutions, new abusers were able to claim new

victims. As one mother probably knows better than anyone. Both of

Maggie Wilson's daughters were sexually exploited. It began when

her eldest, Sarah, was just 11. She had two phones cos there were a

pattern with phones, if it rang it was if it was a sign to, right it's

time to meet and things like that. It got to a stage where I even had

to lock the bedroom windows but she'd still get out cos there was no

lock on the bathroom window. Again, she was desperately trying to get

the police and council to help. Even when Sarah should have been

protected in care, the abuse continued. Only later did Maggie

discover her youngest daughter Laura was also being groomed. Did you

think that she was getting drawn into exploitation in the same way

Sarah had been? I didn't know. An official inquiry had known that

Laura, like her sister, was being groomed. Maggie believes that if she

had been given more help when she was first asked, things might have

been different. If they had listened to me all of those years ago, Laura

wouldn't be where she is now, she would be alive. Finally, in 2010,

nearly 15 years after the abuse was identified, rather got its first

convictions for sexual exploitation. Five men were jailed for a total of

32 years. It should have been a turning point for the town but there

had been no other major prosecutions since, and still the grooming and

exploitation goes on. Until two years ago, this man's daughter was a

target. Sometimes we found her in the park, sometimes we found her in

Sheffield. They had already had a lot of contact with social workers

and felt all the blame was being put at their door. We are not excellent

parents, nobody is an excellent parent, but we did our best. What

can you do? Apart from ring the police and they say you can't report

something until it happens. He was shocked when he discovered Rotherham

council had known about the men suspected of abusing his daughter

since 2007, long before her abuse began. I was just sifting through

it, looking through the notes they were sending, then I saw that,

Rotherham Safeguarding. I read it and I went absolutely ballistic.

Social workers had accidentally left this document in a bundle of other

papers. This was a list of the names. What they were keeping from

us. Did you know any of this? No, not one bit of it. It says your

daughter and another girl are in contact with two of the men listed

here. Yes. Down here it says these males have also featured in previous

strategy meetings about safeguarding, dating back to 2007.

If they had acted in 2007... It might not have happened to my

daughter. Instead, she became yet another child in Rotherham to be

sexually exploited. The only person in authority to resign for such

failure has been the council leader, Roger Stone. Both Rotherham Council

and South Yorkshire Police have apologised. They refused to be

interviewed for this programme. But they say improvements have been made

and they'll act on the recommendations. The man who abused

Isabel when seh was 14 has still not been prosecuted. Why has my life

been affected and he's gotten away with it? Through his solicitor,

Arshid Hussain says he denies the criminal allegations against him.

There is now a major police investigation into past cases. This

is a scandal that has caused shock far beyond this one South Yorkshire

town. A warning to all communities. It is essentially a hidden problem.

You need to seek it out and identify it because the one thing that won't

happen is that the individuals will come forward themselves easily and

ask for help. And it is children who live with the consequences when

others fail to act. Being portrayed by the people who you thought were

there to protect you, that you genuinely believed would protect

you, can you imagine what that does to a child? It is lifelong damage

and it could have been prevented.