Political correctness played a major role in a shocking child-sexual-abuse scandal.
Last August, Rotherham, an industrial town in northern England, was thrust into the headlines when a government report detailed how gangs of local men had raped and trafficked at least 1,400 girls, some as young as eleven years old, over the course of more than 15 years. The report found that almost all the alleged perpetrators were Muslim men of Pakistani origin and that most of the victims were white working-class girls.
The 153-page report, written by Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, further found that local authorities, including the Rotherham Metropolitan Bureau Council, had failed to halt the abuse and in some cases perpetuated it.
On February 4, another government report — this one authored by Louise Casey, who heads the government’s troubled-families unit — corroborated Jay’s findings. Casey discovered that the Rotherham Council tried to silence whistle-blowers and cover up its own responsibility in the scandal. The council, according to Casey, also “demonstrate[d] a resolute denial of what has happened in the borough.”
Casey concluded that the Council was “not fit for purpose”; hours later, all five members of the council’s cabinet announced their resignations.
In late December, we traveled to Rotherham (pronounced ROTH-er-um) in an effort to gain some insight into how it had become the setting of one of the most shocking cases of mass child sexual exploitation in recent memory.
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