'I was called a liar and a racist for exposing this sex gang abuse horror', by SUE REID

Report found 1,400 children abused between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham

Majority of victims described the perpetrators as 'Asian' men



The figure is likely to be a conservative estimate of the true scale

Victims terrorised with guns and doused in petrol and threatened with fire

More than a third of the cases were already know to agencies



Outrageous: Mail investigative reporter Sue Reid was accused by some in Rotherham of making up the stories that were, in fact, told to her by parents and the abused girls themselves. She was also branded racist.

Even those of us who warned for years of young girls being traded in provincial towns as sex slaves were shocked at yesterday’s revelations of the scale of the crimes.

Particularly shameful was the silence of police, councillors and senior social workers. For crucial information about the crimes that had been given to the authorities — often by parents frantic about their daughters going missing or turning up drunk and dishevelled late at night — was either suppressed or ignored.

And so the brutal street-grooming and sexual abuse went on for 16 years. One girl quoted in the report says she thought ‘gang-rape was a usual part of growing up’.

It was many years ago that I began investigating this scandal for the Mail. At first, I was accused by some of making up the stories that were, in fact, told to me by parents and the abused girls themselves. I was also branded racist.

The reason? I had dared to mention the uncomfortable truth about this abhorrent behaviour: most of the victims are white or of mixed race, while all too often the perpetrators come from Britain’s South Asian communities.

Yesterday’s report was a vindication of the Mail’s journalism as Professor Alexis Jay said that the majority of the abusers were Pakistani males.

Crucially, I believe the reason the crimes were not tackled properly by the authorities was because the racial make-up of the perpetrators was a taboo subject.

In the politically correct culture of modern Britain, police, councillors and social services chiefs were terrified of being accused of racism if they highlighted crimes by racial minorities.

Instead, they shamefully blamed the girls for being out of control, wilful young teenagers who eagerly consented to sex with men old enough, in some cases, to be their fathers or even grandfathers in exchange for a ‘good time’.



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Condemned: Professor Alexis Jay, author of the report, blasted the 'blatant' failing of Rotherham Council

Even the fact that the grooming gangs referred to their victims as ‘white trash’ did not seem to provoke a murmur of alarm from those in authority.

It was four years ago that a confidential document compiled by the police admitted for the first time an unpalatable fact about sexual exploitation of girls by gangs in South Yorkshire.

‘There is a problem with networks of Muslim offenders both locally and nationally,’ said the report, which was leaked to the Mail and other newspapers.

‘This is particularly the case in Sheffield, and even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with Asian males exploiting young white females.’

As a result, Rotherham’s then MP Denis MacShane blamed a ‘misplaced racial sensitivity’ for the lack of action by the police to follow through their investigations and he questioned the role of the local Pakistani community. At last, the truth began to trickle out.

Mohammed Shafiq, the director of Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for harmony between different ethnic communities, was one of the first within the Muslim community to address the problem.



One victim of child sex abuse in Rotherham was trafficked for sex to Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield by the time she was 15-years-old and was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight

Like many other decent-thinking Muslims, he was appalled at what was happening. Extraordinarily, he received death threats for what he said.

Subsequently, he has said: ‘What I said has been proved right — that if we did not tackle the problem, there would be more abusers and more girls getting harmed.’

It is vital to stress two important things. First, that the great majority of Asian men are law-abiding citizens with strong family values. Second, that rape and paedophilia are problems across all sectors of society and have nothing to do with race and ethnicity.

Yet the responsibility for these crimes to continue unpunished for so long lies with the weakness of those authorities whose duty it is to care for the vulnerable.

As one of the Rotherham girl victims told ITV last night: ‘The authorities knew how old I was. They knew my abuser could be a danger to other children as well.

‘They had full knowledge of it. They just never did anything. The authorities should get the same punishment as the men who did this to me.’

During my investigations, one charity in Rotherham (that had been set up to counsel abused girls) told me it was not prepared to reveal the racial make-up of the sex gangs. Another, the Coalition For The Removal Of Pimping in Leeds, refused to hint at the background of the criminals.

It seemed to me utterly wrong for the ethnicity of the suspects to be kept secret. It was an impediment to the police’s chances of catching the criminals.

But now a series of successful criminal prosecutions have been made and yesterday’s report is, at last, honest about the scandal. Shockingly, in two cases, the fathers of two girls who tracked down their daughters — and rescued them from houses where they had been gang-raped — were arrested themselves by police.

Other families were terrorised (to try to silence them) by gangs sitting in cars outside their houses, smashing windows and making continual abusive phone calls.

Speaking on conditions of strict anonymity because she fears for her safety even though she has now left the town, one of the early victims of the Rotherham gangs told me that she was at primary school when she was first attacked.

Widespread: More than a third of the sexual abuse cases were known to agencies but not followed up

‘One minute I was playing with dolls, the next I was a sex slave.’

She had met two Asians in their 20s and 30s at a shopping centre where she went on Saturdays with her parents. The men said that they wanted to be her friends. They started picking her up after school in flash cars, including a Bentley with personalised number plates, plying her with vodka, cigarettes and cannabis.

‘I thought I was having a great time. It was exciting to start with. I had no idea the men were part of a gang,’ she recalled.

But one day, the leader of the gang led her to a patch of wasteland and raped her. The rest of the gang watched — laughing, calling her ‘white trash’ and photographing the assault on their mobile phones. Afterwards, she was left to pick herself up, wash the blood off her clothes in the nearby public lavatory and catch a bus home.

Warnings: The report comes after two others done between 2002 and 2006 which 'could not have been clearer'

Then the threats began. ‘They said they would firebomb my home with my parents inside, shoot me with a pistol, rape my mother and kill my older brother if I told anyone about the rape. In my child’s mind I wanted to believe the gang leader was my boyfriend and had feelings for me, but soon he was making money out of me by selling me to other men.’

This girl’s story was not a one-off. A frighteningly similar scenario was played out time and time again by the gangs.

As yesterday’s report finally confirmed, sex slavery is an organised and violent crime which, police say, reaps four times as much money for these gangs as drug-dealing. Perhaps the last word should go to the girl hoodwinked by the Bentley-driving gang when she was just 13.

She says: ‘Most of the men running the sex slave gangs in the north of England are Asians of Pakistani origin. But very few of the authorities will admit this.’