UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Gaby Hinsliff
For well over a decade, hundreds of vulnerable children were sexually exploited and abused by men from whom they should have been protected, not just in secret but sometimes in plain sight. What happened in Rotherham was a terrible, extraordinary thing. But what is so unsettling about Louise Casey’s report on the aftermath of the scandal, published this week, is that this was made possible by the most ordinary of things.
It’s trite and misleading to portray Labour-led Rotherham as a bunch of loony lefties hamstrung by political correctness, terrified of going after mainly Asian abusers in case it looked racist. As Casey makes clear, some witnesses did describe pressure not to say that most of the perpetrators were Asian men, or to raise a perceived link with local taxi drivers, many of Pakistani origin. But others expressed openly racist views. Politicians’ attitudes towards women were so bullying and chauvinistic that one officer said the very idea of the council being too PC was laughable. The report paints a portrait of people who, far from being overly sensitive to others’ feelings, aren’t nearly sensitive enough; who even now are deep in denial about the damage done.
Several councillors nitpicked at the estimate of 1,400 victims, as if things would be fine had it been fewer
One officer complained that Alexis Jay, whose damning inquiry first exposed the scale of grooming for abuse in Rotherham, had got their job title wrong – as if this mattered in the larger scheme of things, or somehow disproved accounts of girls being raped with broken bottles. Several councillors nitpicked at Jay’s estimate of 1,400 victims, as if things would be fine had it been a few hundred less. Others grumbled about the story being exposed by the “Murdoch press”. The wrong people were complaining, apparently. You wonder if some aren’t even now privately dismissing Casey because she works for that bloody Tory, Eric Pickles.
Yet unexpectedly, what leaps out from the report isn’t the influence of politics with a big P so much as office politics: all the surprisingly humdrum, niggling things about status and hierarchy and process that determine who counts in an organisation and who is heard.
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