South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner Shaun Wright was clinging on to his post yesterday despite pressure to quit from his own political party following a "devastating" report into child abuse in Rotherham.
Mr Wright was the council cabinet member responsible for children’s services in Rotherham from 2005 to 2010, in the middle of a 16-year period when, according to the report, 1,400 youngsters suffered wide-scale sexual exploitation including gang rapes, grooming and trafficking.
He apologised to victims but insisted he had no knowledge of the "industrial scale" of child abuse when he was a Labour councillor in the South Yorkshire town.
But the party said he should step down from his £85,000-a-year role following publication of the damning report into the scandal. A Labour spokesman said: “The report into child abuse in Rotherham was devastating in its findings. Vulnerable children were repeatedly abused and then let down. In the light of this report, it is appropriate that South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner Shaun Wright should step down.”
The author of the report, Prof Alexis Jay, appeared to cast doubt on Mr Wright's claims he was not aware of the scale of the problem.
She said that, given the information available to agencies by April 2005, “nobody could say ‘I didn’t know’.”
She said: “Part of my remit was to identify what information was available to key people in positions of influence throughout that time.”
Prof Jay said: “I have spent decades looking at complex cases of child protection and I have never encountered such brutality and such abuse.” – (PA)
‘Exaggeration’ claims
She cited possible reasons why authorities did not get to grips with the child sexual exploitation. She said some officers thought youth services and social workers were “exaggerating the scale of the problem”.
She went on: “There were also concerns that the priority in child protection at the time was younger children and that these mainly girls were making lifestyle choices by choosing to behave in this way. The police might say that they couldn’t act on anything if they didn’t receive complaints but so many of these girls were absolutely terrified for their lives and their families’ lives if they came forward and needed a great deal of support to do this.
“There were also issues around some of the police attitudes to them, characterising them as prostitutes rather than children who needed protection.”
She said her immediate concern is for victims to get help to repair their “very damaged” lives.