Rotherham whistleblower reveals how sex abuse was covered up

Jayne Senior ran the Rotherham young people’s outreach project Risky Business between 1999 and 2011 and reported about 1,700 cases of child sexual exploitation (CSE) to police and local social workers.

But after action was rarely taken she handed over more than 200 confidential documents in 2012 to a national newspaper in order to expose Rotherham's scandal of abuse and inaction by police and social care services.

A subsequent independent inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay, the report of which was published in August 2014, estimated that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.

Speaking on BBC Five Live, Senior said: “Naively in the early days every report we passed to police we believed was good enough for them to investigate, but it became apparent quite quickly that was not the case.

“We were always told that there wasn’t enough evidence. But we weren’t police officers. It wasn’t about us getting evidence, it was about us gathering the information, giving it to police and for them to look for evidence.”

Another barrier she faced was being regularly told by police that “the girls wouldn’t make good witnesses and they were consenting to their own abuse”.

Senior, who continues to work with CSE victims in Rotherham, added: “What kind of country do we live in where they use that sentence about an 11-year-old? That still shocks me.”

She said one of the most demoralising moments during her battle to expose CSE in Rotherham was being given an email address by police called "box five" for the Risky Business team to submit their intelligence.

At the time, the project thought it indicated that a large-scale investigation into CSE was taking place.

"It was a good three years later that I found out that box five didn’t exist," she said. "It was just another rejection.”

Social workers also failed to properly investigate referrals of CSE, Senior said. She recounted an incident where her husband had witnessed a gang of men attempting to abduct a vulnerable young girl late at night.

“I reported it to a social worker, who said ‘what is your husband doing approaching vulnerable females late at night’," Senior said.

"The girl in question had been violently raped in a park and they had come looking for her."

Earlier this week, South Yorkshire Police was strongly criticised in a report by former Youth Justice Board chief executive Professor John Drew for its “inadequate” response to CSE in Rotherham.

His report added: “Opportunities to explore the prevalence of sexual exploitation in more detail regularly presented themselves and were regularly missed.”

South Yorkshire Police chief constable, David Crompton, who is to retire this year, said the force had “heavily focused resources on this issue” over the past two years but accepted “that there is more to be done".