It's difficult to simplify without over-simplifying, but the Rotherham scandals seem to have originated in a failure of leadership – political and professional in the council, leadership in the police force, leading to a general culture of denial that there was a problem, or if there was a problem, that it mattered greatly.
Leaders seem to have not wanted to know what was going on, or to address issues that dealt with race, even though frontline workers reported frequently that there was abuse.
There is now a danger that the Rotherham cases lead to the general public thinking that services for children are as bad everywhere as they seem to have been in Rotherham. It is difficult to prove a negative, and I certainly cannot speak for most local authorities, but I can speak of experiences in Dudley, a metropolitan council not dissimilar to Rotherham, where I was education director and then children's services director between 2001 and 2008.
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