SHE NAMED THE ABUSERS. THEY SENT HER ON A DIVERSITY COURSE.
In 2001, solicitor Adele Weir was hired by Rotherham Council on a Home Office programme to research child sexual exploitation in the area.
What she found was horrifying. Her ten-page mapping exercise named suspects, listed car registrations, and linked 54 abused children to one family. She estimated 270 victims at that point alone.
She took her findings to senior South Yorkshire Police (
@syptweet
) officers. They told her the report was unhelpful. A police commander accused her of making up stories and deliberately lying. She was told to anonymise individuals and institutions. She was told she and her colleagues were exceeding their roles.
Then files were stolen from the Risky Business office where she worked. No broken locks. No broken windows. A computer had been accessed. A police officer stopped her in her car and told her, in no uncertain terms, that people knew where she lived.
Her work was sidelined. By 2007 the operation around her had effectively collapsed. Her reports were finally released by South Yorkshire Police (
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) in 2015, only after a Freedom of Information request.
The Jay Report, published in 2014, found that approximately 1,400 children had been abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. It concluded that by 2005 it was hard to believe senior officers and elected members were not aware of the problem.
Zero senior officials were prosecuted. Zero.
A researcher identified the abuse network in 2001 with names, car plates, and victim counts. The institution's response was to bury the paperwork and threaten the person who wrote it.
Source: The Guardian
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