However bad you think the rape gang scandal is, it keeps getting worse. Yesterday, the BBC published a detailed investigation which stated that ‘five women who were exploited by grooming gangs in Rotherham as children say they were also abused by police officers in the town at the time.’ The report, based on interviews with the five women, along with testimony from 25 other victims, says that ‘corrupt police officers worked alongside the gangs or failed to act on child sexual exploitation.’ Most of the alleged victims were ‘in their teens but some were as young as 11’.
Again and again we see signs that these rape gangs acted with the collusion or tacit approval of public servants
One ‘says she was raped from the age of 12 by a serving South Yorkshire Police (SYP) officer in a marked car.’ This man ‘would threaten to hand her back to the gang if she did not comply’. The report is full of other horrific accounts. The victims describe ‘years of abuse from serving police officers’, with one woman saying that, ‘as a child she would hear a police officer having sex with girls in exchange for drugs and money.’ Another ‘says as a child she witnessed a police officer supplying illegal Class A drugs to a grooming gang.’ Three women ‘describe being beaten up by officers as children – one says this happened in a police cell.’
The BBC say that the names of these officers have been redacted from the reports they have seen, although they do say that three former SYP officers have been arrested since December 2024 on suspicion of historic sexual offences, but none have been charged. One former officer is named though. PC Hassan Ali was named by one victim as having raped her. He died ‘in January 2015, a week after he was hit by a car’, on the day he had been ‘put on restricted duties because of an investigation’ into the abuse scandal.
South Yorkshire Police are investigating these allegations themselves, something which has ‘shocked’ Professor Alexis Jay, who led the independent inquiry into sexual abuse in Rotherham. She’s right. The idea that a police force can investigate its own wrongdoing at this scale is laughable. Another force, perhaps the National Crime Agency or even the Royal Military Police should trawl through these records, and pursue every line of enquiry.
Even this won’t be enough. Again and again we see signs that these rape gangs acted with the collusion or tacit approval of public servants.
When Katie Lam MP spoke about this in the Commons in April she gave the example of ‘Anna’, a 14 year old girl from Bradford whose social worker approved her Islamic ‘marriage’ to her abuser. She also spoke of ‘the ringleader of the Rochdale rape gang, Shabir Ahmed’ who worked as a ‘welfare rights officer’ for Oldham Council.
Despite these horrors, and despite the evidence of police involvement, not one single public servant has been prosecuted or convicted for hiding or facilitating the mass rape of girls by gangs of Muslim men. Sometimes the horror of this is too much to imagine. Thousands of vulnerable young girls abused and raped, sometimes by state employees they should have been able to trust to protect them. Meanwhile other supposed public servants excused, hid or minimised these horrors.
A statutory inquiry is coming. But it isn’t enough. We need a full Royal Commission with powers to investigate, force the disclosure of evidence, compel testimony and ultimately to launch mass prosecutions of every guilty public servant. Those who are found guilty should face exemplary punishment.
We treat attacks on emergency workers as requiring a greater sentence. The betrayal committed by a council worker who facilitated or covered-up these crimes is far, far worse. Misconduct in Public Office is a seldom-used charge, but one which carries up to life imprisonment. In these cases the maximum sentence should be used. Along with this we should strip honours, pensions and property from the guilty. Their punishment should serve as a signal and a warning to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. As for the violation of trust, of people and of law committed by a uniformed policeman who rapes a vulnerable girl, there has seldom been a better case for the death penalty.
All of this may sound extreme. It is extreme. But how else can Britain respond to these extremes of horror and abuse? Some crimes are unforgivable in this world. We need truth, yes. But there can be no Earthly reconciliation. Truth and justice it must be.
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