Mick Hartley

From the obituary of Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, the man who uncovered the grooming gangs scandal:

Norfolk suffered a torrent of abuse, particularly from what he called “left-wing academics”, accusing him of racism. He also received two death threats, but having met the girls (some of whom had abortions as a result of being raped), he vowed to continue. His next big exposé was on the town of Rochdale, where a girl had gone missing from a children’s home 15 times in two months. She had been taken to a house in Greater Manchester, where 50 men raped her in one night. Norfolk was told of a case in Rotherham where police were called to a flat at 2.30am and found an almost naked and “blind drunk” 13-year-old girl and seven men. The girl was arrested and then convicted of being drunk and disorderly. The men were not even questioned.

“I kept coming back to Rotherham,” Norfolk recalled. “It seemed extraordinary that the authorities knew so much and did so little.” Needing hard evidence, he got it when the Rotherham social worker Jayne Senior gave Norfolk two “very large” cardboard boxes crammed full of hundreds of confidential social services case files and police documents. He went on to publish a series of stories in 2012 and 2013 about how grooming gangs were acting with “virtual impunity” in the South Yorkshire town.

South Yorkshire police knew exactly what was happening. They knew the girls, they knew the men, the places they were taking these children to and they shrugged their shoulders and did nothing. Rotherham metropolitan borough council sought to block his first story in May 2012 with a High Court injunction, but failed to turn up on the day of the hearing. It was published in The Times a day later. The police launched a criminal inquiry into the leak and accused The Times of “exploiting the victims”.

Finally, Rotherham council ordered an independent inquiry in August 2013 because, its chief executive admitted, “The Times won’t leave us alone”. Professor Alexis Jay’s report in 2014 found that 1,400 girls had been groomed and abused in Rotherham since the late 1990s. Children had been trafficked to other cities. Some were doused with petrol and told they would be set alight if they told anyone. The council was placed in special measures. Heads rolled. Norfolk would win the Paul Foot award and the Orwell prize for his investigations and was named the 2014 Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards.

Not that there's been any kind of happy ending to the whole wretched saga.

Julie Bindel on Norfolk at UnHerd – "a rare hero in the grooming gangs story".