Mick Hartley

Lovely tribute to fellow Times journalist Andrew Norfolk from Janice Turner:

Before she rang Andrew Norfolk, the Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior had already contacted several national newspaper journalists. She had told them that as a youth worker she saw many underage girls who were being groomed and raped by a local gang of British-Pakistani men. She had made notes, had names, addresses, car registrations. Were they interested? None replied — until Andrew….

Social workers saw not child sexual abuse victims but dirty little slags of the very worst sort since they “even” went with Pakistani men. Police treated the girls’ complaints as not worth the paperwork, let alone the extra hassle of sparking community tensions. In tight-knit communities such as Rotherham or Rochdale, huge, permanent Labour majorities removed all political oversight. Councillors were sometimes related to abusers and if violence got out of hand, cosy deals could be cooked up with a friendly cop. The girls were worthless collateral in men’s games.

So when Jayne Senior sat down with this quiet, earnest man from The Times, her expectations were low. When she offered him a memory stick containing case files and names, she was amazed that he not only vowed to investigate but to protect her from possible imprisonment as his source.

Beyond the therapy profession, few men have listened to more horrific tales of sexual abuse. Teenagers told him they’d been raped so often at such a tender age they could not bear children, that they’d been taken on to the moors and told to dig their own graves, or raped by a dozen men in one night. This was not just upsetting but difficult work: the girls could be infuriating, flawed witnesses, too drunk at the time to remember details. Yet he kept listening.

A distinct pattern emerged. While paedophiles usually work alone and in secret, these men did so collectively and openly, with friends or relatives, or fellow Pakistani Muslims working in the late-night economy for minicab companies and fast food outlets. And this modus operandi was replicated in other towns, and always — as in Rotherham — ignored.

It was a sensational story yet Norfolk, importantly, told it without sensationalism. Forensic and thorough, he refused to grandstand or promote his exclusives on social media, and only reluctantly appeared on TV. Squeezed on one side by angry liberal academics and community leaders, on the other by the gleeful far right, he cared only about the truth….

Surprisingly few men, I’ve found, are willing to risk their momentary discomfort, let alone careers, in fighting for women’s causes. Andrew Norfolk’s tireless efforts took an enormous toll: he was often exhausted, traumatised by the horror of what he had heard. I pray he died knowing this wasn’t in vain, that abuse continues but no one can pretend there’s nothing to see when a 14-year-old girl has sex with an adult male. Andrew, righteous among men, will be remembered as one who ran into the fire while others fled.