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Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal - Wikipedia

The earliest reports of localised grooming in Rotherham date to the early 1990s, when several managers of local children's homes set up the "taxi driver group" to investigate reports that taxis driven by Pakistani men[53] were arriving at care homes to take the children away. The police apparently declined to act.[16][42]

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The Jay inquiry reported that "most of the victims in the cases we sampled were white British children".[f][68][69] However, despite the media focus on "Pakistani men preying on young white girls", a 2013 report by the UK Muslim Women's Network found that British Asian girls were also being abused across the country in situations that mirrored the abuse in Rotherham.[70] The unfunded small-scale report found 35 cases of young Muslim girls of Pakistani-heritage being raped and passed around for sex by multiple men. In the report, one local Pakistani women’s group described how Pakistani-heritage girls were targeted by taxi drivers and on occasion by older men lying in wait outside school gates at dinner times and after school.

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The Weir report continued that members of the [Hussain] family were "alleged to be responsible for much of the violent crime and drug dealing in the town". They used untraceable mobile phones, the report said, had access to expensive cars, were linked to a taxi firm, and may have been involved in bed-and-breakfast hotels that were used by social services for emergency accommodation. Several girls sent to those hotels had complained of being offered money, as soon as they arrived, if they would have sex with several men. Other girls were targeted at train and bus stations.[58]

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Heal wrote that white girls were the main victims, targeted from age 11; the average age was 12–13. British-Asian girls were also targeted, but their abuse was hidden, not part of the localised-grooming scene. The most significant group of perpetrators of localised grooming were British-Asian men. Several employees dealing with the issue believed that the perpetrators' ethnicity was preventing the abuse from being addressed, Heal wrote.[125][126] One worker said that British-Asian taxi drivers in Rotherham had been involved for 30 years, but in the 1970s the crimes had not been organised.

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Staff described Rotherham Council as macho, sexist and bullying, according to the report....The Jay report noted that "[t]he existence of such a culture ... is likely to have impeded the Council from providing an effective, corporate response to such a highly sensitive social problem as child sexual exploitation."[165] Several people who spoke to the Jay inquiry were concerned that Rotherham Council officials were connected to the perpetrators through business interests such as the taxi firm; the police assured the inquiry that there was no evidence of this.[166]

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Four were members of the Hussain family—three brothers and their uncle, Qurban Ali—named in Adele Weir's 2001 report.[191][192] The Hussein family were said to have "owned" Rotherham.[191] Ali owned a local minicab company, Speedline Taxis; one of the accused women had worked for Speedline as a radio operator.[193][194] A fourth Hussain brother, Sageer Hussain, was convicted in November 2016.[195]

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According to Andrew Norfolk in The Times, one Rotherham police officer had been in regular contact with one of the perpetrators. In one incident in March 2000, he and a local taxi driver—who later became a Rotherham councillor—are alleged to have arranged for Arshid Hussain, arguably the gang's ringleader, to hand a girl over to police at a petrol station "in exchange for immunity".[212][213]

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