Arnold Ahlert: ‘Diversity’ Re-education for Rotherham Whistleblower

by Arnold Ahlert

 

For the despicable protectors of political correctness and multiculturalism, the systematic sexual abuse of 1,400 girls over the course of a decade and a half — including some as young as 11 years of age — was the lesser of two evils that occurred in Rotherham, England. In a stunning testament to the bankruptcy of both ideologies, a researcher who blew the whistle on this appalling scandal more than a decade ago was sent to an “ethnic and diversity course” by child protection authorities after she revealed the ethnic identity of the abusers.

The revelation emerged in a segment of Panorama, a current-affairs program broadcast by the BBC that produced a report on the scandal. The researcher, a person from the United Kingdom’s Home Office who wished to remain anonymous, explained that she began encountering victims while working at Risky Business, a youth outreach organization set up by the Council, aka the local government. “The workers in that project were the only people that those young people trusted, that they were telling the complete story to,” the researcher told Panorama’s Alison Holt. “And some of the stories that I heard very early on were just so graphic that I don’t think I will ever forget them. I was collecting data on who the perpetrators were, what cars they were using, their grooming methods, their offending methods, and what I was also collecting, was information on professional responses.”

In 2002, the researcher documented that 270 young girls had been exploited in 2001. In the course of sharing her findings with the Council, she unwittingly violated a PC taboo: she revealed that the chief perpetrators of the abuse were men from the British Pakistani community.

The response of the Council was shocking. “They said you must never refer to that again, you must never refer to Asian men,” she revealed. “And [the] other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues.”

It gets worse. The researcher says she submitted her report to the Home Office and the Rotherham Council on a Friday. On either Saturday or Sunday, someone entered the offices of Risky Business where the backup data on her report were stored and took it. The researcher believes it was an inside job because there was no evidence of a break-in. “They’d gained access to the office and taken my data, so out of the number of filing cabinets there was one drawer emptied and it was emptied of my data. It had to be an employee of the council,” she contended. Adding insult to injury, the report was never published and according to Holt, “the council even tried unsuccessfully to get the researcher sacked.”

“I was subjected to the most intense personal hostility,” the researcher revealed. “There were threats made from a range of sources. I’ve never seen back-covering like it, and I still feel extremely angry about that.”

It is likely that certain aspects of her report drove the efforts to suppress it. One chapter noted the “alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers” along with her contention that responsibility for the exploitation was “continuously placed on young people’s shoulders rather than with the suspected abusers.” “Had this report been treated with the seriousness it merited at the time by both the police and the council, the children involved then and later would have been better protected and abusers brought to justice,” the 2002 draft added.

Prof. Alexis Jay, who wrote an independent report on the scandal, The Independent Inquiry Into Child Exploitation in Rotherham, 1997-2003, paints a devastating picture of determined ineptitude, noting that more than a third of the children affected were “previously known to services because of child protection and neglect.” He describes the “appalling nature” of the abuse these children endured. “They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated,” he reveals. “There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”

The response by officials was equally appalling. Jay cites their “collective failures” despite “growing evidence” that child sexual exploitation (CSE) was occurring in Rotherham. He further notes that senior managers “underplayed” the problem and Police gave the CSE cases “no priority,” often treating the victims “with contempt” and “failing to act on their abuse as a crime.” He goes on to note that three separate reports from 2002, 2003, and 2006, known to both the Police and the Council “could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham,” further explaining that the 2002 report written by the whistleblower was “effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained.

Martin Kimber, chief executive of Rotherham Borough Council, accepted the findings in Jay’s report, but claimed to know nothing about the alleged break-in at Risky Business. “The alleged ‘raid’ on the Risky Business office is not something that I am aware of and having made appropriate checks within the council, I am unable to find anyone who recognises this series of events as they have been presented to us,” he said in a released statement. “Similarly, I have been unable to find any reference within the Alexis Jay report to the alleged incident and have no other independent means of corroborating the allegations that are being put forward. If further information is made available which enables me to do so, I would be happy to look into it.”

South Yorkshire Police have promised to bring the perpetrators to justice, and have increased the number of investigators on the case from 10 to 45. “A number of large-scale investigations looking at historical and current sexual offences in Rotherham are ongoing and involve a large number of victims,” it said in a statement.

All well and good, but it can’t make up for the concerted effort to suppress this atrocity and the overriding reason for doing so. “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so,” Jay’s report states.

British Parliament member Simon Danczuk, who is calling for a mandatory reporting law that would make officials criminally liable for failing to report child abuse, confirms that assessment, noting that senior managers believed “political correctness and cultural sensitivity was more important than shocking criminal behavior,” and thus they were more interested “in ticking boxes in diversity training than protecting children.”

One is left to wonder if there is a lower depth to be plumbed than the suppression of child rape by the adherents of political correctness and multiculturalism. And make no mistake: at the heart of both concepts is the determined suppression and/or vilification of anyone who dares to defy these utterly bankrupt shibboleths. Bankrupt shibboleths that produce real victims. “I was a child and they should have stepped in,” a woman called “Isabel” to protect her identity, told Panorama. “No matter what’s done now… it’s not going to change that it was too late, it should have been stopped and prevented.”

Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/diversity-re-education-for-rotherham-whistleblower/

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