It was difficult to read the Alexis Jay report into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham. 1400 girls and 200 boys brutally abused and exploited.

And then we have the response from the council and the police. Denial. Victim blaming. Placing children into care homes where they were more at risk than they were in the family home. Sending looked-after children to school by taxis implicated in grooming and abuse. Regarding abused children as consenting participants. Treating an abused child as a criminal. Failure to investigate crimes. Vilification of those trying to raise awareness.

I am a councillor in the next-door authority of Sheffield. We are under the same police force. I have been assured that we do not have the same kind of problems that Rotherham has, but reading this report, I don’t see how I or any of us can take those kind of assurances at face value. So I want to know what I need to do, what questions I need to ask, who I need to challenge, to be satisfied that the council and police are doing a good job in preventing child sexual exploitation.

Section 10 deals with three early reports into CSE that appear to have been disbelieved and ignored.

A chapter of a draft report on research into CSE in Rotherham, often referred to as ‘The Home Office Report’, was written by a researcher in 2002. It contained severe criticisms of the agencies in Rotherham involved with CSE. The most serious concerned alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers. The report also stated that responsibility was continuously placed on young people’s shoulders, rather than with the suspected abusers. It presented a clear picture of a ‘high prevalence of young women being coerced and abused through prostitution.’ Senior officers in the Police and the Council were deeply unhappy about the data and evidence that underpinned the report. There was a suggestion that facts had been fabricated or exaggerated. Several sources reported that the researcher was subjected to personalised hostility at the hands of officials. She was unable to complete the last part of the research.

Nobody should be subject to this kind of treatment. I have been assured that officers in this situation (in a different but comparable context) have access to the chief executive, the chief auditor, the chair of the audit committee (and the vice-chair, which is me). I have been told this, but have the officers who might need to know it been told it, and do they believe it?

And how did the Home Office respond to this treatment of their researcher?

Section 13 deals with the role of elected members and I will quote a few points:

By 2005, it is hard to believe that any senior officers or members from the Leader and the Chief Executive downwards, were not aware of the issue. Most members showed little obvious leadership or interest in CSE for much of the period under review apart from their continued support for Risky Business. The possible reasons for this are not clear but may include denial that this could occur in Rotherham, concern that the ethnic element could damage community cohesion, worry about reputational risk to the Borough if the issue was brought fully into the public domain, and the belief that if that occurred, it might compromise police operations.

In response to these growing concerns about sexual exploitation in Rotherham, a Task and Finish group was set up in December 2004, chaired by the Leader of the Council. Only one minute of its meetings (March 2005) was available, though other minutes contained references to this group’s work. The March minute listed a number of actions including multi agency training, a local publicity campaign and appointing a Co-ordinator on the issue, though this did not seem to happen until 2007. In November 2005, the Chair of the Children and Young People’s Voluntary Sector Consortium wrote to the Chief Executive, expressing concern at the problem of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham and recalling that members of the Consortium gave evidence to the Task and Finish Group on March 2. The Consortium had not been represented at any meetings after that. She requested a progress report on the Group’s work. The Chief Executive’s reply has not been found. In late 2005, the Group agreed that more awareness training around CSE needed to be provided within the child protection training programme. There is no further record of this group’s meetings or its outputs or how it ceased to exist.

The Chair of the Children and Young People’s Select Commission has been in that role for the past eleven years. She attended the members’ seminar on CSE in 2005 and knew about the Leader’s Task and Finish Group. She was confident that she had challenged officials, but over the years she had faced obstacles to her work as Chair. When the majority of members belonged to one party, it was not easy for a Commission to maintain its total independence. In her experience, agenda items were too often presented as faits accomplis, already wrapped and sealed. She recalled raising the issue of CSE in 2008 with the Lead Member and the Director of Children’s Services, specifically about why certain things had not been done. She described how she was given assurance that all was in hand and that she would be informed on a ‘need to know’ basis. Again, in 2009, she reported that she asked for information about CSE and received the same message.

The language of action plans, reports, strategies, monitoring, and task and finish groups is familiar to all councillors, and it can create the appearance of activity and progress. A key difference between a leading and a time-serving councillor is perhaps the ability to see through and cut through all that, to get at what is actually happening. Another is the ability to tell the difference between effective partnership working on the one hand, and endless meetings between partners, none of whom is clearly responsible or accountable, on the other.

Should we trade some of the reports and strategies for being better connected to our communities?

* Joe Otten was the candidate for Sheffield Heeley in June 2017 and Doncaster North in December 2019 and is a councillor in Sheffield.