by Joanna Williams, spiked
The police didn’t just appease the rape gangs – they allegedly took part in the abuse, too.
‘We’re forgotten children. We’re dirty little secrets. That’s how they look at us.’ Shockingly, the brave woman who uttered these words is not referring to the mainly Pakistani-heritage men who raped her and other young girls in Rotherham, South Yorkshire over the course of several decades. She is talking about her town’s police officers. Five women have this week gone public with their allegations that the very people who should have been protecting vulnerable girls and arresting their abusers were not only complicit in silencing victims and appeasing perpetrators – they raped, threatened and violently attacked grooming-gang victims, too.
The accounts of these women, who are now pursuing a legal case against South Yorkshire Police, are horrifying. One victim of Rotherham’s so-called grooming gangs claims she was raped at the age of just 12 by a serving police officer. ‘He knew where we used to hang out, he would request either oral sex or rape us in the back of the police car’, she told the BBC. The officer allegedly threatened to hand her back to her abusers if she complained. ‘In a world where you were being abused so much, being raped once [each time] was a lot easier than multiple rapes, and I think he knew that’, she said. When, aged 15, she was forced into an abortion, a social worker contacted the police. But the officer who interviewed her, she says, was the same one who had been abusing her. She claims he ripped up her statement in front of her.