Smithsonian To Post Sign At Exhibition Featuring Bill Cosby-Owned Art, Alexis Jay on child sex abuse: ‘Politicians wanted to keep a lid on it’, Rotherham victims
July 15, 2015 Comments Off on Smithsonian To Post Sign At Exhibition Featuring Bill Cosby-Owned Art, Alexis Jay on child sex abuse: ‘Politicians wanted to keep a lid on it’, Rotherham victims
Smithsonian To Post Sign At Exhibition Featuring Bill Cosby-Owned Art
July 14, 2015 Krishnadev Calamur
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington will post a sign Wednesday telling visitors an exhibition that includes art owned by Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille, is “fundamentally about the artworks and the artists who created them, not Mr. Cosby,” representatives for the Smithsonian Institution say.
The sign, which will be posted at 10 a.m., comes amid allegations of sexual misconduct directed against Cosby by more than two dozen women. Some of them say he drugged and raped them. Cosby has not been charged in any of the alleged assaults.
Last week it emerged that the comedian testified in 2005 he obtained the sedative Quaalude with the intent of giving the drug to women with whom he wanted to have sex, and he acknowledged giving it to at least one woman. The Los Angeles Police Department says it is conducting at least one current criminal investigation into allegations of sexual assault against Cosby….
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/14/423001343/smithsonian-to-post-sign-at-exhibition-featuring-bill-cosby-owned-art
Alexis Jay on child sex abuse: ‘Politicians wanted to keep a lid on it’
Her devastating Rotherham report blew open the national debate on child sex abuse. Now the ‘retired’ social worker is investigating historic claims on an unprecedented scale, taking on Westminster, the BBC and NHS
Helen Pidd Monday 13 July 2015
Alexis Jay officially retired two years ago – not that you’d notice. In 2013 she stepped down from her role as Scotland’s chief social work adviser, shortly after being awarded an OBE. But rather than tending to her garden she ended up digging up horrific claims of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. That job done, the scalps of many officials taken, she moved on to sort out Northern Ireland’s safeguarding children boards.
But last week the 66-year-old began her biggest task yet, when she joined the panel of what has been described as Britain’s most complicated and wide-reaching statutory inquiry ever. The independent inquiry into child sex abuse (IICSA) is expected to take five years investigating claims of abuse in faith and religious organisations, the criminal justice system, local authorities and national institutions such as the BBC, NHS and Ministry of Defence….
“By victims we are not talking about children who were at risk of sexual exploitation, who were friendly with victims or who moved in the same circle,” she told the journalists. “The 1,400 victims are those who had actually experienced sexual exploitation.” Determined that no one could bat away her findings, she had produced a 153-page report that spelled out in plain language the appalling abuse suffered by children aged 10-16 in the South Yorkshire town (Rotherham) between 1997 and 2013….
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/13/alexis-jay-politicians-rotherham-report-child-sex-abuse-social-worker-claims-westminster-bbc-nhs
Home Office worker investigating Rotherham child abuse ‘had data stolen’, 11-year-old victim was arrested
September 3, 2014 Comments Off on Home Office worker investigating Rotherham child abuse ‘had data stolen’, 11-year-old victim was arrested
Home Office worker investigating Rotherham child abuse ‘had data stolen’
Local council took data from office, accused me of insensitivity and tried to sack me, researcher claims on Panorama
Martin Williams The Guardian, Monday 1 September 2014
A Home Office official who investigated the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham accused the council of being involved in the unauthorised removal of information from her office.
Her report in 2002 suggested there were then more than 270 victims of the scandal, which was finally exposed last week with revelations that at least 1,400 children were abused from 1997 to 2013.
She told Panorama that she had sent her report to both the council and the Home Office on a Friday, but when she returned on Monday she found her office had been raided.
“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 said….
The Home Office researcher said that at one point the council tried to get her sacked and the report was never published.
A draft of the report severely criticised agencies working to tackle the child exploitation in the area, including “alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers”.
It said: “Responsibility was continuously placed on young people’s shoulders rather than with the suspected abusers.”
She met the victims at a youth organisation called Risky Business. “The workers in that project were the only people that those young people trusted, that they were telling the complete story to,” she said.
“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 subjected to the most intense personal hostility – 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.”
Rotherham council and South Yorkshire police have both apologised for the abuse, but refused to be interviewed by Panorama.
Panorama identified one perpetrator who is still free, following a series of police failures to arrest him for exploitation. The man had 18 underage “girlfriends”….
Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote last week’s independent report on the abuse in Rotherham, said people had been “punished for speaking truth to power”….
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/01/home-office-rotherham-child-abuse-research-stolen-claim-panorama
Rotherham child abuse scandal: New victims come forward 2 September 2014
Twelve new victims have made allegations of child sexual abuse in Rotherham since a report found at least 1,400 children were abused, police say….
A report last week said hundreds of children were abused from 1997 to 2013.
Mr Crompton, who earlier announced he had commissioned an independent inquiry into South Yorkshire Police’s handling of the scandal, was giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee.
Mr Crompton said he now had 62 officers dedicated to dealing with child sex abuse, compared with three in 2010 and eight in 2012.
He told the committee 104 convictions had been secured since the start of 2013, while 40 more suspects were on bail.
South Yorkshire Police is conducting nine “multiple victim, multiple offender” investigations, including two in Rotherham, he said.
However, he was unable to give direct answers about specific failures highlighted in Professor Alexis Jay’s report, including why an 11-year-old victim was arrested and why an officer described the rape of a 12-year-old girl by several men as “entirely consensual”….
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-29036742
Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says 1,400 Children in Rotherham, England, Were Sexually Abused, Report Says
August 28, 2014 Comments Off on Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says 1,400 Children in Rotherham, England, Were Sexually Abused, Report Says
Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says 1,400 Children in Rotherham, England, Were Sexually Abused, Report Says
By KATRIN BENNHOLD AUG. 26, 2014
LONDON — A report released on Tuesday on accusations of widespread sexual abuse in the northern England city of Rotherham found that about 1,400 minors — some as young as 11 years old — were beaten, raped and trafficked from 1997 to 2013 as the local authorities ignored a series of red flags.
Some children were doused in gasoline and threatened with being set on fire if they reported their abusers, the report said, and others were forced to watch rapes and threatened with the same fate. In more than a third of the cases, the victims appear to have been known to child protection agencies, but the police and local government officials failed to act….
Alexis Jay, the author of the report and a former chief inspector of social work, said that vulnerable girls as young as 11 and largely from disadvantaged backgrounds had been brutalized by groups of men.
“They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated,” she wrote.
The report described the failures of the political and police leadership as blatant. Even as social workers reported that the sexual exploitation of children was becoming a serious problem in Rotherham, senior managers in the local authority and South Yorkshire police ignored them. When victims came forward, Ms. Jay said, the police often regarded them “with contempt.”
Three earlier reports, published from 2002 to 2006, detailed the abuse, and according to Ms. Jay, “could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham.” But the first one was “effectively suppressed” and the other two “ignored,” she said….
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/europe/children-in-rotherham-england-were-sexually-abused-report-says.html
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997 – 2013)
Independent inquiry CSE in Rotherham
Information relating to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham
http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham
27 August 2014
Rotherham child abuse: Calls for police commissioner to quit
….Rotherham abuse
1,400 children were abused, 1997-2013
+ 30% of victims were already known to social services
157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation made to police in 2013
9 prosecutions were made
Source: Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham
Key findings of the report
Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple attackers, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.
The “collective failures” of political, police and social care leadership were “blatant” over the first 12 years covered by the inquiry.
Police were said to have given child sex exploitation no priority, regarding many child victims “with contempt” and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.
The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the majority of the reported victims were young white girls. The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled “racist” if they focused on victims’ descriptions of the majority of abusers as “Asian” men.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28947707