Two current or former Rotherham councillors are among up to 300 men suspected of grooming and sexually exploiting girls as young as 12 in the South Yorkshire town, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).
The NCA, Britain’s answer to the FBI, began investigating child sexual exploitation in Rotherham following harrowing allegations of non-familial abuse in the town uncovered in a report by Prof Alexis Jay, which was prompted by an investigation by the Times.
Investigators said the majority of suspects appeared to be of Asian appearance, but would not give a firm number while research was still being done on further potential suspects.
Detectives believe there are at least 1,400 victims, largely vulnerable white girls; this tallies with the conservative estimate given by Jay, the former chief social work adviser for Scotland, in August last year.
In the sixth months since the NCA began Operation Stovewood, 32 officers have collected 92 boxes of files relating to abuse believed to have been suffered by girls in the town between 1997 and 2013, the period covered by the Jay report.
Forty-seven crates came from Risky Business, a specialist service in Rotherham set up to monitor children at risk of prostitution, which was shut down by the council in 2011. Workers at the unit complained that they were belittled by other agencies and their files were tampered with. The NCA said it could not yet be confident it had recovered all the Risky Business files.
Steve Baldwin, senior investigating officer, said more than 3,000 lines of inquiry had already been identified.
No arrests have yet been made as part of the operation but Baldwin said officers were concentrating on those perpetrators who continue to present the biggest risk to children.
“We will prioritise action against suspects who may continue to pose any risk of harm today and those who have caused most harm in the past,” said Baldwin at a press conference in Sheffield on Wednesday.
Trevor Pearce, the NCA officer in overall command of Operation Stovewood, said the figure of 300 potential suspects should be treated with caution. “It is clear that some details provided will be duplicates of other details, names, nicknames or street names. Others may not prove to be offenders at all, or may be witnesses to abuse,” he said.
Asked whether two of the suspects were two current or former councillors in Rotherham, Pearce said yes. They were suspected of criminality rather than professional misconduct, he added.
The NCA officers warned that the inquiry could easily take three years and would cost £3m to £5m each year.
Many victims in Rotherham are concerned at how slowly the inquiry appears to be progressing and fear their abusers may flee the country before they ever reach court. Last month a key suspect in a child exploitation case in Rotherham skipped bail and was reported to have fled to Pakistan. Basharat Hussain, 38, was arrested last year on suspicion of multiple offences against young girls.
Asked whether NCA suspects were leaving the jurisdiction, Baldwin said they had not yet encountered the problem.
“We will need to assess the risk and there are mechanisms we can put in place to satisfy us as to the location of people,” he said. “As a national law enforcement agency all of our investigations have an international link.”
Reports by Jay and Louise Casey, the government’s lead on troubled families, criticised police and other agencies in Rotherham for turning a blind eye to abuse for fear of upsetting relations with the local Pakistani community.
At the press conference on Wednesday, officers were reluctant to divulge the ethnicities of suspected abusers or their alleged victims..
Asked about the ethnicity of the 1,400 victims, Baldwin said: “The victims are local people from Rotherham.” After being repeatedly pressed on the issue by reporters he said: “I suspect that the ethnicity on the whole is of white British origin.”
After refusing to say if all of the potential suspects were of Asian background, Baldwin was accused by one reporter of not properly addressing the investigation’s race dimension in the investigation, just as Rotherham council had not acted for fear of upsetting racial sensitivities.
Baldwin denied the allegation, saying: “The majority of potential suspects appear to be of Asian appearance. However, we are still researching further suspects.”
He said the suspects were largely acting as part of criminal gangs. “The majority of the offenders appear to have acted as part of organised crime groups. For example, as serious criminals do, they have exploited opportunities. Unfortunately in this case they are vulnerable young girls. They have also used intimidation to keep control of people. They have used different people to further different elements of criminality.
“For they might have used young people to make the initial contact or grooming and other people to move girls around. But what we do have is an incredible amount of overlap between victims, between witnesses, between suspects, between offences, between times and also other investigations.”