South Yorkshire Police (SYP) is the territorial police force responsible for policing South Yorkshire in England. The force is led by Chief Constable Lauren Poultney. Oversight is conducted by Mayor Oliver Coppard.
The North Wales child abuse scandal was the subject of a three-year, £13 million investigation into the physical and sexual abuse of children in care homes in the counties of Clwyd and Gwynedd, in North Wales, including the Bryn Estyn children's home at Wrexham, between 1974 and 1990. The report into the scandal, headed by retired High Court judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse QC, which was published in 2000, resulted in changes in policy in England and Wales into how authorities deal with children in care, and to the settling of 140 compensation claims on behalf of victims of child abuse.
Rotherham is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. It lies at the confluence of the River Rother, from which the town gets its name, and the River Don. It is the largest settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham.
The Rochdale child sex abuse ring involved underage teenage girls in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. Nine men were convicted of sex trafficking and other offences including rape, trafficking girls for sex and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child in May 2012. This resulted in Greater Manchester Police launching Operation Doublet and other operations to investigate further claims of abuse. As of January 2024 a total of 42 men had been convicted resulting in jail sentences totalling 432 years. Forty-seven girls were identified as victims of child sexual exploitation during the initial police investigation. The men were British Pakistanis, which led to discussion on whether the failure to investigate them was linked to the authorities' fear of being accused of racial prejudice. The girls were mainly White British.
Shaun Wright is a British politician. He was the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner from 2012 to 2014. He was the first person to hold the post, to which he was elected as a Labour Party candidate on 15 November 2012. As he held a senior position in child services during the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, he faced continual calls to resign. This resulted in his resignation from the Labour Party on 28 August and from his post on 16 September 2014.
Sarah Deborah Champion is a British Labour Party politician who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Rotherham since 2012.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consists of the organised child sexual abuse of girls that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England, from the late 1980s until 2013 and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history", with one report estimating that 1,400 girls, primarily from care home backgrounds, were abused by "grooming gangs" between 1997 and 2013. Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16.
The Telford child sexual exploitation scandal is an ongoing scandal spanning over several decades in the United Kingdom involving a group of men who were convicted of engaging in sexual contact with local female minors between 2007 and 2009 in Telford in the English county of Shropshire. While media reports had suggested there were 100 or more victims and around 200 suspects, the Sunday Mirror reported in March 2018 that up to 1,000 may have been affected, with some even murdered, in incidents dating back to the 1970s. Social workers and police cast doubt on this report, denying that Telford had a "discernible problem compared to other towns".
Jane Maria Collins is a British politician and horse show-jumper who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Yorkshire and the Humber from 2014 to 2019. She was elected in May 2014 as a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), but defected to the Brexit Party in 2019 in the last months of her membership of the European Parliament.
Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom includes the proliferation of indecent images, online exploitation, transnational abuse, and contact abuse. Efforts to prevent child sexual abuse include providing information to children and parents, and disrupting abusive situations. Perpetrators may act alone or as part of a group or street gang, and may either exploit vulnerabilities in children and young people or have long-standing sexual attraction to children. Underreporting of child sexual abuse and low conviction rates remain barriers to justice, among other factors. In the UK, high profile media coverage of child sexual abuse has often focused on cases of institutional and celebrity abuse, as well as offences committed by groups, known as grooming gangs.
Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council is the local authority of the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, England. It is a metropolitan borough council and provides the majority of local government services in the borough.
The Ashley Youth Detention Centre is a youth detention centre outside Deloraine, Tasmania, Australia. It is the only such centre in Tasmania and has a capacity of 51 beds for 10 to 18 year old offenders.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales was an inquiry examining how the country's institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse. It was announced by the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, on 7 July 2014. It published its 19th and final report on 20 October 2022.
Alexandrina Henderson Farmer Jay, CBE is a British academic. She is visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde and the independent chair of the Centre for Excellence for Children's Care and Protection (CELCIS).
The South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner by-election was a 2014 by-election on 30 October 2014 for the position of Police and Crime Commissioner in the South Yorkshire Police region of the United Kingdom. It was triggered by the resignation of Shaun Wright, the inaugural South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, who stepped down from the position on 16 September 2014 following the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal. Wright had been head of children's services in Rotherham between 2005 and 2010, while events surrounding the scandal were taking place. The Labour candidate, Alan Billings, was elected.
Events from 2015 in England
Sara Louise Rowbotham is a British local councillor, community leader and former health worker in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, notable for helping to expose the child sex abuse ring there. She has served as Deputy leader of Rochdale Borough Council since 2018, and was first elected to represent North Middleton in 2015. She is also the Cabinet Member for Health and Wellbeing. She is a member of the Labour Party.
Andrew Mark Norfolk is a British journalist and chief investigative reporter for The Times. Norfolk became known in 2011 for his reporting on the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and other cases of on-street child grooming. He won both the Paul Foot Award and Orwell Prize for his work, and was named 2014 Journalist of the Year.
Sammy Woodhouse is an activist against child sexual abuse. She was a victim of the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, which she helped expose by giving an anonymous interview to Andrew Norfolk of The Times. Woodhouse has actively supported pardoning child sexual abuse victims for crimes they were coerced into committing.
The sexual abuse scandal at Crewe Alexandra F.C. concerned child sexual abuse by former football coach Barry Bennell while employed at English professional football club Crewe Alexandra in the 1980s. While Bennell had been convicted for sex offences in the US in 1994 and in the UK in 1998, fresh allegations were made in November 2016, initially relating to Crewe Alexandra and Manchester City. The scandal then rapidly extended as allegations were made about numerous other abusers at many other UK football clubs. The Football Association, football clubs and police forces quickly established various inquiries and investigations; by July 2018, 300 suspects were reported to have been identified by 849 alleged victims, with 2,807 incidents involving 340 different clubs.
