I’m a Rotherham grooming gangs survivor and we’ve been betrayed by Keir Starmer – we live with the abuse every day
A VICTIM of the Rotherham grooming gangs has said she feels “betrayed” by Sir Keir Starmer and called on him to ditch Dominic Beck as a Labour candidate.
Elizabeth, now 35, who was attacked by a string of abusers in the Yorkshire town, blasted the move to select Beck as the party’s candidate to become a MP in Rother Valley.
Beck resigned as a cabinet member of Rotherham Council following a damning report on the authority.
It was accused of ignoring the horrific sexual exploitation of more than 1,400 girls between 1997 and 2013.
Elizabeth - not her real name - told The Sun: “It’s horrendous that this man is going to be standing as an MP.
“Girls like me see it as a complete betrayal. Years after being abused we’re still having to live with this day in, day out.
Read More on the Rotherham scandal
“Yet while we suffer there are people being promoted – all on the back of the abuse of children”.
The 2014 independent report by Professor Alexis Jay laid bare how the majority of the grooming perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage.
Beck was not a cabinet member at the time but was promoted to the top team shortly afterwards.
Yet he was forced to step down in 2015, along with the rest of the cabinet, when a second report by Louise Casey blasted the council for being in “robust denial” about the findings.
Most read in The Sun
Elizabeth added: “We needed a clean slate after the Alexis Jay report but we didn’t get it. As far as I’m concerned, those that stayed silent at the time were complicit and they still are.
“Keir Starmer needs to intervene to stop this man becoming an MP, and while he’s at it he can get rid of all those councillors who were part of the problem back in 2005 and yet are still there”.
She said: “I can’t believe that Dominic Beck is on track to be an MP after having to resign when Louise Casey’s report said Rotherham Council was still in denial.
“And Emma Hoddinott, the deputy leader who had to resign with him back in 2015, was on the selection panel that’s chosen him.
“Seven years on, they assume people aren’t keeping an eye on what’s going on. But we are, and we’re appalled.
“At least 1,400 girls were sexually abused in this town between 1997 and 2013, yet we’re still being treated with contempt as if we don’t exist. To me this selection screams ‘They don’t care’”.
Sir Keir is already facing calls to dump Beck after admitting as Director of Public Prosecutions the abused girls had been betrayed by the justice system.
The current Tory MP Alex Stafford has previously said there was no way Beck should be an MP.
He told The Sun earlier this month: “No one who has been involved in, or had knowledge of and failed to speak out against, the grooming gang scandal should have any position of authority at any level.”
A Labour Party spokesman told The Sun: “The Labour Party takes the findings of the Jay and Casey reports incredibly seriously. The NEC took the necessary action at the time against officials implicated. Beck was one of the cabinet members reappointed in May 2016 to take forward the new governance of the council alongside commissioners.”
Child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, was at epidemic levels from as early as the 1980s before being exposed in 2012.
A series of articles by journalist Andrew Norfolk in The Times revealed the vast scale of child protection failings in the town - saying the police and social services knew of but did little about the danger grooming gangs posed.
Pressure mounted on Rotherham Council to investigate the scale of its own problem, and in August 2014 the independently commissioned Jay report shocked the country.
It revealed that at least 1,400 children, most of them white girls aged 11–15, had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men.
Police, schools, social workers and other authorities largely turned a blind eye on the abuse, the report said, out of fear of being branded racist.
It added that horrific rape, threats, violence, and child pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions were rife.
Rotherham's entire Council executive resigned, as did its Director of Child Services and the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire Police.
A 2015 government report by Louise Casey into Rotherham Council found that bullying and intimidation by council staff led to a silencing of whistleblowers and was it "not fit for purpose".
Amongst the worst offenders were brothers Ashrid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain, were jailed for 35 years, 25 years and 19 years respectively in February 2016.
They were jailed alongside their uncle Qurban Ali, who was handed 10 years, as well as associates Karen MacGregor, jailed for 13 years, and Shelley Davies who was handed an 18-month suspended sentence.
In November 2016, Sageer Hussain, Ishtiaq Khaliq, Waleed Ali, Masoued Malik, Asif Ali, Naeem Rafiq, and Mohammed Whied were jailed for between 19 years and five years. Basharat Hussain was given another seven years to add to his 25-year sentence.
Rotherham council was ordered in April 2018 to apologise to whistleblower Jayne Senior who helped to expose the horrific grooming scandal.
The Rotherham Labour MP Sarah Champion helped with investigations into, and supported victims of, abuse in the town.
In response to another vast child abuse ring uncovered in Newcastle, she wrote in The Sun that "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls".
A brave survivor of the grooming gangs revealed the shocking abuse she suffered when she was just 14.
Sammy Woodhouse was subjected to horrendous sexual abuse by Arshid 'Ash' Hussain and fell pregnant with his child aged 15.
Speaking about her experience on Crime + Investigation programme Survivors, Sammy said last year he treated her like a "dead body on a slab in a morgue".
Sammy was the victim of rape, assaults and coercion, with Hussain threatening to kill her family.
Elizabeth, known as El, detailed the horrendous abuse she suffered almost every day in the book Snatched when she was just 15 years old and lasted for four years.
Shockingly, the teenager was groomed by a woman - Shafina Ali, who she met at a bus stop near her home in 2003.
Ali - a white woman who had converted to Islam - lured Elizabeth to her flat, where she plied her with drink and drugs before inviting men to rape her for as little as a packet of cigarettes and a top up of her electricity key.
Throughout her ordeal, she says police and social services turned a blind eye and even arrested her desperate dad for breach of the peace when he tried to rescue her.
She told The Sun earlier this year the trauma she endured and her treatment by the authorities still haunts her.
She said: “I have complex post traumatic stress disorder with anxiety and depression. I manage it well, but I do have blips with my mental health and I have been left with a lot of psychological damage.”
Despite the failing of South Yorkshire Police - who reportedly knew about Ali’s involvement in child sex exploitation for years before she met El, and ignored reports the teenager was missing - no officers have been held accountable.
In April this year the last of 47 police officers to be investigated over their handling of historic allegations of child sex abuse in Rotherham was cleared of misconduct.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
This was despite a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct which found police had ignored child abuse for decades because of fear of racial tension.
Asghar Bostan - the first man to rape El when she was 15 and he 47 - was jailed for nine years in 2018.
