[DanaC]

One of the most worrying aspects of the Rotherham cases and of the other child abuse scandals now coming to light is what appears to be systemic tendency to cover up abuse at the highest levels.

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, who was not named by Panorama, also said she had been accused of being insensitive when she told one official that most of the perpetrators were from Rotherham's Pakistani community.

A female colleague talked to her about the incident. "She said you must never refer to that again – you must never refer to Asian men.

"And her other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues."
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."

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...claim-panorama

A former cabinet minister has said there "may well have been" a political cover-up of child sex abuse in the 1980s.

Lord Tebbit told the Andrew Marr Show the culture at the time was to protect "the establishment" rather than delving "too far" into such claims.

His comments come after it emerged that the Home Office could not locate 114 potentially relevant files.

Current MP Keith Vaz said files had been lost "on an industrial scale".

The government has rejected calls for an over-arching public inquiry into the various allegations of child abuse from that era.

However, a new review, to be carried out by a senior legal figure from outside Whitehall, will look into a Home Office review last year of any information it received in the 1980s and 1990s about organised child sex abuse.

Home Secretary Theresa May will make a statement on the issue to the House of Commons on Monday.

'View was wrong'

Lord Tebbit, who served in various ministerial roles under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, said at the time people had an "almost unconscious" tendency to protect "the system".

"And if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into them," he said.

"That view was wrong."

Lord Tebbit said he hoped the latest review would report back "fairly quickly" so the government could decide what to do next.

-snip-

The Home Office's 2013 review found 527 potentially relevant files which it had kept, but a further 114 were missing, destroyed or "not found".

Mr Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Committee, said this represented loss of files "on an industrial scale" and it was "a huge surprise" that so much potential evidence had gone missing.

Among the files found, there were 13 pieces of information about alleged child abuse - nine of which were already known or had been reported to the police, including four cases involving Home Office staff, the Home Office's top civil servant Mark Sedwill said in a letter to Mr Vaz.

The four other items, which had not been previously disclosed, "have now been" passed to police, Mr Sedwill said - although a Home Office spokeswoman said "now" meant during the 2013 review, as opposed to at the time the allegations were received.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28182373