Timeline of grooming cases and investigations in recent years
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There have been various investigations and reports into cases of child grooming in recent years. Here, the PA news agency takes a look at the timeline of events. – 2010. Five men are given lengthy jail terms after they are found guilty of grooming teenage girls in Rotherham for sex.
The same year, police finally act on sexual grooming in Rochdale – going back years – with a series of arrests. – 2012. Reports in The Times newspaper claim that details from 200 restricted-access documents showed police and child protection agencies in Rotherham had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted.
The same year, nine men are convicted over a grooming scandal in Rochdale. – 2014. Professor Alexis Jay publishes her devastating report on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. The report describes how more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian males in the South Yorkshire town over that period.
It is scathing about a culture among police and council officials which ignored the industrial scale of abuse, instead treating the victims as troublesome teenagers. That same year, then-home secretary Theresa May announces a public inquiry into child abuse – the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
– 2015. IICSA is reconstituted as a statutory inquiry, meaning it can compel witnesses and request any material necessary to investigate failures. In the same year, a separate report finds hundreds of girls may have been sexually exploited after authorities repeatedly failed to tackle grooming gangs responsible for “indescribably awful” abuse in Oxfordshire over 16 years.
