Victims Unite!

As part of his article / column in the Sunday Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9261122/Keeping-the-country-short-of-water-is-now-government-and-EU-policy.html

Christopher Booker writes:

Abused girls paid price for ‘child care’

Much of the response to the case of the teenage girls in Rochdale who were sexually abused by Pakistani and Afghan men has focused on whether this horrifying episode should be discussed in terms of the racial origins of the perpetrators. Rather less attention has been paid to the revelation that many of the 47 girls involved in the case were in council care, under our “child protection” system. Ofsted, reponsible for monitoring child care, is reported to be investigating claims that a great many more girls in care in the area have been abused, not a few of them in “sole” care in private homes run by companies that charge councils up to £250,000 a year for each child, 10 times the annual fee for Eton.

Ofsted admits that 631 children in care have been the victims of actual or suspected sexual abuse in the past five years, 187 in the past 10 months alone. This latest case appears to confirm that many of the 10,000 now being taken into care each year by English social workers are at more risk of serious harm than they ever were from the families from which they were removed. Inevitably, this prompts the question – who is in a position to protect these children from the social workers? Of all the scandals clustering round our dysfunctional “child protection” system, this may be the most obviously shocking – but there are plenty more. So far off the rails has this entire system gone that it is hard to imagine how it can ever be corrected. The only people with the power to call it to account are the politicians. But with the shining exception of John Hemming MP, they seem as oblivious to what is really going on as they are to so much else.

Related articles

• SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: The girl, 15, handed to her abusers on a plate to be raped by a sex gang after care home staff let her run away 19 times (dailymail.co.uk)
• Child snatching: the ethical battleline between mainstream and online media (gloriamusa.wordpress.com)
• Police arrest nine men in Rochdale child sex grooming investigation (guardian.co.uk)
• Scandal of care firms that failed to protect girls from grooming: Teenager in children’s home died from overdose after being targeted for sex (dailymail.co.uk)
• The cover-ups that happen when sexual abuse scandals threaten your values | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)