Once famed as an industrial powerhouse that produced some of the world's finest steel, Rotherham is now known as the epicentre of the UK grooming scandal, leaving the town angry, ashamed and needing answers. The issue of UK grooming gangs was again thrust into the spotlight when tech billionaire Elon Musk launched incendiary attacks on his X platform against the UK government for resisting calls for a new national inquiry.
Over the course of several decades, men of mostly South Asian origin in various English towns are suspected of abusing thousands of mostly white girls from working class families, often from troubled homes.
More than people have been convicted of the crimes. Senior is a former manager at Risky Business, a youth project set up in by the local authority in Rotherham, where an estimated 1, girls fell prey to the gangs. Her group helped almost 2, girls and boys at risk of being groomed, and she lodged a successful complaint against police for failing to act on evidence she presented.
At the start of the group "it tended to be predominantly girls 15 to 16, upwards. By , what we saw is the majority of referrals were from about age 12," she explained.
She frequently clashed with police and local authorities, accusing them of indifference. There was "very little response," she said, adding: "We could have done so much more. The decline of the steel industry over recent decades has hit the town hard, and more than one in four high street units now stand empty.
