Rotherham child sex abuse whistleblower told by police she was ‘rocking the multicultural boat’ UK News

Jayne Senior, who ran the Risky Business youth project in the city between 1999 and 2011, testified Monday at a hearing into the conduct of former Detective Sergeant David Walker, who was accused of failing to follow through with some of the information she provided to him.

Ms Senior described her ‘frustration and horror’ at how much of the intelligence she had gathered had not progressed.

She said in a meeting that she was told: “I was going against the human rights of authors, I was rocking the multicultural boat, I was racist”.

Ms Senior told the court: ‘I was given many reasons to stop passing on information.

But she agreed it was not told to her by Mr Walker, who is accused of failing to investigate reports that teenage sisters had sex with car wash workers and that a council educator passed names of vulnerable girls to potential ones. sex offenders.

Ms. Senior explained how she passed on thousands of pieces of information over a period of more than a decade.

She said on one occasion that Mr Walker, who was in charge of Rotherham’s Child Abuse Investigation Unit between 2008 and 2012, told her ‘how am I supposed to do anything with this, isn’t that proof?

The former youth worker agreed that some of the information was too vague to be useful on its own, but she told the panel meeting in Sheffield: “It was a puzzle. We may have one information and another organization may have another or another. We put this puzzle together, as we have done many times.

Ms Senior said: ‘The next new face was constantly telling us that something would be done, someone would listen, someone would help stop this horror.’

She described how she was filled with ‘frustration and horror’ when she went to see a sergeant who ran neighborhood policing in part of Rotherham and who she said had not seen any of the intelligence she had provided to Mr. Walker’s unit.

She said, “It still horrifies me to this day.”

Ms. Senior admitted to using information about alleged drug trafficking to check whether Mr. Walker was passing on information.

But she denied focusing on him, saying she had brought charges against more than 30 officers in connection with the Rotherham scandal.

And she agreed, under questioning by Jason Pitter QC, for Mr Walker, that the former detective was a key investigator in Operation Central, which led to the jailing of five men in 2010.

Mr Walker, who has now left South Yorkshire Police, denies all allegations of misconduct made against him, which also involve allegations that he failed to record the concerns expressed in a series of emails from Ms Senior.

These included reports that a teenage girl was raped by a man in the presence of an accomplice, that a suspect threatened young girls with a gun he was carrying in his car, and that a man who had been arrested for sex offenses was encouraging girls as young as 10 to visit his home.

When the hearing opened last month, the panel was told that Mr Walker would argue that non-family child abuse was beyond the remit of his unit, that he had not been properly trained in CSE and that it lacked resources.

Mr Walker is one of 47 officers and former officers investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) following the Jay Report in 2014 which described how at least 1,400 children in the city had been subjected to care and abuse by male gangs between 1997 and 2013.

A full report on the findings of the IOPC Fund’s investigation is expected to be published following the conclusion of this hearing next month.