Child sex abuse trial: Police ‘ignored’ book detailing daughter’s abuse
From the Rotherham Advertiser
A MOTHER has told a court how she pleaded with police and social services to help her and her daughter who was being sexually exploited by Asian men, but was ignored.
Crying in the witness box, the mother said she discovered in her daughter’s exercise book disturbing explicit details about what Asian men were forcing her to do. She said she took the book to a police station but it was just handed back to her.
The mother was a witness in the Rotherham child sexual exploitation trial which has resumed today after the Christmas break at Sheffield Crown Court.
The woman’s daughter is a complainant in the case and gave evidence in December when she told the jury she had been sexually and physically abused by Arshid Hussain, Qurban Ali and brothers Sajid and Majid Bostan, Shelley Davies and Karen MacGregor between 1990 and 2001.
The alleged offences, which include rape, buggery, false imprisonment and procuring a woman to become a common prostitute, were said to have begun in 1990 when the complainant was 11 and ended when she was around 20-years-old.
The mother said her daughter started to go missing a lot and she would ring social services and the police and ask for help. She said: “I used to roam the streets looking for her, she was only about 11 or 12-years-old.”
The witness said she would ground her daughter but she would say: “I have to go out.”
The daughter had spells in three children’s homes and when she was 12-years-old took an overdose.
The mother said she asked her what had made her do this and added: “That’s when she told me about the Asian men. “She said they were her friends these Asian men and that they were taking her out.
The mother said she found an exercise book hidden in her daughter’s bedroom that detailed sexually explicit things older Asian men were doing to her.
“I could not believe it when I read it, I could not believe what she had written, it took a long time for it to sink in. I was that shocked I took it to the police and I told them to look at it, but they just gave it me back. I took it to social services, to the home (children’s home where she was staying) and I said ‘read this, this is what’s happening to her’, and they looked at it and never documented it, it should have been put into her care plan. They never documented it, never did nothing, just gave it me back.
“I kept it for a couple of years, might have been longer, and I thought ‘it’s not going to go nowhere this’.”
The mother said she eventually burnt the book.