Rotherham Worker ‘Told To Give Girls To Abusers’

A whistleblower who repeatedly tried to expose the full extent of child sex abuse in Rotherham has told Sky News that a manager actively encouraged her to release underage girls into the hands of abusers.

In an exclusive interview, the former residential care worker said that when she alerted senior staff about men frequently waiting outside children’s homes to take the girls away she was told: “Let them go!”

The former employee says she even confronted some of the abusers herself in an attempt to prevent them taking the children away and now fears reprisals.

Helen – not her real name – said: “I even went down the path and told [the men] ‘Look! They are children. You are not having them!’ “One of the girls said to me: ‘Don’t let me go!’  They said: ‘The longer you f*****g well delay this the more we’ll take it out on her.'”

Over almost 17 years the former employee worked in most of the local authority children’s homes in Rotherham and says she submitted several written reports warning managers that underage girls were being drugged and raped. She claims her warnings were ignored and that she was treated as “a thorn in the authority’s side”.

“It was like letting them out to be raped … When I rang up a senior officer who was on call, when I needed advice about these Asian men coming to the units taking the children, she just said: ‘Open the door and let them go… Because I told the truth and I stuck up for the children and I was a proper child protection worker I was too much of a problem for them. They were hiding everything,” she said.

She was sacked by Rotherham Council after she reported to the police that she had found “paedophile images” on her former partner’s computer.  She was dismissed after it was discovered she had stored wholly innocent photographs of some of the girls from a children’s home on the same device.

In tears, she told Sky News she had been driven close to suicide. “It made me feel worthless. I didn’t want to be here. I felt awful that those children were left under their care and I had done nothing wrong.”