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Police chief at center of child sex row quits
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AN official who for weeks defied a barrage of calls to quit over his role in a 16-year sex abuse scandal involving some 1,400 children bowed to pressure and resigned yesterday.
Shaun Wright was in charge of children’s services in the northern English town of Rotherham for some of the period when children, some as young as 11, were abducted, raped, beaten and abused in other ways.
Wright was later elected Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire, the area covering Rotherham, and faced calls to resign when an independent report was released last month detailing failures by the police and the local authority for which he worked.
For weeks he clung on to his job in the face of the almost universal criticism, including from British Prime Minister David Cameron and relatives of victims. He said he had known nothing about the abuse while in his former post, and the prevention of child sexual exploitation had been his top priority in his new police role.
But yesterday he announced he had quit, saying the focus on him was detracting from providing support to victims of the abuse in Rotherham and bringing those responsible to justice. “With this in mind, I feel that it is now right to step down ... for the sake of those victims, for the sake of the public of South Yorkshire and to ensure that the important issues outlined in the report about tackling child sexual exploitation can be discussed and considered in full,” he said in a statement.
Last month’s report said huge numbers of children, mainly white girls in social care homes, were sexually abused by gangs of predominantly Asian men and that some were trafficked to other cities across northern England to be gang-raped.
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