British Inquiry Faults Rotherham City Council in Child Abuse Scandal, by Steven Erlanger, New York Times (February 4, 2015)

LONDON — The British government on Wednesday severely criticized legislators in the northern English town of Rotherham for a culture of “complete denial” that led to a long-running ring involving the sexual abuse of up to 1,400 children from 1997 to 2013.

A report into the scandal by a senior official at Britain’s Department for Communities and Local Government found a deep-rooted culture of cover-ups and bullying, and grounds for possible criminal indictments.

The Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council leader, Paul Lakin, has resigned, and the council’s cabinet is also set to resign. Earlier, Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner of South Yorkshire, stepped down over the scandal.

The work of the council will be given to five commissioners appointed by the British government, which will call early elections in Rotherham next year to choose a new council.

“This inspection revealed past and present failures to accept, understand and combat the issue of child sexual exploitation, resulting in a lack of support for victims and insufficient action against known perpetrators,” the report said.

An earlier inquiry, published last August, found that gangs of men, mostly of Pakistani descent, many of them taxi drivers, had gradually seduced girls, many of them white, for years. Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, taken to other cities, beaten and intimidated, the inquiry found.

But reports from the council’s own youth service were regularly ignored, the latest report said, sometimes out of concern that the council not appear racist. Instead, the report said, the council chose “not only not to act, but to close that service down.”

By failing to act, the council did a disservice to the Pakistani community, the report said, while it “inadvertently fueled the far right and allowed racial tensions to grow.”

Eric Pickles, the minister who runs the Department for Communities and Local Government, said he hoped that local control could be returned to the Rotherham council as “rapidly as possible.”

To address another child abuse scandal, Home Secretary Theresa May appointed a New Zealand High Court judge on Wednesday to lead an inquiry into allegations of sexual abuse of children by powerful figures in British society that date from the 1970s.

Two previous chairwomen quit over charges of conflict of interest, delaying the inquiry. The first, a retired judge, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, resigned less than a week after her appointment when alleged victims and their lawyers questioned how her brother had handled abuse allegations when he was attorney general in the 1980s.

Her replacement, Fiona Woolf, a lawyer who was also lord mayor of London, quit when it emerged that she had social ties to Leon Brittan, who was home secretary in the 1980s when a file containing claims of abuse was submitted to his ministry. The file cannot be found; Mr. Brittan, who denied any wrongdoing, died last month.

The new chairwoman is Lowell Goddard, who conducted an inquiry into the police’s handling of child abuse in New Zealand. “I am honored to be asked to lead this crucial inquiry and am well aware of the scale of the undertaking,” she said in a statement.