Andrew Norfolk: the journalist who exposed the grooming scandal

When Elon Musk seized on the issue of child-grooming gangs earlier this year, he claimed that the "mainstream media" had covered it up, said Janice Turner in The Times. It was nonsense.

Plenty of people had, of course, turned a blind eye for years to the fact that in towns across England, girls, some as young as 11, were being abused by groups of men of mainly Pakistani heritage, who plied them with alcohol and drugs and then touted them around, to be gang raped on dirty mattresses in unused flats and rooms above shops. Police thought these girls, most of whom were white and in care, were not worth the paperwork, let alone the community tensions an inquiry would cause; social workers often regarded them as little more than "slags"; local Labour councillors didn't want to know.

But the scandal was exposed – thanks to the mainstream media, and the persistence, and courage, of one journalist in particular. Andrew Norfolk, who has died aged 60, listened to the girls' distressing stories, embarked on a years-long investigation, in the face of abuse, intimidation and official obstruction, and published his findings "without sensationalism" in The Times from 2011 to 2013.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

He was not the first person to have raised the alarm – some brave women, including the Labour MP Ann Cryer, had done so earlier, and been denounced as racists and warned that they were playing into the hands of the far-right. But when Jayne Senior, a youth-worker-turned-whistleblower in Rotherham, started ringing around the papers, Norfolk was the only journalist who agreed to pursue this incendiary story. He was the man who "ran into the fire while others fled".

The son of a head teacher, Norfolk grew up in Kent and Yorkshire, and started work on a local paper after leaving Durham University. His investigation into corruption in Doncaster Council won him his job at The Times. He had been too self-effacing to apply himself, however; his brother had sent in his CV.

In 2003, Norfolk heard Cryer's warnings about grooming gangs in Keighley; later, he started to see a pattern of such behaviour in other towns. He identified 17 such cases. But when he put his findings to officials, he met a wall of silence. His first exposé was published in 2011. He was ordered by his editor to keep digging, and more followed. In Rotherham, he heard of a case in which police had arrived at a flat at 2.30am. They found seven men with a 13-year-old girl who was naked and drunk. They arrested her. None of the men were even questioned. With Senior's help, he was able to show that gangs had been operating with "virtual impunity" in the town.

Finally, the local council – having repeatedly dismissed Norfolk's findings – agreed to order an independent inquiry. Prof Alexis Jay found that 1,400 girls had been abused in Rotherham since 1997, many of them trafficked to other cities too. "This story is an example of why newspapers matter," Norfolk said. "When all else failed, a very brave person placed their trust in journalism." He was aware that the gangs had not all been stamped out, but he hoped, he said, that "some children... are safer as a result".