The Rotherham MP has spent over a decade campaigning against child sex abuse by grooming gangs, but has been vilified by some on the left. She tells Alice Thomson of her determination for justice
Sarah Champion did not go into politics to wage war against child sex abuse rings or become a voice for vulnerable teenage girls preyed on by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin who groomed, trafficked and raped them. When she became the Labour MP for Rotherham she did not know they existed.
“I had been running the local children’s hospice as CEO when I became an MP in 2012 and I remember reading an article about this 15-year-old Rotherham girl who had a baby by any of three different men and was seen as a little scrubber, and I thought that’s not right. Then a girl was found dead in a river, and they said she’d gone mad. Finally, a young white girl came to us with a poorly baby and her boyfriend was a much older Asian man; the relationship seemed odd.”
