Well -kept: a national scandal evaluation – it is amazing to hear these children as “celebrity” | TV

'CHantelle … has abused cannabis and alcohol and … the risk of sexual exploitation “is an astonishing punishment in the case collapse of a council about a child in his care system. She hangs around with a number of men who take her money. She is a very promiscuitive girl.”

I could continue. Well -kept: a national scandal is full of it. The filmmaker Anna Hall has material to choose from for a decades. Her film Edge of the City from 2004 was the first television synopsis of what we have now described as nursing rinds born by research that she had started after a accidental meeting five years ago with a senior director at Barnardo's children's aid organization, who told her that you had noticed a new pattern of child abuse. Groups of men aimed at children in need of protection – almost always white girls, normally in the care system – friends – they have to do with them, drink and give them drugs, became their “friends”, then have sex with them and offer them round for other men.

The 32 -year -old Chantelle speaks here of 11 when her Twentysomething “Freund”, one of the men who used to sit on the wall in front of their children's home of Manchester, began to maintain them. The abuse, including days in a hotel room and “over”, lasted for years. She often contacted the police, she says, but “you never did anything”.

Erin was maintained from the age of 12 and first raped at 13. The police told her mother that it was Erin's lifestyle election. An even worse attack followed. Her mother took her daughter (“Bitemarks from head to toe”) and her panties full of sperm back to the police. You didn't do anything. A report on social services notes that she is “a young girl … that is often at risk”.

Hall's film explains the systemic failures of the police and all other authorities, which are said to be responsible for the protection of these girls and thousands as they are responsible, not only then, but now and now and for all the terrible years. It is a story of blind eyes, abundantly ignored, reported, buried reports and dissolved the Task Forces.

Such a task force was Operation Augusta, who was set up as a result of the death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia in 2003 after reporting that she was raped by a much older Asian man and violently injected heroin. It was led by Detective Constable Maggie Oliver, who says that it only took weeks here to find evidence that the care of gangs (“We have identified over 97 children”), who were “only cannon food”. The group was broken up while Oliver was affected by compassionate vacation.

Jayne Senior, who becomes a whistleblower and the source for the newspaper articles of the times that first drew attention to the Rotherham care scandal, said that the Home Office report that she had prepared was buried for clearer reasons. “I was told more than once that I should stop rocking the multicultural boat,” she says.

The ethnicity of many of the men involved is of course what seems to have made the topic so uncomfortable for the powers. The possibility of being seen as racist or in view of the religion of many of the alleged perpetrators, apparently the need to prevent children from being beaten, raped and acted. The testimony of newer survivors indicates that the demands of the various police forces and authorities have changed in terms of a revolution since then.

The trouble of Senior, Oliver and Hall itself is noticeable, drives Halls, but never overwhelmed the film. The survivors are still deeper in survival mode and try to heal, overcome the damage and grief that are caused by their terrible experiences. How they do this in a world that is still privileged by a picture of terrible substance, in a world in which the deep misogyny that enables women to be released, and the victims responsible for it, I do not know. But they are films like well -groomed – in their unshakable details, in the certificates they report in the unpublished reports that they move out – that can work as a springboard, somehow one day, for some repoances.