SEX GROOMING: Shaun Wright may face select committee summons

SOUTH Yorkshire’s newly-elected Police and Crime Commissioner Shaun Wright may have to face a Commons committe looking into the Rotherham sex grooming scandal.

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said during a hearing yesterday that Cllr Wright, who was Rotherham Council’s Cabinet member for children between 2005 and 2010, could be asked to give evidence to the committee, along with other council representatives.

Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, who spent two years looking into sexual exploitation in the town told the committee that he was ‘flabbergasted’ that the issue of attitudes to the age of consent had not been considered over the question of young girls being groomed for sex by Asian men.

“If you come from rural Mirpuri, Kashmiri community, where whatever state law says, village tradition and Sharia law says puberty is the green light for marriage, then perhaps you begin to understand why it’s not just lone offenders,” he told the committee.

For a full report of Mr Norfolk’s evidence to the committee, see this week’s Advertiser.