Karen

⚽️#LUFC. #Retired NHS. Ex✈️BAcrew & Ex👩🏼‍⚕️BritishArmyQARANC

[Karen @yorks_K]

@HaroldGrav1979 @reformparty_uk There’s always one that has to chip in with snidy comments! 🙄

[Karen @yorks_K]

@robertwlk 🥺🥺thoughts with you Robert 💔

[Karen @yorks_K]

@Canellelabelle She just oozes class & finesse….. beautiful lady 😍

[The English Crusader @andrewc44104127]

She raised the alarm 181 times.
181 separate referrals, about girls being groomed and abused in one northern town.

For years, almost nothing happened.

Then they made her redundant.

Her name was Sara Rowbotham.

She was born in Middleton, Greater Manchester. She was not a police officer, not a senior manager, not a politician. She worked for the NHS in Rochdale, on a small team called the Crisis Intervention Team, offering sexual health support to young people.

She started there in 2004.

It was the kind of job where teenagers told you things they told nobody else.

And what they were telling her was horrifying.

Young girls, many of them vulnerable, many of them already known to services, were being groomed, passed around and sexually exploited by groups of men.

This was not a rumour. It was not one case. It was a pattern.

So she did exactly what she was supposed to do.

She reported it.

Between 2005 and 2011, Sara and her team made 181 referrals detailing the abuse and grooming of young people.

181.

Each one was a child. Each one was a warning.

Here is the part that should make people angry.

Those warnings went to the agencies whose job was to protect children. And again and again, they were not acted on. Some of the girls were treated as if they were making choices about their own lives, rather than as children being abused.

Think about what that actually meant. A girl of thirteen or fourteen, being exploited by grown men, and the system looking at her and seeing a problem teenager instead of a victim.

Sara would not accept that.

She kept reporting. She kept pushing. She kept telling anyone who would listen that this was happening, and it was happening now.

In May 2012, nine men were convicted in the Rochdale grooming case.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to know how it had been allowed to go on for so long.

That year, Sara gave evidence. She told the Home Affairs Select Committee in Parliament that Rochdale's child protection services had failed to act on her alerts, and that the abuse had been widespread.

She said it in public. About the system she still worked within.

Two years later, in 2014, she was made redundant.

Two more years.

Then gone.

The woman who had done more than almost anyone to expose what happened in Rochdale was out of a job.

For a while, it looked as if that would be the end of it. Another person who had told the truth, quietly moved aside.

Then, in May 2017, the BBC broadcast a drama called Three Girls, based on the Rochdale case.

Sara was in it. The actress Maxine Peake played her.

Millions of people watched a sexual health worker refuse, again and again, to let it go, and wondered who she really was.

Within days, a petition was started calling for her to be formally recognised. It gathered more than 275,000 signatures.

Consider what it took to get there. Years of being ignored by the people who should have listened. Losing her job. And it took a television drama for the country to find out her name.

By then, she had already found another way to serve the town.

She was elected as a local councillor for North Middleton, and she went on to become Deputy Leader of Rochdale Borough Council and its cabinet member for health and wellbeing.

The woman who had been pushed out of the system ended up helping to run part of it.

In 2018, she received a Special Recognition Award at the NHS Heroes Awards. That October she became an honorary member of the NSPCC's council.

In 2021, she was appointed MBE for services to young people.

Her case became one of the clearest examples in modern Britain of what happens when a frontline worker sees abuse and the institutions above her do not respond. It is now part of how social workers, health workers and police are trained to think about exploitation, and part of an ongoing national reckoning with grooming gangs that has still not finished.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Rhiannon's killer was Deng Chol Majek, a Sudanese illegal migrant who had entered Britain by small boat less than three months earlier. He was housed, fed, clothed, and protected by the taxpayer. He stalked Rhiannon after her shift. Followed her to a deserted train platform while she was speaking to her family on the phone. He stabbed her twenty-three times with a screwdriver. Then he went back to the hotel, bought beer, and danced in the car park. That sequence matters. Not for shock value, but for responsibility.

Majek should never have been there. Not in Britain. Not in that hotel. Not near unprotected women doing their jobs. He lied about his age. He had been observed staring at female staff. Police had been called repeatedly to the hotel. Former staff warned it was a ticking time bomb. The warnings were known. They were ignored. This is the real cost of the Channel crossings con. Not statistics. Not slogans. Lives.

[Karen @yorks_K]

@ineMariaKeogh1 @dlLambo Vile human!

[Henry Bolton OBE 🇬🇧 @_HenryBolton]

Stop f***ing around. @andyburnham @ShabanaMahmood

Face up to the fact we’re being invaded and damn well find the steel to do something about it.

If you don’t have the steel, bring in someone who does - @RestoreBritain

If you don’t want to stop the invasion, well, then you have absolutely no right to govern the British people.

[Laurie Elisheva @writtenbylaurie]

I will never forget seeing Shani Louk’s mangled body in the back of that truck, as people laughed, celebrated, beat her and spat on her.

I also won’t forget the reaction to it that I saw from some people here in Ireland. One of my old 'friends' had a picture of it on their Instagram story, posted in celebration.

One thing I will never understand is how any woman could excuse away that complete and utter barbarism - that disregard for the life and body of another human being, another woman. How any woman could excuse that, let alone celebrate it.

October 7th took the mask off a lot of people. There are people here in Ireland whom I will never be able to look at in the same way again.

May Shani’s memory be a blessing. I cannot imagine what she experienced in her final moments.

Three years 💔

[Karen @yorks_K]

@Wilfrid8mv @Askrigg_lad @UKLabour ‘Some’… not ‘The’

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Pro-Palestinian protesters are planning to March on October 7th.

The police are "pleading" for them to re-arrange.

Don't plead.

BAN it.

[Karen @yorks_K]

@NigelJ216 Terrible at Faro Friday! Landed 1035hrs, finally out of airport gone 1245hrs, absolute nightmare 🥺Was here in May & straight thru!

[Karen @yorks_K]

@Beingadiisingh No-one ‘rushing’ any cockpit there….on the contrary, looks quite calm. No shouting, no chaos, just pax standing filming in the aisle 🤷🏼‍♀️

[Norman Brennan @NormanBrennan]

BREAKING NEWS! Hundreds of illegal Migrants have left France & are in boats en-route to Britain; our borders are not safe our streets are not safe & hey fecking ho we have a Major Terrorist Incident at RAF Fairford; what a Fucking mess this once great country is in! 🤷‍♂️🙄🤦‍♂️

[AmyButtermaker @Amy_Buttermaker]

🚨BIBI JUST FUCKING DID IT. 💀

Netanyahu stood at the UN in NEW YORK CITY and directly called out Mamdani AND Hasan Piker.

“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here.”

Then he brought up Hasan saying America deserved 9/11.

This is absolutely fucking insane. 🇺🇸🇮🇱

[Dr Helen Ingram @drhingram]

Meanwhile the trial for the murder of Ann Widdecombe has been scheduled for June 2027. The courts can move quickly when they want to scare people. And slowly when they want the people to forget.

[Karen @yorks_K]

@models_by_Russ Thankfully you have some most wonderful memories of him Russ and also, made with him 🥺💔…..they will last forever xx

[Karen @yorks_K]

@models_by_Russ 😱😳….So, so sorry to be reading this Russ 🥺
Didn’t know he’d been unwell, sincere thoughts are with you 💔💔

[Sarah Pochin MP @SarahForRuncorn]

The scenes in Gosport and along the south coast last night were chilling.

French and British authorities appeared to be coordinating the planned movement of illegal migrants to the UK.

This country is being invaded, with our own government actively working against the will of the British people to facilitate it.

Credit to the people of Gosport for their peaceful show of strength and for standing up against a clandestine, underhand operation.

[Karen @yorks_K]

@JaneEdwina2 @pavyg Same here Jane, didn’t get as far as dismissal interview, only letter threatening dismissal, but went no further! 👏🏻

[Karen @yorks_K]

@yakoujinn @JohnCleese It’s the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, N.Yorks 👍🏼