A Rotherham police officer who was told of serious child abuse in the town in the 1990s had sex with girls at a house where a victim was living, a court has heard.
He was also allegedly passing on drugs to one of the seven defendants involved in an alleged Rotherham grooming ring now on trial in Sheffield crown court.
The central witness in the trial, known as Girl B, told the jury on Friday that she had told police officer Kenneth Dawes about assaults she was allegedly suffering when she was in and out of care homes as a young girl in the early 1990s.
Asked by prosecutor Michelle Colborne how she had found the officer, the alleged victim, now 36, responded: “He used to come to the houses where we were.”
Girl B said this included the houses of two sisters whom she used to live with. She added: “He used to have sex with girls. He used to take drugs from people and pass them on to Ash.”
Two of the defendants in the trial are said to have had nicknames with the word Ash, Arshid Hussain, who was known as “Mad Ash” and Qurban Ali, who prosecution say was known to victims as “Blind Ash”.
Girl B, who lived in children’s homes from the age of 11, said she had still been in care at the time of the police officer’s alleged behaviour.
Girl B named the detective constable twice during cross-examination on Thursday and said that he had ignored her report and the abuse continued. On Friday, prosecutor Colborne asked her under re-examination what she had said to Dawes.
“I told him what was happening. He wrote it down in his booklet, he said he would get back in touch with me. He never got back in touch with me.”
The jury has previously been shown hours of police interviews in which Girl B, now 36, said she was in and out of care as a teenager and had been sexually abused for around a decade since the age of 11.
She has accused Hussain, Ali and four other defendants, brothers Sajid and Majid Bostan, landlady Karen MacGregor and another woman Shelley Davies of being involved in her abuse which allegedly included rape, indecent assault and false imprisonment.
The five men and two women deny a combined 63 charges relating to alleged child sexual exploitation offences.
The trial continues.
