Earliest Known Grooming Gang Trial

When I wrote Easy Meat, the earliest discussion I could find of grooming gangs was 1988.  Here's an article from 13 years earlier (1975), from the local newspaper for Rotherham.

One of the points I made in Easy Meat, was that the local news media MUST have known what was going on long before 2011. This article is proof that they did indeed know.  For an industry who spend their time reporting on the opening of a new supermarket or on a reduction in the opening times of a public library, their failure to document the industrial scale rape of schoolgirls is shocking.  It is probably the biggest scandal in Britain in a century, and it was the local news media who were sitting on top of the primary information.

From the looks of this photograph, some dedicated citizen scoured the local newspaper archive to find the story (one can see the image is of a newspaper page bound by string into some larger volume).  Here is the above image at its original size.