The power of the internet?
The awfulness of a near-local news story of the organised abuse of children?
How should one respond?
As I begin writing this at 07.15am, this blog has had 47 visitors in the past 8 hours and 45 minutes, according to the Feedjit 'Live Traffic Feed'. 42 of these visited just one particular post from May 2012: "Belated farewell to Dr Sonia Sharp - heading down under to Victoria." These 42 visitors come from across the UK and across Australia, with one from New York. Almost all arrived via Google or other searches.
Almost exactly 12 hours later, as I write at 19.20pm the number of visitors to the same blog post is beyond counting.
The awful news story is, of course, the publication of the report by Professor Alexis Jay, revealing that between 1997 and 2013 at least 1400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham, to which Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police are said to have turned a blind eye.
Today, there have been calls for all those senior people responsible for a culture of denial at the Council and in the Police service during those years to be prosecuted.
That, of course, explains the interest in the blog post: Dr Sonia Sharp was Rotherham's Director of Children and Families services from 2005 until 2008, when she moved into a similar post with Sheffield Council and then, in 2012, to a senior education post in Victoria, Australia.
The "Belated farewell post ...." drew 2 comments: one from Andrew Sutton commenting on Dr Sharp's approach to conductive education when she earlier worked in Birmingham and the second (posted 11 months later - April 2013) from Jim Graham who, inter alia, had this to say: ".... she then moved on to Rotherham where she has consistently failed to answer allegations that she knew about young girls being groomed for sex by Asian gangs, but she looked the other way." I had a brief email exchange with Jim Graham, in which he expanded on some of the points he had made but not about the sexual exploitation.
Five months later, early in September 2013, a telephone call was taken at Paces' office from a person acting on behalf of Dr Sharp, asking that Jim Graham's comment be removed. Having at that time no further knowledge of the allegations, I reluctantly but simply out of courtesy,"unpublished" the Comment. And there it rested until this morning.
It seems to me a remarkable instance of the power of the internet that so many have lighted on my simple blog post. Now that the horrific findings of the inquiry have been published, I have asked myself if I did right in unpublishing Jim Graham's Comment and whether I ought now to republish it. The easiest thing now is to do nothing - not even post this - but then how is that different from those in Rotherham who turned a blind eye - for whatever reason - and likewise did little or nothing to help 1400 children defend themselves?
How should one blogger respond? How should we all respond?
I'd be interested in visitors' views.