Two men have been found guilty of raping two teenage girls who were residents of a children’s home in Rotherham when they were targeted for sexual exploitation.
The girls were sexually assaulted several times a week over a period of six months in the South Yorkshire town by a gang of men who referred to them as “fresh meat”, Sheffield crown court was told during a five-week trial.
The teenagers were “powerless to prevent the actions of older and more mature individuals determined to exploit them for sexual purposes”, prosecutors said.
On Monday, Romulad Stefan Houphouet, 37, and Absolom Sigiyo, 41, were found guilty of a number of offences including rape.
A third defendant, Jacek Brzozowski, 35, was cleared of the one charge he was facing in the trial, of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. He admitted a charge of penetrative sexual activity with a child earlier this year.
Houphouet, an Ivorian national of Burngreave in Sheffield, and Sigiyo, a Zimbabwean national of Catcliffe in Rotherham, would be sentenced on Wednesday, Judge Wright said as she remanded both in custody.
Brzozowski, a Polish national of Rawmarsh, Rotherham, was bailed and will be sentenced on 14 April.
When the trial opened last month, prosecutor Gordon Stables told a jury both the complainants were living in a children’s home when they were befriended by the defendants and “other associates”.
Stables said these were “all older men in their 20s, or thereabouts, whose sole intention was to engage in penetrative sexual activity with them, knowing they were under the age of consent”.
The prosecutor said: “The defendants gained the girls’ trust and confidence by plying them with alcohol and giving them cigarettes at house parties, and offering them flirtatious attention.
“Both girls became conditioned to having regular sexual intercourse with the same male.”
Stables said: “Psychologically, the girls were made to feel that sexual activity was how they repaid the debt they owed the defendants for the provision of alcohol and tobacco.
“Once the males were sexually satisfied, however, the girls were treated as having served their purpose – at least temporarily – and they were often then ignored and expected to make their own way home. In this way, [the girls] were sexually groomed within an environment of dependency.”
Stables explained how Houphouet befriended the two girls in Rotherham town centre one evening more than 10 years ago and raped one of them in an alley that night.
He said Houphouet took both girls the short distance to a house and introduced them to Sigiyo “and other males who were undoubtedly present”.
The convictions are the latest following the National Crime Agency’s investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, called Operation Stovewood.
It was set up after the landmark Jay report found in 2014 that at least 1,400 girls were abused by gangs of men of mainly Pakistani heritage in Rotherham in that period.
