How English town let Asian sexual predators rape 1,400 children over 16 years

"Collective failures" by authorities in a northern English town allowed the sexual exploitation of at least 1,400 children over a 16-year period, a damning report says. Victims as young as 11 were beaten, raped and trafficked, mainly by members of the town's Asian community, it says.

Report author Professor Alexis Jay cited appalling acts of violence between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, a town of 250,000. The independent report followed convictions of sexual predators in the region and ground-breaking reporting by The Times.

Victims described the perpetrators as "Asian" but the town's council failed to engage with the Pakistani community. Police told the inquiry that some Pakistani councillors in Rotherham acted as barriers to communication on the issue of adult Asian men grooming children for sex.

"Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away," Jay said. "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

Jahangir Akhtar, the former deputy leader of the council, is accused of naivety and potentially "ignoring a politically inconvenient truth" by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls.

The report makes grim reading. It describes rapes by multiple perpetrators, mainly from Britain's Pakistani community, and how children were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.