In a recent report it has become known that the British police had failed to help at least 1,400 children in the town of Rotherham who were under serious sexual abuse by members of Pakistani gangs between 1997 and 2013 for fear of coming out as racist. The police along with social care workers are receiving heavy criticism for these failures.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham wrote in its report that "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."
It has been reported that "no one knows" the true magnitude of the sexual exploitation that had taken place in Rotherham over the years. However, it is evident that the crimes were indeed horrific. "It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated," the report detailed.
Some other details of the atrocities these 1,400 children had to go through were indeed horrific. The report from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham provided the public with following details of the crimes: "There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators."
As a result of these failures of the police to carry out its obligations, the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, Shaun Wright was asked to step down, the BBC reported.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Conservative Party has said that the government was "establishing an independent inquiry panel of experts in the law and child protection to consider whether public bodies, and other non-state institutions, have taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse."
