London - A new report has concluded that around 1 400 children were sexually exploited in one northern England town - a damning account of the collective failure by authorities to prevent children as young as 11 from being beaten, raped and trafficked.
Report author Alexis Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government, cited examples on Tuesday 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".
She says the problem was not prioritised by South Yorkshire Police but managers in child protection services also failed to act. The report covers the period between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, a town of around 250 000.
The majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage.