To read the Jay report on child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham is to be immersed in the depths of human depravity. Looking to the authorities that presided over such wickedness with years of inaction, we ask how and why? Amid the calls for answers, let’s pause to consider how class, sexism and racial prejudice provided fertile ground under which a culture of disbelief and wilful ignorance could flourish.

Large numbers of victims would grow up to experience domestic abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, and as parents be unable to care for their own children; arguably archetypal figures of the British underclass society so readily imbibes. Filed under the title “scum”, they are a category thought of as beyond human decency and accordingly afforded no value or relevance. Why would their children be viewed any differently? Such toxic class bigotry forms part of the answers to why things went so horribly awry in Rotherham. Mixed within this is the thorny issue of race.

Much has been made of officials’ oversensitivity to accusations of racism. Much less discussed has been how these often poor white girls were considered disposable by authorities because they had transgressed the colour divide. In towns brimming with racial tension, it is often women’s bodies – black, white and brown – that are so fiercely contested by rival communities.

I have worked within schools where poor white girls being groomed were, despite brilliant work from pastoral teams, viewed as complicit in their own exploitation by some staff. What did they expect from mixing with the “Asian boys”? These children were fair game because they had crossed the colour and cultural line. Doing so had rendered them beyond respectability and thus all relevance.

Jay’s report highlights such attitudes well. She writes that: “The police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt.” Why such scorn for vulnerable children? They were tainted or, as Suzanne Moore puts it, “damaged goods”, sullied by rape and miscegenation.

Police disdain for victims isn’t particular to Rotherham alone. I found much the same approach when living in one of Bradford’s homeless hostels for vulnerable women and girls in 2000. Each night, after staff had left for the day, there would be a rapping of furious knocks at the door. Peering out the window would reveal cars filled with men parked outside. Often they would be shouting out the names of girls no longer staying there. Workers told us the hostel had been shut only weeks before because several of its previous residents would “go off” into the night with the men. Sometimes they would return in the morning, sometimes not. One night, genuinely fearful that the men would break in, we called the police. We might as well have not bothered. Though they knew all about the hostel, it was a knowing filled with contempt rather than compassion or sympathy. We were threatened with prosecution for “wasting” their time. In the eyes of the law, we didn’t matter.

Weeks later, a 17-year-old resident of the hostel was allowed to move into her own flat. Kicked out from home for having an Asian boyfriend and ostracised by friends at school, “Louise” had gotten ever more attached to a man she believed was alluringly older. When I went to visit her new place, she described sexual encounters with her “boyfriend’s” friends and cousin, which he had encouraged. Trying to explain that this wasn’t normal proved fruitless.

Sexual exploitation isn’t a crime limited to a particular community, nor are its victims from one race or gender. A third of those accessing Barnardo’s sexual exploitation service are boys. And it would be another catastrophic act of wilful denial to assume Asian women are protected from the predatory desires of the men involved in these grooming rings.

Looking to understand reasons behind the authority’s apathetic response is not the same as excusing the perpetrators. Blame lies squarely on their shoulders. Yet there is no doubt that there is a symmetry of perception where the victims are concerned. Both those appointed to protect them and their abusers had agreed to see them as insignificant, in an unholy alliance of the one validating the other.