UP to ten cops are being investigated over claims they sexually abused kids in scandal-hit Rotherham.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission has been called in to probe the involvement of an undisclosed number of police involved in sex abuse claims - with a top cop further admitting officers were to blame for "significant" failures into the Rotherham scandal.

3 Police have come under the microscope after it was revealed that an undisclosed number of officers are under investigation for allegedly sexually abusing children Credit: Alamy

South Yorkshire's new Chief Constable Stephen Watson made the revelations after an independent report into the sexual exploitation of children in the town was released.

He said: "Stuff has been passed onto the IPCC who are actively looking into all of those cases.

"In some cases there are suggestions that officers themselves were involved in the abuse of children and those issues need to come through due process."

3 Rotherham was the subject of an independent report that found about 1,400 children were abused by men - with authorities failing to act Credit: Alamy

The police watchdog confirmed the investigation, saying there had been "a range of allegations from a failure to act on reported child sexual exploitation to corruption by police officers".

The Chief Constable admitted his force, which he joined over the summer, played a "significant part" in failures identified in Rotherham as part of the child sex scandal, but said improvements have now been made.

He described failures to recognise and help victims as "totally inexplicable and unforgivable".

He said: "What went on in Rotherham was a total systemic failure and it was a failure in which South Yorkshire Police played a significant part."

His admission comes after an independent report from two years found that 1,400 children were abused by men of largely Pakistani heritage between 1997 and 2013 while those in authority failed to act.

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Professor Alexis Jay's damning document detailed how girls as young as 11 were raped, trafficked, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.

It said there had been "blatant" collective failures by the council's leadership, a failure by South Yorkshire Police to prioritise the issue and said senior managers had "underplayed" the scale of the problem.

In February, during a trial of a gang of men convicted of sexually exploiting and abusing girls in Rotherham, collusion between police officers and offenders was suggested.

Allegations were made that South Yorkshire Police officers passed information and drugs to a Rotherham child grooming ring and acted to protect serial child abusers Arshid and Basharat Hussain from prosecution.

One victim also alleged a detective at the force "had sex with girls" linked to the grooming gang.

At that time, the Independent Police Complaints Commission confirmed it had received a total of 194 complaints from 41 people about the conduct of police officers in relation to Rotherham child sexual exploitation cases.

3 South Yorkshire's new Chief Constable Stephen Watson has revealed the cops are the subject of probes Credit: South Yorkshire Police

Chief Constable Watson said: "The reality is we were dealing with difficult kids and nobody could see past the difficult behaviours that these youngsters were presenting.

"It just seems that there was this weird 'group think' at the time, when nobody seemed to pause and say 'potentially the reason why these kids are behaving in a difficult way is because they are really troubled kids who have been abused, and actually their behaviours were precisely because they were being abused by paedophiles'.

"I just cannot explain why we didn't past the difficult behaviours and go for the perpetrators of what is the worst form of exploitation, and that's abusing children."

He said his force had to accept its past failings.

He added: "The vast majority of officers complained about were complained about in the sense that they had not spotted these things, they had not dealt with these things, they weren't professionally curious in the sense of getting a grip of the stuff and seeing the evidence as was before their eyes.

"We have as an organisation to take it on the chin. There were things happening in front of us that we just did not spot and if we did spot we lacked the professionalism, the professional curiosity to actually do what the public pay us for and for that there is no defence I'm afraid.

"It is something that we are absolutely committed to making sure we put right and our practice today is a completely different ball game to what happened in the past."

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