The victim says she was exploited every day between the ages of 12 and 15, and was sometimes raped by five men at a time. Courtesy: Sky News

FOR more than 16 years an English town has been home to a terrible secret: Hiding the systematic beating, rape and trafficking of some 1400 children.

Children were doused with petrol and threatened with being set alight. Guns were pointed at them. They were forced to watch other children being subjected to violent gang rapes.

Nobody cared.

Rotherham, in England’s north, is a city of 250,000 people. So how could it fail to protect so many children, many as young as 11, from being so ruthlessly exploited over such a long period?

The independent report shows young people in the past were let down by us - we are deeply sorry — Rotherham Council (@RMBCPress) August 26, 2014

The United Kingdom’s attention was only drawn to the riverside town on the outskirts of the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire when five men of Pakistani origin were arrested for grooming teenagers for sex in 2010.

Their conviction revealed a list of complaints going back for more than a decade and sparked a scandal over how long it had taken police and child protection agencies to act — despite several official calls to do so.

A new report today states as many as 1400 children — mainly girls — were victims of a macho and disbelieving culture and have raised suspicions of “collusion and cover up”.

HARROWING TALE

One young woman today gave SkyNews UK an account of the daily abuse she suffered between the ages of 12 and 15 — sometimes by up to as many as five men at once.

She says she made several complaints, the first in 2003 when she was just 13.

“You couldn’t argue with the fact that there are lots of young women wandering about whose lives have been ruined ... I blame them (the authorities) as much as my perpetrators.”

She says she still sees her attackers walking the streets.

The woman, who remains anonymous, said she began to be groomed by a group of schoolboys when she was only 12. The boys then introduced her to older men.

“They started giving me soft drugs, alcohol, buying me cigarettes, taking me to McDonald’s — just normal things ... I started to build a friendship with them,” she said.

“I was very innocent …. and I thought these people were giving me things for free and I later found that they wasn’t.”

“One of them singled me out, I made a friendship with him and I was completely innocent ... one night he took me up to the outdoor market stalls and the next thing I knew he was actually on top of me and was raping me.

“I was being pinned down by two other men. One of my friends they was making watch. She was already involved in sexual exploitation.”

CASCADING FAILURES

Three official reports have been generated into the unusually high instance of child abuse reports in the Rotherham area since 1997.

In 2002 a report criticised the Rotherham police and local council for their “indifference” towards complaints relating to young women being coerced into prostitution. Rotherham’s authorities dismissed the allegations as “fabricated or exaggerated”.

In 2003 and 2006 two further reports were generated by a drugs analyst: It warned the illicit trade was linked to sexual exploitation and gang crime in Rotherham, and that the narcotics were “widely distributed to middle and senior managers in all key agencies.”

The fourth report — released early this morning Australian time — has been the most damning.

Professor Alexis Jay say the failure of authorities to act in Rotherham “have led to suspicions of collusion and cover up.”

“The police and the council both failed in their duties to protect some of the most vulnerable children in the borough,” Professor Jay told media this morning.

Her report says the vast majority of the 1400 victims identified so far were girls, with only a small number of boys being affected.

She states there was “clear evidence of child sexual exploitation being disbelieved, suppressed or ignored”.

The new report was conducted only after a series of convictions of sex offenders and a series of probing reports in the Times of London.

The investigation has shocked Britain.

“The collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant,” said Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government. “From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.”

CULTURE SHOCK

Professor Jay agrees, citing a “macho, sexist and bullying culture” within the local authorities which prevented it from acting.

She later told the BBC that she fears such systematic abuse may also be prevalent in other English towns.

The town’s former Labour MP, Denis MacShane, agrees. “It is clear the internal trafficking of barely pubescent girls is much more widespread,” he said.

Police say some 29 arrests have been made in relation with child sexual exploitation offences in Rotherham. There have also been arrests in 11 other Northern and Midlands communities.

Almost all arrests have been of men of Pakistani origin.

Police “regarded many child victims with contempt,” Professor Jay said, adding that the first report that described the situation in Rotherham was “effectively suppressed” because senior officers refused to believe the data.

Even more damming was the fact that victims described the perpetrators as “Asian” and yet the council failed to engage with the town’s Pakistani community.

“Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away” Professor 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.”

Rotherham Council chief executive Martin Kimber told media he accepted the report and its findings in full.

“No-one in the council today finds it acceptable or excusable that this happened,” he said in a statement. “We all have a responsibility to protect our young people from these predators but it’s clear from today’s report that we, the council, and other agencies that worked with us failed in that duty for a significant amount of time.”