Sarah Champion says fact babies born to some girls and young women were taken away shows children weren't seen as victims

The council at the centre of one of Britain's worst sexual exploitation scandals has faced further criticism from the local MP for failing to provide proper counselling and support to the girls and young women who became pregnant as a result of abuse.

The Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, said one of the worst aspects of the scandal was that babies born to some victims were taken away from them and their mothers will never see them again.

She said it showed the authorities did not see these children as victims, adding that she would investigate what counselling the mothers had been offered.

Prof Alexis Jay's devastating analysis of the scale of child sexual exploitation in the town revealed at least 1,400 young people were subjected to appalling abuse over 16 years from 1997.

In her report, she wrote: "In a number of the cases we read, children and young people had pregnancies, miscarriages and terminations.

"Some had children removed under care orders and suffered further trauma when contact with their child was terminated and alternative family placements found.

"This affected not just the victims themselves, but other siblings who had developed attachments to the baby.

"However, there were other cases where vulnerable and sometimes very young mothers were able, with appropriate long-term support, to recover and successfully care for their children."

Champion said on Saturday: "I have the utmost sympathy for the children and young people who suffered during this appalling period.

"That some babies born to the victims as a direct result of such horrific abuse were taken away and never seen by their mothers again speaks volumes about the way these children weren't seen as victims at all.

"In my eyes, this is one of the most upsetting parts of the report. I intend to press the council to find out what work is being done to identify both mothers and their babies, and the counselling support being offered.

"The victims involved deserve personal apologies. It is precisely these victims we should keep in mind when holding those who failed in child protection to account."

Her pledge comes after Jay said she hoped her report would lead to proper support being provided to victims: "Child welfare must come first. There was no long-term support for these girls. At 15 and 16 they were discarded as too old for the purposes of the perpetrators and left with broken lives."

In an interview with the Telegraph, the former chief inspector of social work added that she was unprepared for "the catalogue of utter helplessness" detailed by parents and frontline youth workers when they attempted to raise the alarm.

Jay said the "utter brutality" of the abuse suffered by the young girls, who had been trafficked and raped by gangs of mainly Asian men for years, was what shocked her the most.

She said: "It is really hard to describe it – the horrible nature of the sexual acts and the brutality of the controls these girls were subjected to. There was a vast amount of truly horrific material. I was taken aback at how callous, how violent, the operations were. These were girls of 11 and 12. They were children. The violence was worst. Petrol dousing was used as a form of intimidation. Oral and anal sex were so often a means of control and punishment. It was truly frightening that people in our country could be doing that."