The detail disclosed by the Jay report into the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham is so shocking it will grab the headlines with its accounts of children as young as 11 being doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. But it is the scale of the abuse that ought to give most concern. The figure of 1,400 children subjected to a series of appalling ordeals is almost certainly a conservative one.

If we are still shocked we are, sadly, less surprised by yet another example of the way in which those in authority over decades disbelieved, suppressed or ignored evidence of abuse. That is not just true of the police and social workers. The warp runs through the weft of establishments from schools and children’s homes to the BBC and the Catholic church. Abuse was made worse by cultures of denial and cover-up. The victims were blamed for what had happened to them. Whistleblowers were chastised.

But we should take care with one particular aspect of the Rotherham case – and those that preceded it in Rochdale, Derby and Oxford. In all, the abuse was categorised as being perpetrated by Asian men with young white girls as the victims. The authorities’ failure to act, it is suggested, was conditioned by nervousness about being branded racist.

Some sections of the media have gleefully portrayed this as a failure of liberal notions that social harmony in Britain is best served by celebrating every culture. The assaults grow out of Pakistani culture, it is suggested. Some of the coverage has been an exercise in covert racism or religious prejudice. “The rapists are all probably in one sense ‘good’ Muslims, praying and fasting in the daytime, then prowling and preying at night,” one rebarbative commentator wrote.

The reality of child abuse in modern Britain is that it is widespread and far from confined to any specific community. Despite the high-profile coverage of Pakistani abusers in Rochdale in 2013, 95% of the men on the area’s sex offender register are white. Offences defy easy stereotyping; the lead perpetrator in Rochdale was later also sentenced for assaulting a young Asian female. And if all cases are about the abuse of power they have different dynamics: Rochdale revealed opportunism by taxi drivers and takeaway workers using girls for quick sex; Oxford was about gang-related trafficking motivated by money.

This is not to say that Asian communities don’t have a problem to address. Muslim women have criticised a culture of racism, misogyny, tribalism and sexual vulgarity among men who hail from the poorest, least-educated and most closed-off parts of Pakistan. Julie Siddiqi, executive director of the Islamic Society of Britain, has called for a change in the male dominance at the top of many Muslim organisations, which may have contributed to their community’s silence on grooming.

Male Muslim leaders are now beginning to act. The public prosecutor in the Rochdale case, Nazir Afzal, is of Pakistani origin. An Oxford imam, Taj Hargey, responded to the abuse there with a campaign against those British Asians who believe that the “miniskirts and sleeveless tops” of white women signal “their impure and immoral outlook”. Alyas Karmani, a Bradford imam who is a psychologist, has put initiatives in place in several northern towns to challenge distorted notions of masculinity among Muslim youth, though he insists the problem is not confined to Asians, as the misogynist lyrics of some rappers show.

Less newsworthy than all that are the programmes that Rochdale council has put in place after local men were jailed. They involve school awareness programmes, training of council staff, a single point of contact for all referrals of concern on child sex abuse, improved Criminal Records Bureau checks, an accreditation scheme for taxis, and joint police and youth worker patrols on the streets. None of that will make headlines the way a bit of sensationalist stereotyping will. But it will do far more to protect children.