1,400 Children Sexually Exploited In Rotherham, England As Officials Did Nothing: Report

Simon McCormack huffingtonpost.com Between 1997 and 2013, hundreds of children were sexually exploited and abused while police and elected officials in an English town failed to curb the violence, a new report says. According to the Independent, the report, commissioned by the Rotherham town council found that at least 1,400 children were abused in the town between 1997 and 2013, and the crimes continue today. Rotherham is a town of 250,000 people. From the Independent:

Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the report, said she found “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”.

It said that three reports from 2002 to 2006 highlighted the extent of child exploitation and links to wider criminality but nothing was done, with the findings either suppressed or simply ignored. Police failed to act on the crimes and treated the victims with contempt and deemed that they were “undesirables” not worthy of protection, the inquiry team was told.