Members of Britain's Pakistani community have expressed outrage after an independent inquiry found that police and government agencies failed to act on sex abuse cases because of concerns about racism in the northern English town of Rotherham.
Muhbeen Hussain, founder of the Rotherham Muslim Youth Group, told the Daily Mirror on Wednesday that Muslims are disgusted that justice was not done.
Hussain says "race, religion or political correctness should never provide a cloak of invisibility to such grotesque crimes."
There are calls to oust Rotherham's police chief and others in positions of authority there after a report found that "collective failures" led to inaction in the town of 250,000.
1,400 minors
An inquiry revealed Tuesday some 1,400 minors were sexually abused in the British town of Rotherham over a 16-year period and blamed local authorities for failing to act.
Local council chief Roger Stone resigned immediately after the publication of the report, which detailed the gang rape, kidnapping and trafficking of girls as young as 11 in the town in north England.
"No-one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years," said Professor Alexis Jay, the author of the report which had been commissioned by the council.
"Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013," said Jay, an expert in social services.
"The authorities involved have a great deal to answer for," she said, pointing to "blatant" failures and the fact that some early reports about the abuses had been ignored.
Fears of being called racist
It said the majority of the alleged abusers were described as "Asian" by victims but local officials had described "nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought of as racist".
No council officers will face disciplinary action over what happened.
Jay said some victims were "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".
The inquiry followed the conviction of five men in 2010 for sexual offences in Rotherham at a trial in which they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.
Similar cases of widespread sexual abuse of children -- sometimes by organised gangs -- have been revealed in recent years in the cities of Derby, Oxford and Rochdale.
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