LONDON: Police and local authorities across the UK have failed to keep pace with the changing ways criminal gangs sexually exploit children, allowing the abuse to become an increasingly hidden and underreported problem, a government-appointed panel concluded Tuesday.
At a time when perpetrators are using mobile phones, social media, and dating apps to groom younger children, bureaucratic responses are preventing victims from getting the help they need and obscuring the true scale of the problem, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said in a report.
The report, based on evidence from six communities across the country, cited multiple cases of abuse, including a 14-year-old girl who was held at gunpoint, raped, and forced to perform sex acts on a group of 23 men.
Authorities often blamed the children for the ordeals they suffered, while their abusers escaped prosecution, the inquiry found.
"The sexual exploitation of children by networks is not a rare phenomenon confined to a small number of areas with high-profile criminal cases," said Professor Alexis Jay, who leads the inquiry."We found extensive failures by local authorities and police forces in the ways in which they tackled this sexual abuse."
The inquiry was established in 2015 after widespread reports of child sexual abuse, including the exploitation of dozens of young women by groups of men in the communities of Rotherham and Rochdale in northern England.
The inquiry conducted 325 days of public hearings and has produced 18 separate reports in an effort to identify what went wrong and why.