How could they allow abuse on this scale?

AND still the number of victims keeps rising. Earlier this week, the National Crime Agency said it had identified scores more children believed to have been sexually abused in the Rotherham grooming scandal, bringing the total to an appalling 1,510.

Now an independent report on grooming gangs in the North-East finds no fewer than 700 women and girls were preyed upon – with the likelihood vulnerable women are being abused ‘extensively’ across the UK.

Indeed, this industrial-scale abuse – and the way it was allowed to flourish unchecked – is one of the greatest social scandals of our age. Nor do we need look far for the reason the authorities turned a blind eye.

Again and again, the same pattern is repeated. While the Mail stresses that the great majority of Asians are decent, lawabiding people with strong family values, the worrying fact remains that in Rotherham, 80 per cent of the suspected offenders were men of Pakistani origin. Meanwhile 90 per cent of the victims were white British girls, aged 11 to 18.

As for Northumbria, says yesterday’s report, the mostly British-born abusers all came from Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iraq, Iranian or Turkish communities.

In another striking similarity with other areas, it was the largely Asian perpetrators who were given the benefit of the doubt – many were not even formally interviewed – while the victims were disbelieved.

Shockingly, some of those abused were even put in secure accommodation. This served only to encourage the guilty in their ‘arrogant persistence’.

With so many cases mounting up, why were the gangs not pursued?

In his report, retired barrister David Spicer rightly highlights the need to investigate the cultural background of abusers, which clearly holds the key to understanding and eradicating these crimes.

Yet this paper disagrees profoundly when he says there’s no evidence that concerns about political correctness or allegations of racism made the authorities reluctant to investigate.

On the contrary, many – including Rotherham’s Labour MP Sarah Champion – have identified the fear of being branded racist as a prime reason why the authorities allowed abuse to continue.

Whatever the truth, it is a stain on our society that such huge numbers of women and young girls were drugged, raped, beaten up or driven into prostitution while police and others looked the other way.

Doesn’t this wholesale, vicious abuse demand far greater public attention than the PC, anti-sexist posturing of #MeToo campaigners at the Baftas?