I have seen how the system ignores abuse

the FULL extent of the horrific child abuse in Rotherham is still not known, it seems. this week the national Crime Agency (nCA) announced it has identified up to 300 suspects after the revelation that 1,400 children had been abused by gangs of men, mainly of Pakistani origin.

it would be a mistake to think this Yorkshire town is unique. What took place in Rotherham is undoubtedly happening elsewhere, too.

indeed, it has now emerged that West Midlands Police suppressed a report on gangs of Asian men grooming young girls in Birmingham, for fear it would ignite racial tension before the 2010 election.

Children are abused by all sorts of people, but it would be foolish not to accept that there is a cohort of men from mainly Muslim-faith ethnic minorities, in particular from Pakistan, who view women differently to the rest of us.

i have witnessed this. i was brought up in Slough and remember the repeated harassment that my teenage sister and her friends used to receive from young Asian men who viewed white girls as ‘easy’. When i was working in child psychiatry a few years ago, i came across exceptionally vulnerable young girls who told me stories almost identical to those in the Rotherham scandal.

Make no mistake, this is the result of a culture in which women in general are too often viewed as second-rate citizens and white women in particular as third-rate.

it is a result of the twisted dogma of multiculturalism, whose proponents insist that a culture with diametrically opposite views on women to our own should be allowed to exist in Britain without repercussions.

Scandals like the abuse in Rotherham are a direct result of social mores that endorse female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and honour killings and of a culture that holds that because white women wear revealing clothes, they must be prostitutes, regardless of their age.

For change to happen we need first to accept that there is a cultural problem, and second to ensure an infrastructure is in place to deal with abuse cases as they are happening.

Such an infrastructure simply does not exist at the moment. Beleaguered social workers are inundated with referrals of victims of suspected abuse, all equally horrifying and in need of attention. Last year the nSPCC warned that cuts to social services meant that just one in nine children at risk of such horrific abuse is receiving adequate support.

i have nothing against reducing government spending but, surely, there are some areas that must be left alone?

When, i referred a case of a patient of mine, a young girl in care who was being passed around gangs of young men for sex, the weary response from the social worker was that she was now nearly 16 and would soon be legally allowed to have sex, so what was the point of investigating?

Knowing that i was about to discharge her back to a life of abuse simply because social services were too overstretched, i could have wept.

Being horrified by what happened in Rotherham is not enough. if the rape gangs are to be stopped, we need to cut through the politically correct stranglehold of multiculturalism and invest money and resources in the social-work teams on the ground.