"When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up...."

"Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time. Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But [Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work who was commissioned by the Rotherham Council to carry out an independent investigation] said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as 'tarts' and to the girls’ abuse as a 'lifestyle choice.' In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been '100 percent consensual.' She was 12.... During an interview at her home outside Rotherham, [one victim] recalled being questioned about her abuse by police officers who repeatedly referred to the main rapist as her 'boyfriend.'"

The NYT reports on the Rotherham rape scandal.

"And if [the rapists] are providing [love], plus drugs, and alcohol and freedoms, or perceived freedoms, then we're never going to be able to keep [young girls] safe."

That's a quote from BBC's unnamed source who was a home-care worker in in Rothingham during the period when 1,400 young girls were systematically raped over a period of years:

"I had no choice really, because they used to threaten to get my mum and rape my mum."

"So in my mind, as a 13 or 14-year-old, it was 'well if I didn't go out and see them they are going to get my mum and are going to rape her'.... I look back at it now, I was a child, these were adult men who were very, very dangerous, very nasty, they knew everything about me because in the grooming process I had told them everything. So they knew all about my family, they knew where we lived, they knew everything."

From the BBC's "Rotherham abuse victim: 'I was raped once a week, every week.'"

"No-one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years."

"Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013," said Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the new report.

The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham."

Prof Jay said the first of these reports was "effectively suppressed" because senior officers did not believe the data. The other two were ignored, she said.

Even if you don't believe that data — because the scale of the criminality is so extreme — action should be taken. Or was the action always only to do another report in order to get better data?

As for the "fear of being thought as racist" — that gets our attention, and we could muse forever about how to talk about race in the context of patterns of criminal behavior — but it doesn't explain (let alone excuse) the failure to deal with rampant crime. It's harmful to provoke people to worry that every Pakistani male is a child rapist, but descriptions of suspects can't be edited to exclude identifying characteristics. Everyone knows that.

I'd like to see more detail about this "fear of being thought as racist." It sounds like a confession of deliberate law enforcement paralysis, a choice to permit thousands of children to be raped for decades on end, because of befuddlement about how on earth to begin to do anything without looking bad or because of a sense that your community is already hopelessly overwhelmed by evil forces that will only become more aggressive and violent if opposed.

A victim of abuse in Rotherham, who has been called "Isabel" to protect her identity, told BBC Panorama... "I think because the police were aware and social services were aware and he knew that and they still didn't stop him it I think it encouraged him. It almost became like a game to him. He was untouchable."