Child abuse ‘rife across every town and village in England’ shocked MPs are told

Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz said her in-depth study of the problem suggested there “isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”.

And she shocked MPs with a graphic description of just some of the crimes she had encountered in her research for a major report due out in September.

Giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee, Ms Berelowitz said the recent sex abuse case in Rochdale – which involved mostly men of Pakistani origin and white girls – was just one part of a wider picture of exploitation.

She told the cross-party committee: “As one police officer who was the lead in a very big investigation in a very lovely, leafy, rural part of the country said to me: ‘there isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited. The evidence that has come to the fore during the course of my inquiry is that that, unfortunately, appears to be the case.

“We should start from the assumption that children are being sexually exploited right the way across the country.

“In urban, rural and metropolitan areas, I have hard evidence of children being sexually exploited. That is part of what is going on in some parts of our country. It is very sadistic, it is very violent it is very ugly.”

Giving examples from the capital, she said: “There are parts of London where certainly children expect to have to perform oral sex on line-ups of boys, up to two hours at a time from the age of 11.

And it was “quite common” for girls to be lured via internet chat rooms to meet a friend, only to be met by a group of boys and gang raped in a park.

“Then another group of boys come, they take her to another part of the park and she is serially raped again. I wish I could say to you that such things are uncommon but I’m afraid they are quite common.”

In the Rochdale case, nine Muslim men, mainly of Pakistani origin, were found guilty of plying girls as young as 13 with drink and drugs to use them for sex.

But while it may be true that some Pakistani men saw white girls as “easy meat” that was only one pattern among many, she said.

She said easy access to extreme pornography was a particular concern.

Speaking about the race issue, she told the committee she had visited a “racist” estate in the north of England where there was routine sexual abuse of children within an all-white community.”