More than a thousand children in Telford, England were sexually exploited since 1989 because of the police and local government's failure to investigate the offenders, an independent inquiry concluded on Tuesday.
The inquiry was launched after a 2018 Sunday Mirror investigation found sexual exploitation reports dating back to the 1980s. The inquiry has since confirmed these reports and found that the abuse was allowed to continue because the children were blamed, not the perpetrators.
Teachers and youth workers were discouraged from reporting child sexual abuse and police were nervous that investigating some of the Asian men who carried out the abuse would inflame racial tensions, the report found.
