LONDON, England (AP) — About 1,400 children were sexually exploited in a northern England town, a report concluded yesterday in a damning account of “collective failures” by authorities to prevent victims as young as 11 from being beaten, raped and trafficked over a 16-year period.

Report author Alexis Jay cited appalling acts of violence between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, a town of some 250,000. The independent report came after a series of convictions of sexual predators in the region and ground-breaking reports in The Times of London.

Reading descriptions of the abuse makes it hard to imagine that nothing was done for so long. The report described rapes by multiple perpetrators, mainly from Britain’s Pakistani community, and how children were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.

“There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,” Jay said. “Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”

Attention first fell on Rotherham in 2010 when five men received lengthy jail terms after convictions of grooming teens for sex. A series of other high-profile cases featuring Pakistani rings also emerged in Rochdale, Derby and Oxford– and communities began to look more closely at their child sex exploitation cases.

Rotherham decided to conduct a formal inquiry and Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish Government, was appointed to investigate.

Police “regarded many child victims with contempt”, Jay said, adding that many of the children were known to child protection agencies. Even though earlier reports described the situation in Rotherham, the first of these reports was “effectively suppressed” because senior officers did not believe the data.

“The collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant,” Jay said. “From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.”

Complicating the reporting was the fact that victims described the perpetrators as “Asian” and yet the council failed to engage with the town’s Pakistani community.