THOUSANDS of children are being sexually exploited across the country, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner has told MPs.
Sue Berelowitz said girls as young as 11 are being forced into horrendous sex acts.
She revealed that in parts of London they are made to perform sex acts on rows of boys for up to two hours.
Ms Berelowitz told the Commons home affairs committee 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 some of the crimes she had encountered in her research for a report due out in September.
She said that thousands, not hundreds, of children in England were being abused and that “it was common” for girls lured out by predators on internet chat rooms to be gang-raped by groups of boys.
She was “extremely concerned” about the role being played by the internet in enabling and fuelling abuse.
Young people were acting out scenes they saw in online pornography and organising abuse via social networking sites and messaging systems, she said.
One police force showed her a list of 1,000 girls, aged 12 to 14, who had become “friends” on Facebook with a man in his forties who was masquerading as a boy.
Ms Berelowitz said the recent sex-grooming case in Rochdale, in which mainly Pakistani men targeted white girls, was just one part of a wider picture of exploitation involving victims and abusers of all races and cultures.
“I regret to say that there are parts of every single community – white, Pakistani, Afghan, Gypsy and Romany travellers, you name it – who are seeing children as easy access in terms of sexual exploitation.
“And in terms of victims we are seeing the same sort of profile,” she said.
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