(CNN) -- Hundreds of children have been systematically raped, beaten and sex trafficked in a northern English town for more than 12 years. And it is still going on, a government commissioned report says.

The "appalling" revelations also expose cultural tensions and lack of communication between authorities and the town's ethnic minorities that may have helped stop it.

Social counselors saw evidence of sexual exploitation early on, but turned a blind eye, according to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham.

The city's government recently made the inquiry's report available on its website.

And so the abuses amassed, which included gang rape and death threats at gunpoint.

At least 1,400 cases of abuse went on between 1997 and 2013 -- a conservative estimate, the report says. This year, specialist investigators are handling 51 cases. Other teams are looking at additional cases.

Torturous sexual abuse

The exploitation has reached a level tantamount to torture, according to the report.

"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," the report says.

Some victims were not even in their teens.

"Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators," the inquiry says.

The report accuses politicians, social services and police of "blatant" failure to stop them, citing an inability to traverse cultural barriers with Rotherham's small Muslim community.

Fear of label of racism

The perpetrators often worked together and were mostly of Pakistani heritage; the victims were mostly white girls, the report says.

An earlier report said that "Asian" gangs originally were exploiting women and girls "for their personal gratification" but later turned to making money with it, passing girls around.

Social counselors often took a hands-off approach to the cases for fear of being branded as racists or stoking a right-wing backlash in the city.

"Several (counselors) interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be 'giving oxygen' to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion. To some extent this concern was valid, with the apparent targeting of the town by groups such as the English Defence League," the report says.

Though known victims were mostly white, the report delved into an underbelly of alleged systematic abuse by select groups of Asian men against women in their own ethnic groups.

These often go unreported, because the victims fear vengeance or public shame in their communities, the report says. Perpetrators may be using that fear to blackmail these victims into continued sexual servitude.

Community left out

Cultural differences also hindered effective involvement with concerned members of Rotherham's Pakistani community.

Authorities turned to male community leaders and imams and greatly left out women. Many ethnic Pakistani women told the Inquiry that it made them feel disenfranchised and prevented people from speaking openly about abuse.

Members of both genders said they missed any direct engagement on the topic by officials. "This needed to be addressed urgently, rather than 'tiptoeing' around the issue," the report said.

Under the rug

Some social counselors also hoped cases they were seeing were one-off occurrences and hoped they would go away. That may have been bolstered by the fact that the vast majority of child sexual abusers in Britain are white males.

Research reports on the problem began appearing a few years ago, but they had little effect.

"The first of these reports was effectively suppressed, because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained," the report said.

Social services managers downplayed the problem. Officials thought reports were exaggerated. Law enforcement gave it little importance.

"Police gave no priority to (child sexual abuse), regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime," the report said.

Improvement but frustration

By the time awareness of the problem increased by 2009, thinly staffed social service workers were overwhelmed by the number of potential victims.

There has been a marked improvement in training police to recognize sexual abuse and work together with social services, the inquiry says.

"But the team struggles to keep pace with the demands of its workload," according to the report. And finances are running low.

And still, few cases even make it to court.

AUSTIN, Texas -

Texas Gov. Rick Perry will turn himself into authorities Tuesday evening on two  counts of abuse of power, Local 2 News has learned.

According to our sister station in Austin, KXAN-TV, Perry will surrender at around 5 p.m. Tuesday.

His attorneys said Monday that a mug shot of the governor will be taken.

Monday's developments

A Texas judge opted Monday not to issue an arrest warrant against Gov. Rick Perry, but the Republican still faces the unflattering prospect of being booked, fingerprinted and having his mug shot taken -- and has assembled a team of high-powered attorneys to fight the two felony counts of abuse of power against him.

Leading conservatives around the country have mostly lined up to support the longest-serving governor in Texas history, and Perry's aides said the case won't derail his busy travel schedule, which includes visits to several key presidential battleground states as he continues to eye a second run for the White House in 2016.

"This is nothing more than banana republic politics," Tony Buzbee a Houston-based defense attorney who will head a cadre of four lawyers from Texas and Washington defending Perry, said at a news conference. "The charges lobbed against the governor are a really nasty attack not only on the rule of law but on the Constitution of the United States, the state of Texas and also the fundamental constitutional protections that we all enjoy."

Perry on Friday became the first Texas governor since 1917 to be indicted, and is facing charges of coercion and official oppression that carry a maximum sentence of 109 years in prison for carrying out a threat to veto funding for the state's public integrity unit last summer.

The governor has emphatically stood by his veto and denied all wrongdoing. The judge overseeing the case, Republican Bert Richardson, decided against issuing an arrest warrant and instead a special prosecutor appointed to the matter was planning a simple legal summons. That still means a booking is in Perry's future.

Buzbee said he didn't know exactly when those would occur but that the governor has no intention of hiding: "That's going to be something, that when he goes in to be booked and take his picture that we're going to let you know about."

A summons was being prepared to hold Perry's arraignment -- a court appearance to answer the charges -- on Aug. 29 at 9 a.m., according to the Travis County District Clerk's Office. But Perry spokesman Felix Browne said Monday evening that date had not been confirmed, adding that the governor wouldn't need to appear personally at the arraignment.  Perry would appear personally at his booking.

A grand jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise largely conservative Texas, indicted Perry for carrying out a threat to veto $7.5 million in funding for the state's public integrity unit after Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat, refused to resign following a drunken driving arrest. The ethics unit is housed under Lehmberg's office.

No one disputes that Perry has the power to veto measures approved by the Legislature, but his threat to do so before actually carrying it out prompted a complaint from a left-leaning watchdog group.

The grand jury met for months before handing down its indictment, and Perry's $450 per-hour defense attorney was paid using state funds. Buzbee said the public will continue footing the bill for the governor's now pricier legal team, though he said a private foundation could eventually be established to handle some of the costs.

Word that Perry avoided an arrest warrant raised questions of favoritism, but legal observers said forgoing an arrest warrant is common in white-collar cases. Former U.S. Attorney Matt Orwig said that insisting on an arrest warrant for Perry would have been "grandstanding."

"He's obviously not a flight risk or danger to the community," Orwig said.

The public integrity unit also led the case against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay, a fellow Texas Republican who was convicted in 2010 on campaign finance charges, but eventually had them overturned on appeal.

Dick DeGuerin, a Houston attorney who defended DeLay, said the congressman was originally issued a summons -- and it wasn't until DeLay's legal team had some of the indictments against him thrown out that prosecutors sought an arrest warrant. DeLay eventually turned himself in and, wearing a suit and American flag lapel pin, smiled wide for his mug shot.

"It turned out to be kind of a glamour shot," DeGuerin said.

Aides said the case wouldn't prevent Perry from maintaining his packed upcoming schedule, which includes visits to the key presidential battleground states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in the next two weeks. Perry also has a Thursday speech on immigration at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

The governor is attempting to rebrand himself to a national audience after stumbling badly during his short-lived 2012 presidential campaign.

Potential 2016 presidential rival and Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie released a statement Monday saying he has "complete faith and confidence in Governor Perry's honesty and integrity," echoing similar sentiments from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, all of whom may eventually seek the GOP White House nomination. Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad said the charges "could well help" Perry.

"It is an attack. It also is coming out of a county where you wouldn't expect even-handedness," said Branstad, a Republican.

Conservatives also have been quick to note that a video recording made at the jail showed Lehmberg shouting at staffers, kicking the door of her cell and sticking her tongue out at deputies. Perry's attorneys showed the "outrageous" video again while addressing reporters Monday.

Not everyone was backing Perry, though. In Pennsylvania, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett's re-election campaign removed a video endorsement by the Texas governor from its website following Perry's indictment.

Copyright 2014 by Click2Houston.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

BAGHDAD/ARBIL, Iraq, Aug 8 (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes bombed Islamist fighters marching on Iraq's Kurdish capital on Friday after President Barack Obama said Washington must act to prevent "genocide".

Islamic State fighters, who have beheaded and crucified captives in their drive to eradicate unbelievers, have advanced to within a half hour's drive of Arbil, capital of Iraq's Kurdish region and a hub for U.S. oil companies.

A Pentagon spokesman said two F/A-18 aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf had dropped laser-guided 500-pound bombs on a mobile artillery piece used by the fighters to shell Kurdish forces defending Arbil.

Obama authorized the first U.S. air strikes on Iraq since he pulled all troops out in 2011, arguing action was needed to halt the Islamist advance, protect Americans and safeguard hundreds of thousands of Christians and members of other religious minorities who have fled for their lives.

The United States also dropped relief supplies to members of the ancient Yazidi sect, tens of thousands of whom are massed on a desert mountaintop seeking shelter from fighters who had ordered them to convert or die.

"Earlier this week, one Iraqi in the area cried to the world, 'There is no one coming to help'," said Obama in a late night television address to the nation on Thursday. "Well, today America is coming to help."

"We can act carefully and responsibly to prevent a potential act of genocide," he said.

The Islamic State was defiant. A fighter told Reuters by telephone the U.S. air strikes would have "no impact on us".

"The planes attack positions they think are strategic, but this is not how we operate. We are trained for guerrilla street war," he said. "God is with us and our promise is heaven. When we are promised heaven, do you think death will stop us?"

The advance of the Sunni militants, who also control a third of Syria and have fought this past week in Lebanon, has sounded alarm across the Middle East and threatens to unravel Iraq, a country divided between Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds.

In Baghdad, where politicians have been paralyzed by infighting while the state falls apart, the top Shi'ite cleric all but demanded Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki quit, a bold intervention that could bring the veteran ruler down.

SHELTERING ON MOUNTAIN

Sunni fighters from the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot rejected as too extreme by Osama bin Laden's successors, have swept through northern Iraq since June. Their advance has dramatically accelerated in the past week when they routed Kurdish troops near the Kurdish autonomous region in the north.

Attention has focused on the plight of Yazidis, Christians and other minority groups in northern Iraq, which has been one of the most diverse parts of the Middle East for centuries.

"The stakes for Iraq's future can also not be clearer," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday. The Islamic State's "campaign of terror against the innocent, including the Christian minority, and its grotesque targeted acts of violence show all the warning signs of genocide."

The U.S. Defense Department said planes dropped 72 bundles of supplies, including 8,000 ready-to-eat meals and thousands of gallons of drinking water, for threatened civilians near Sinjar, home of the Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who practice an ancient faith related to Zoroastrianism.

The Islamic State considers them to be "devil worshippers". After fighters ordered them to leave, convert or die, most fled their towns and villages to camp out on Sinjar mountain, an arid peak where they believe Noah settled after the biblical flood.

"After we fled to the mountain, I returned one day to recover belongings and I saw the bodies of the elderly disabled men who had been shot dead by the Islamic State. They were too old to flee. I can't forget that scene," said Akram Edo, who escaped to Kurdish-held territory with seven children.

His brother Hameed Edo, still back on the mountain with five children, told Reuters by telephone water was running out and no aid had arrived for the civilians trapped in the wilderness.

Mahma Khalil, a Yazidi lawmaker in Baghdad, said: "We hear through the media there is American help, but there is nothing on the ground.... Please save us! SOS! save us!" he said. "Our people are in the desert. They are exposed to a genocide."

TRAMPLE OUR DEAD BODIES

In the Kurdish capital, suddenly near the front line for the first time after a decade of war, defiant residents said they were stockpiling weapons and prepared to defend the city.

"People with children took them to their families (outside Arbil), but the men have stayed," said Abu Blind, 44, working at a tea stall in Arbil bazaar. "They will have to trample over our dead bodies to reach Arbil."

The Kurdish region has until now been the only part of Iraq to survive the past decade of civil war without a serious security threat. Its vaunted "peshmerga" fighters - those who confront death - also controlled wide stretches of territory outside the autonomous zone, which served as sanctuary for fleeing Christians and other minorities when Islamic State fighters arrived in the region last month.

But the past week saw the peshmerga crumble in the face of an advance by the fighters, who have heavy weapons they seized from Iraqi army troops that abandoned their posts in June. In addition, the fighters are flush with cash looted from banks.

Christians, many of them already refugees who had sought shelter in peshmerga-controlled areas, were suddenly forced to flee. Tens of thousands of Christians fled on Thursday when the Islamic State overran their hometown, Qaraqosh.

Shamil Abu Madian, a 45-year-old Christian, told Reuters he had first quit the city of Mosul when it fell in June. He initially sheltered in a town protected by the peshmerga, but was forced to flee again in panic in the middle of the night when the Kurdish peshmerga troops suddenly vanished.

"We were not able to take anything with us except some clothes in a nylon bag," he said. "People are living on sidewalks, in public gardens, anywhere."

A United Nations humanitarian spokesman said some 200,000 people fleeing the Islamists' advance had reached the town of Dohuk on the Tigris River in Iraqi Kurdistan and nearby areas of Nineveh province. Tens of thousands had fled further north to the Turkish border, Turkish officials said.

AYATOLLAH CITES "GRAVE MISTAKE"

While the relentless advance of Islamic State fighters has threatened to destroy Iraq as a state, bickering politicians in Baghdad have failed to agree on a new government since an inconclusive election in April.

Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist whose foes accuse him of fueling the Sunni revolt by running an authoritarian sectarian state, has refused to step aside for a less polarizing figure, defying pressure from Washington and Tehran.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a reclusive 84-year-old scholar whose word is law for millions of Shi'ites in Iraq and beyond, has repeatedly pushed for politicians to break the deadlock and reunify the country. His weekly sermon on Friday, read out by an aide, was his clearest call for Maliki to go.

Though he did not mention Maliki by name, he said those who cling to posts were making a "grave mistake".

Reuters photographs on Thursday showed the insurgents had raised their black flag over a checkpoint just 45 km (28 miles) from Arbil. U.S. oil majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron began evacuating expatriate staff from Iraqi Kurdistan on Thursday. Smaller oil companies also evacuated staff and cut back operations, and several saw their shares fall sharply on Thursday and Friday.

The Islamists' lightning offensive and the threat of U.S. military action sent shares and the dollar tumbling on world financial markets, as investors moved to safe haven assets such as gold and German government bonds.

Obama, who brought U.S. troops home from Iraq to fulfill a campaign pledge, insisted he would not commit ground forces and had no intention of letting the United States "get dragged into fighting another war in Iraq".

Questions were quickly raised in Washington about whether selective U.S. attacks on militant positions and humanitarian air drops would be enough to shift the balance on the battlefield against the Islamist forces.

"I completely support humanitarian aid as well as the use of air power," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted after Obama's announcement. "However the actions announced tonight will not turn the tide of battle." (Additional reporting from Isabel Coles in Arbil, Michael Georgy in Baghdad, Michael Shields in Vienna, Bill Trott and Missy Ryan in Washington and Mariam Karouny in Beirut; Writing by Peter Graff, editing by Peter Millership)

JABALIYA, Gaza Strip ? An examination of an Israeli barrage that put a line of at least 10 shells through a United Nations school sheltering displaced Palestinians here last week suggests that Israeli troops paid little heed to warnings to safeguard such sites and may have unleashed weapons inappropriate for urban areas despite rising alarm over civilian deaths.

Inspection of the damage, a preliminary United Nations review that collected 30 pieces of shrapnel, and interviews with two dozen witnesses indicate that the predawn strikes on Wednesday, July 30, that killed 21 people at the school, in the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, were likely to have come from heavy artillery not designed for precision use.

Israeli officials have argued throughout their 27-day air-and-ground campaign against Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, that it is the enemy?s insistence on operating near shelters and other humanitarian sites that endangers civilians. But in the Jabaliya case, they provided no evidence of such activity and no explanation for the strike beyond saying that Palestinian militants were firing about 200 yards away.

?It was clear that they were not aiming at a specific house, but fired lots and it fell where it fell,? said Abdel-Latif al-Seifi, whose three-story villa just beyond the school?s north wall ended up with two large holes in its roof.

The Jabaliya strike has already opened Israel to a new level of global scrutiny. International criticism ratcheted up another notch on Sunday after a missile the Israelis say was meant for three militants on a motorcycle also killed people waiting in line for food outside a United Nations school in Rafah that had been turned into a shelter.

Though Israeli military leaders have declared definitively that no United Nations facility was targeted, Rafah was the sixth shelter struck during the operation. Such strikes have renewed sharp questions about the tactics Israel uses in dense neighborhoods and, especially, near shelters that are supposed to provide refuge to people who follow Israel?s own orders to leave areas of fierce fighting.

?Why aren?t the safe zones working?? asked Robert Turner, the Gaza director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is sheltering nearly 260,000 people in 90 schools and emails the Israeli authorities with their exact locations twice a day. ?Why are the military decisions being made that are leading to these tragedies??

The Israeli general who heads a committee charged with investigating the civilian impact of ground operations said that he did not know the details of what happened in Jabaliya because the troops involved were still fighting and therefore had not been interviewed. Speaking on the condition of anonymity under military protocol, the general said in an interview that ?Hamas people were shooting at? a group of soldiers working to destroy a tunnel in the area. No Israelis were killed or wounded.

The New York Times emailed Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, a map of where the strikes hit and asked him to point out where Israeli forces were operating, and from where in the 200-yard radius around the school they saw enemy fire; he did not respond. Colonel Lerner and the general refused to say what ordnance was deployed.
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Asked whether artillery would be appropriate in such a situation, the general said ?the question is whether or not they were under great or imminent risk.?

?The sheer orders are you are not allowed to fire artillery or mortar shells into urban areas unless there are imminent risks for human lives ? meaning only if you are under deadly fire or under great risk,? he said. ?The orders are clear. But I find it very difficult to judge those fighters under fire and tell them, ?Look, please open your textbook and read out loud what we told you.? ?

It was a Tuesday when construction workers found it. The location was lower Manhattan and the year was 2010 ? nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that toppled the World Trade Center towers.

The workers were in awe. Underneath the black muck and ooze of the ruins lay an exoskeleton of something that hadn?t seen air for 200 years and, freshly exposed to the elements, was quickly deteriorating.

It was a vessel, 30 feet long. Hundreds of years old, the cargo ship had somehow been preserved 20 to 30 feet below street level ? below what had once been the tallest buildings on the planet. Pictures show baffled men clad in orange hovering around the ship like fossil hunters at an excavation.

?We?re trying to record it as quickly as possible,? Doug Mackey, a chief regional archaeologist for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, told the New York Times. ?And do the analysis later.?

Much of the analysis has now been done. Columbia University researchers laid out many of the ship?s secrets in a fresh study published this month in the journal Tree-Ring Research. And not only does the research show where the ship came from, but scientists say this ?rare and valuable piece of American shipbuilding history? helps shed light on how ships of that period were constructed.

The land upon which the World Trade Center was built was not always land. And New York City was not always New York City. In 1647, the Dutch West India Company built the first wharves in what was then New Amsterdam. After the British came to town and founded New York, some of the coastline and inland bodies of water were filled to create more land. Even back then, apparently, real estate in lower Manhattan was hot.

?Cheap and abundant fill materials such as rocks, earth and refuse were placed behind wooden barriers or within wood structures to create new land,? the study states. ?Earlier wharfs and abandoned merchant ships were often a component of the fill in newly constructed land.?

Sometime between 1760 and 1818, the study says, the land where the World Trade Center would stand was filled. ?The location where the ship was found had been infilled by the 1790s,? wrote the scientists, led by Dario Martin-Benito of Columbia?s Tree-Ring Laboratory. ?Our hypothesis is that the ship was built in the mid to late 18th century and was sunk, either deliberately or accidentally, less than thirty years later.?

But where was it built? And by whom?

The answers, researchers say, are in its wood. Applying the techniques of dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, the researchers homed in on what went down ? and where. ?What makes the tree-ring patterns in a certain region look very similar, in general, is climate,? Martin-Benito explained to Live Science. Local rain levels and temperatures, he said, dictate regional ring patters. The wetter the climate, the thicker the rings.

One major clue was the ship?s keel. It contained hickory, ?which greatly reduces the possible provenance to the eastern United States or to East Asia, the latter of which is unlikely.?

The most likely area: Philadelphia. Their research ?suggests that most if not all of the timbers used to build the ship came from the same forest in the Philadelphia area.?

That finding, researchers said, supports earlier theories that the ship, because of ?certain idiosyncratic aspects of the vessel?s construction,? had been built at a ?small rural shipyard rather than a large, established, and well-financed shipyard.?

It just so happens that shipbuilding was one of the most important industries at that time in eastern Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, where colonials constructed ships of similar size and makeup.

So what brought down the ship? The study said it sank at a lower Manhattan harbor only 20 to 30 years after it was built and may have made at least one trip to the Caribbean. But its ?short lifespan,? was perhaps due to ?hard use, repairs and shipworm infestation.?

?I don?t know much about the life expectancy for boats,? Martin-Benito told Live Science. ?But that doesn?t seem like too long for something that would take so long to build.?