Senior Police Scotland officer: systematic sexual abuse of children on scale of Rotherham not happening in Scotland

About a quarter of the 1,590 reported rapes last year were against children, he said.

There were 213 convictions under the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 where the victim was aged 13-15 and 87 convictions where the child was under 13 in 2012/13.

Last year, there were 151 convictions where the victim was between 13 and 15, and 57 convictions where the child was under 13 last year with more still being processed.

The Jay Report into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham detailed how at least 1,400 children were subjected to abuse including rape, violence and trafficking for sex in the South Yorkshire town between 1997 and 2013.

The charity Barnardos said Rotherham must be "a wake-up call" for Scottish forces, insisting that Scotland is similar to Rotherham in that there is no standardised reporting of child sexual exploitation that would give an indication of prevalence.

Speaking at Holyrood's Justice Committee, Mr Graham said: "A question I have been asked a lot is: is Rotherham happening in Scotland?

"The answer I give to that is: it depends what you mean by 'Rotherham'.

"There was such a large amount of information about the scale and prevalence of what was going on in Rotherham that so many people knew about, and the inference in the report is that there was active efforts for a long period of time to repress that.

"And if the question is: is that happening in Scotland? Absolutely not.

"There's absolutely nothing that has come to my attention of any large-scale or extensive co-ordinating group that are conducting child sexual exploitation on the scale described in that report, and if there had been we would be conducting investigations into it.

"However, if the question is: Is there child sexual exploitation in Scotland in the towns, cities and rural areas? The answer is yes.

"We know there is because we are investigating it, we're investigating it successfully in many cases, and we're increasingly understanding that the way to approach these investigations is by working more closely in partnership from the outset."

Police and prosecutors have announced that they intend to join forces with councils and charities in a new national child abuse investigation unit.

Mobile devices such as camera-phones, improved download technologies and sophisticated software to conceal activity have led to a rise in child abuse, Mr Graham said in a submission to the committee.

Many offenders are "resourceful, intelligent and sophisticated in their pursuit of online offending", he said.

The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said there are persistent barriers to prosecution, including a distrust of law enforcement agencies by vulnerable teenage girls who have been groomed for sex with cigarettes and alcohol, and may not realise they are being exploited.

MSPs welcomed the co-ordinated effort but said there needs to be more data on the extent of abuse in Scotland.

Mr Graham said a single data set featuring all of the offences where a child was the victim would be helpful.

"Last year there were 1,590 people reported that they were raped in 2013/14," he said.

"They didn't report that they had all been raped in those years, so some of them were historical.

"But of those 1,590 crimes a quarter of them were against children, which I think was a really big number of children reporting that they had been raped or people reporting that they had been raped as children.

"I think if we were to put together something that looked at all of the offences where children were the victims, whether of physical abuse, sexual abuse, child sexual exploitation, and look at that as one data set we would all have a much clearer picture of all the efforts that have been taken.

"Indeed, most importantly where we need to continue to learn and where the gaps are for the future."