A mother has told millions of TV viewers how she was repeatedly raped at gunpoint by 10 masked teenagers, who then poured chemicals all over her body to clean up any evidence.

The 35-year-old also said that during her three-hour ordeal she was forced to perform sex acts on her 12-year-old son before the thugs fled, taking with them cash, jewellery and mobile phones.

After they left, the woman said she and her son sobbed in the bathroom because they were too shocked to move. Then, in the middle of the night, they walked a mile to the hospital because they had no phone to call for help.

Some of the chemicals went in the boy's eyes, leaving him blind but his sight has now returned.

The case, in Dunbar Village in Florida's West Palm Beach, has horrified America and led to angry calls for a clampdown in towns and cities ridden by drug crime.

Two boys, Avion Lawson, 14, and Nathan Walker, 16, have been arrested and will be charged as adults in the assault and gang rape. They are in jail without bail. Eight others are being hunted.

Lawson's DNA was found in a condom at the crime scene, and he admitted involvement, authorities say. Police say Walker's palm print was found inside the home, but he denies being there.

The woman said that on the night of the attack, she was lured outside by a teenager who knocked on the door and said her car had a flat. Nine more teens, their faces hidden with T-shirts, barged in, she said. They brandished guns and demanded money, then raped her.

"I was so scared," she said. "Some had sex with me twice, some three times. They're beating me up. They make me do those things over and over."

She and her son had arrived in America seven years ago after fleeing Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in search of a better life. With no money, they landed in Dunbar.

But the two almost instantly became targets for crime, standing out as Haitians among the mostly American-born blacks in the barracks style public housing blocks.

Three in five households in the area are below the poverty line.