While the authorities failed to protect them
I’ve written about the grooming gangs many times over the years. It’s a very large and very horrible subject.
Today in the Telegraph:
How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.
A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.
I take it “local review” means smaller review with smaller audience that will draw less attention and create less of a fuss. Well why do that? Why not draw more attention and more of a fuss? (This is apparently why Musk is weighing in. I still think he’s the wrong guy to do any weighing in, for a lot of reasons.)
Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.
Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.
Those dribs and drabs are why I’ve written about it so many times. I guess dribs and drabs can be shrugged off as local aberrations.
The Telford Inquiry found particularly brutal threats. When one victim aged 12 told her mother, and the mother called the police, “there was about six or seven Asian men who came to my house. They threatened my mum saying they’ll petrol bomb my house if we don’t drop the charges.”
Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.
Sigh. This is one reason I keep pointing out the relentless tedious touchy-feely use of “communniny” to bully everyone into blind obedience. It’s such a cuddly word – but not all “communities” are cuddly. The Nazi community was a bit rough, the Ku Klux Klan community was brusque, the rapist community is a nuisance to women and girls. If you call it the “Asian community” you’re implying that all this rape is a gemütlich family affair, a little horsing around among friends.
And above all, there was the concern over community relations: senior council staff were terrified that the abuse of children “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”.
So a few more children thrown into the fire every week to keep the dragon pacified.
Even now, discussing primarily Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs as primarily Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs causes problems; IPSO waded in to censure Home Secretary Suella Braverman for this claim last year, citing deeply flawed Home Office research in its ruling. Yet if we can’t be honest about the problems we’re facing, we won’t be able to address them.
In the words of Guy Dampier, a researcher at The Legatum Institute think tank: “The rape gangs scandal was a product of multiculturalism, which in practice meant the authorities turning a blind eye because victims were mostly white and their abusers largely ethnically Pakistani.”
It’s not evil to want to avoid being racist. It’s not evil to worry about prosecuting underdogs. On the other hand it’s pretty clueless to see men as underdogs and the young girls they rape as overdogs.
As shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick recently wrote in these pages, “a national inquiry is just the start: we need justice for the victims”. In his words, “this appalling scandal continues today because perpetrators still walk free and the officials who covered it up have been let off. The individuals who turned a blind eye to these crimes – and fed the most vulnerable women to the wolves – should be in jail.”
I expect this story is going to run and run…
Great analogy.
Sounds a lot like the situation with trans.
Talking about the perpetrators as “Asian” or even specifically “Pakistani,” hides and euphemises another taboo characteristic: that the Pakistani male sex abusers are largely Muslim. This is not just “cultural” difference; it’s driven by religion, a particularly backward, sexist, abusive, and violent religion. They don’t fear speaking out merely because of a race riot or race war. They fear jihad, religious fanatical war. They can’t stand being called a name, “islamophobe,” so they let violent rapists carry on.
Yes, religious sacrificing of children to satisfy the lust of the perpetrators, and pacify their threats of jihad if they are held accountable. It’s the Danish cartoon cowardice all over again, but with girls as the casualties.
Seems of a piece with the Post Office scandal.
Massive, ongoing, systemic injustice; lives destroyed (including some suicides), and the gov’t just ignored it for years–decades. Dealing with it would have inconvenienced or embarrassed powerful people…so they didn’t…
“Post Office scandal.”
Can you link to something that explains what country’s Post Office & some of the details?
Jim, the country is the UK, and Wikipedia has an overview.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
To add to tigger’s –
Mr Bates V The Post Office is an excellent 4 part dramatisation of the scandal, staring Toby Jones as Mr Bates.
Quite probably because a national inquiry would cost more money. The present government has inherited an exchequer drained of funds over many years of Tory misrule. So-called Brexit (leaving the EU) has certainly been damaging; likewise the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, whose economic policies, in just a few weeks, put the pound into a nose-dive.
I watched a little bit of Mr Bates V The Post Office and couldn’t stand to continue, it was so hideously sad and unfair and monstrous. I’m a wimp about stuff like that.
@Nightcrow:
While you can fairly point to the issues that you do, you are not mentioning the rather large elephant affecting the ability of the current government to borrow and spend, namely covid. The cost of covid lockdown meant that UK government debt jumped from ~ 75% to 100% of GDP.
One can argue about the merits and demerits of halting large swathes of the economy via lockdown, but we will now be paying for it for a generation.
Yes of course, the economy. Far better to just lose a chunk of the population, ‘twouldn’t do to reduce profit margins.
The Chilcot Inquiry investigaing the Iraq War cost 13 million GBP over the course of eight years. That was about 0.1% of the normal UK budget contingency reserve which was inflated by a factor of 25 when it was necessary to address COVID.
My reading of those figures is that even a particularly legally intensive inquiry would be unlikely to burn through the normal, annual contingency reserve in much under a decade.
That’s the position taken by much of the US government….and the government of Nebraska, where I worked at the time. My employer was the worst; they re-opened face-to-face classes months before the other schools did.