The New York Times reports on Rotherham.
It starts with one victim’s account of how the grooming was done – it started with teenage boys flirting and then older men taking over and closing the doors of the trap.
The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.
She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.
She finally mustered the courage to tell her mother, right before her 14th birthday. The police came and took away bags of stained clothes as evidence.
But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.
“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed.
Well it always is the girl’s word against that of the men, isn’t it. Or it’s the boy’s word against the priest. It turns out that’s not actually a reason to throw up your hands and close the case.
The scale and brutality of the abuse in Rotherham have shocked a country already shaken by a series of child abuse scandals involving celebrities, public officials, clerics and teachers at expensive private schools. The Rotherham report suggests that it continues unchecked among the most vulnerable in British society.
Yet people go on defending their pet celebrity. Never mind that there are several accounts that describe a similar approach! Never mind that he’s been on a list of dudes to avoid for years! He’s our creeper, so shut up! Those women are all sluts, they must be.
…the report also outlined how those victims and parents who did ask for help were mostly let down by the police and social services, despite a great deal of detail known to them for more than a decade, including, in some cases, the names of possible offenders and their license plate numbers.
“Nobody can pretend they didn’t know,” Ms. Jay said in an interview.
Unimpeded, the abuse mushroomed. Over time, investigators found, it evolved from personal gratification to a business opportunity for the men.
So here’s a thought: don’t ignore the allegations. Investigate them.
Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”
In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12.
“These girls were often treated with utter contempt,” Ms. Jay said.
It makes me angry.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry. That’s all I can muster.
And fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore…
Um… I did leave a comment?
I don’t want to live on this planet any more…
This is critical. How and why were they lost? Who was personally responsible for this? What were the consequences for the loss? Are the consequences great enough to deter things like this from happening again? How do we functionally find out how the loss occurred and place it into context?
Without these things people are quite justified in distrusting authority figures from that culture of authority. Trust requires information that satisfies the above.
There are elements of this in the response to PZs post using sarcasm about the media’s response to Robin Williams’s death. The people complaining about casual use of depression and suicide were right to complain and I had my mind changed there. But there is a level where I seem to have to tell people that I don’t give a fuck for their special feelings for a celebrity if they are letting those feelings cause problems.
Now Williams was no harmful celebrity at all in this sort of context, and I do feel somewhat bad by the contextual comparison but feel that it’s relevant. But the way that people let feelings for celebrities shape their behavior is something that I find it hard to hide my disgust for. I’m still looking for “rhetorical magic bullets” for that particular monster.
This has been covered up for years by the police, the social services and child protection agencies in order not to compromise community cohesion.
It’s just another case of innocent people being sacrificed on the altar of diversity and multiculturalism.
Some Sikh girls were also abused by these Muslims and when the authorities ignored their complaints the Sikhs were forced to take action on their own and rescued the girls that were being kept in a brothel over a Pakistani owned restaurant. They had to go in and crack skulls.
It’s on the cover up that MUCH more light needs to be shed. The grooming practices and techniques have been known for years. The authorities and department chiefs that spent years squelching these abuses, so they need to be charged, tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
I bet you, as well, that knowledge of what was going on was widespread in Rotherham’s Pakistani community. I’ve read reports that between now and Christmas hundreds and hundreds may be hauled into court
Your first comment did go into the spam file, Nate, for reasons we can both probably guess (or maybe it was just a random glitch).
Yes, I wonder what role class plays in this utterly squalid, repugnant affair, that’s in addition to the usual institutional obsession with ‘racial harmony’ at any cost, of course.
What does it say about the state of the world that, from the title alone, I was expecting either (a) something about IS, or (b) something about threats tweeted to internet feminists?
I must say though, I’m a little suspicious of the claim that “they did not act for fear of being accused of racism”… Given what I know about the general behaviour and culture of the police in this country, it seems implausible – they never seem too afraid of “being accused of racism” when it comes to”stop and search”, or shooting people in debatable circumstances. I find it far more believable to think that it’s rather a question of being even more prejudiced against women and girls in general, and victims of sexual abuse in particular, than they are against anybody with slightly darker skin.
Knowledge of what was going on was widespread in Rotherham generally. My partner grew up there. Her mother grew up there. Her extended family still live there. It has been common knowledge that this has been going on for decades, and it has been common knowledge who the perpetrators were. And don’t think for a moment that Rotherham is in any way unusual. It’s only unique feature is that it has been finally made public. Oldham, Rochdale, Blackburn, Preston, Bolton, Bradford… this is going on everywhere where the same factors are present. It’s only a matter of time (one hopes) before a light is shone in those places too.
This is so much more than fear of being labelled a racist. This is deeply institutionalised misogyny alongside class based prejudice covered up with the excuse of fear of being labelled a racist. It seems like some of the police had the same view of those girls as the perpetrators did and it wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out some of them had been directly involved, i.e. buying ‘services’ from the perpetrators. Maybe the same police officers that ‘lost’ the bags of clothes – maybe the very reason they ‘lost’ them is because their DNA would have been found.
Treating sexual abuse as if it were purse-snatching or burglary is police lunacy. Departments are organized to process ‘cases’ as isolated events. The idea of doing the legwork involved in establishing patterns of behavior, or conspiracies of multiple perpetrators, is absolutely incompatible with police culture.
‘The Wire’ was inspired by the story of a Baltimore policeman who investigated drug murders by following the organization structure of the gangs. He closed a vast number of cases that had been written off after ‘normal investigation.’ His violation of standard operating procedure cost him his job.
That the victims were white, non-muslims may have played into racial correctness. But the apparent fact that they were poor, and plied with drugs and booze, makes them non-persons in police/law culture.
^THIS
I don’t believe for a second that these people were forced to be misogynist lest they be accused of racism. That smacks of blaming people who stand up to racism for these rapes continuing unabated, instead of the people who consciously let it happen.
The poor (I’m assuming mostly) white people wanted to help, y’all. Those bad ol’ social justice warriors wouldn’t let them. It’s scary to be called a racist. so scary that you’ll let little girls be raped to avoid it. /s
This makes me ill. I’m joining Nate off planet.