Girls "left at mercy" of grooming gangs in Rochdale, England because of failings by senior police and council bosses, damning report says

Many or most will be U.K. nationals. But I often think about the fact that most were likely to have wives and children at home whilst they were out all night gang raping children.

And how many of these rapists have been given rights in the basis of their ‘family life’ in the U.K. and allowed to stay with wife and kids?

These kinds of reports make me think the only thing that will ever change this is a long hard campaign of direct action and violence by women against men.

Omg. Just watched the new night interview with Maggie Oliver. What they did to Amber. Absolutely mind blowing. Trying to recover her own children after THEY had framed her as a pedophile. Where was the most basic humanity?

There’s a woman called Ella who’s written articles and podcasts. She’s now a medical doctor and she speaks with quite a posh accent so whilst her family may well have been dysfunctional (not seen them mentioned) I would wager she certainly hasn’t had the typical adverse childhood experiences that many of the girls did. Her view is that it was raced based violence and she believes she was ignored because the police were insistent that white people can’t experience racism.

Call me cynical but something tells me this is coming back in to the headlines simply because these grooming gangs are based in Labour ran towns.

Of course it’s all still been going on, it always will do as well simply because those men genuinely believe they can do whatever they want to those girls. If there was any genuine will to eradicate such heinous crimes then swift tough far reaching action would have been taken years ago.

@duc748 She was brilliant.

Just watched. Maggie certainly didn't hold back, did she? 👏

I don't think this follows at all.

Different kinds of crime operate differently and are policed really differently. In this case, it's not sexual assaults by an individual, it's basically organized crime.

It's not at all unique for organized crime groups to be based on ethnicity, on the contrary it's very common, and understanding that is an important part of how police can move against these groups, because a lot of it has to do with establishing how the criminal enterprise is operating, the relationships and roles of the different people involved.

It is fraught now though, at a social level, to identify certain minority groups as having certain kinds of criminal gangs associated with the group. People know it is the case, but there are some real complications with the public face of it. Because it's not just about moving against individuals who happen to be whatever race, it's seen as targeting based on race, and also as implying that somehow members of that group are inherently immoral.

It's also worth considering that there may have been places where this was a factor in the failure to act, and other cases where it isn't really. There are people involved in trying to get the girls in Rochdale help who said that it was an issue there. But that doesn't mean it was part of what was going on in the next town necessarily.

The report on Newsnight tonight was jaw-dropping.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgkh/newsnight-who-wins-the-first-race-to-become-the-us-2024-republican-candidate

20:44 in

Julie Bindel's article about "Amber" whose story was used for Three Girls. The police tried to prosecute 16 year old Amber, a grooming victim, for being a pimp.

Rochdale victim: ‘I was groomed at 14, then the courts came for my children’ | Rochdale child sex abuse ring | The Guardian

I do think there is a larger cultural context here, which is that our society is very inconsistent around teen sexuality, and especially teen girl sexuality, in general.

The thing is we can't treat teens just like kids, they are starting to mature, and are interested in sex in many cases. So protecting them from becoming victims has to be done in ways that take that into account. Like actually teaching them what a healthy sexuality would look like, but also old fashioned things like not giving themselves away to cheaply. To modern ears that sounds horribly anti-sex and puritanical, but not putting value on themselves is a big part of what makes these girls vulnerable.

I think we are altogether to blase about underage sex, in terms of giving kids access to things like hormonal birth control and abortion, without parental involvement. The attitude described in several posts about seeing these girls as just expressing their sexual agency - that is exactly what many health care providers, including in schools, are taught about dealing with teenagers. They are not quizzing girls on their sexual choices, or worrying they aren't old enough to know what they are doing, they are just writing them a bc prescription.

I have a friend who was "groomed" as a 15 year old. Except the boy was only just 17, so not actually considered too old as such, and not sharing her around. Just abusive. She's now in her 40s very skeptical about much of the received wisdom around medical access for teen girls - she strongly feels that had her parents known she had two abortions that year, and eventually was on bc, they might have realized what was going on and intervened.

Of course this will probably be immediately rejected by many as anti-feminist thinking, as medical access for minors is considered something of a dogma, but I think when you look at how authorities treated these girls in terms of supposedly being in control of their sexual behavior, it's not so different in kind to how they are taught to treat sexual behavior in other younger teens.

The OP's link says that there are 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children. In Rochdale alone.

Why?

There are many teenaged boys, in my experience as a foster carer, all Pakistani or Bangladeshi, who were being trained up as pimps. They could pose as “boyfriends “ who inducted the girls through rape and later threats to families and carers, and the girls were passed on to the older men once their will had been broken. Even in secure accommodation, they receive letters from abusers in prison and yes, they wait for the girls . As carers you can’t lock these girls in, although one might want to. As always the fact that men and boys generally will look for younger girls is not acknowledged. And becoming 18 does not suddenly mean it is acceptable, or empowering.

Yes. We live in a Rape Culture where women and girls are nothing but tools for men.

That is so appalling. And the council dished out taxi licences to men convicted of sex crimes, WTAF? It only says one thing, doesn't it?

The root of the problem is very usually extreme misogyny in a male family member.

Even where there isn't and the family are loving, kind, sick with worry and reporting to the police, If the police are collecting evidence, corrupt or misogynist your kid is fucked.

Ok, Rethinking, thank you for pointing out that he is not known for being reliable. I had wondered as I hadn’t heard of him, but had thought that article appeared fairly even handed.

You're not the only one.

I think you were trying to address me. But I was making a specific point about how people are fixated on Asian grooming gangs to the detriment of investigating white men who are doing the same things - sometimes within the same gangs.

Fixating on race is harming all girls. The problem is misogyny.

Police officers have been collaborating with these gangs, I'm sure of it

There was an article about one particular victim whose abuse was in the Oldham report. The poor girl came to a police station to report sexual assault, and was told by the officer at the desk to go away, stop wasting police time, and to accept a lift home from some male members of the public who just happened to be at the station on unrelated matters.

Those helpful strangers she was told to go with, raped her. What kind of police officer tells a 12 year old girl to get into a stranger's car?

With respect, the article does a bit more than acknowledge the data wasn't there or that it can't be made up. It says it was not looked for or recorded.

"The sole definitive conclusion, cast amid a jumble of Civil Service sophistry, was that 'research has found that group-based CSE [child sexual exploitation] offenders are most commonly white'

The study had actually found no such thing. As Priti Patel pointedly acknowledged in her foreword: 'Some studies have indicated an over-representation of Asian and black offenders.
'However, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor. This is disappointing because community and cultural factors are clearly relevant to understanding and tackling offending.'
...

One other key area – the one Ms Patel was careful to highlight in her foreword – was the lack of hard data on the ethnicity of offenders. It was an issue Home Office aides kept using as a rationale for not drawing a clearer link to the predominance of Asian offenders found in countless high-profile grooming cases. But as one official explained: 'They were right, there wasn't any hard data. But that was because people didn't want to record it or look for it because they knew exactly what they would find.'"

Like I say, worth reading in full

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9070905/DAN-HODGES-reveals-inside-story-cover-abuse-young-girls.html

I’ve read that DM article and it does acknowledge that the data wasn’t there. The Home Office can’t just invent data.

If Said Javid had stayed at the Home Office, perhaps something could have been done about putting resources into getting the data. But that’s one of the problems with the constant stream of different ministers and the general UK government chaos of the past few years - no stability, leadership, follow up.

It still goes on now, they've only skimmed the top of the cream.

Drive through Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale and you see young girls getting into cars. Gangs of men having around street corners with young girls

Myself and my partner were driving through our very own Northwest town and seen young teens having around with grown men. We pulled up, called the police and waited. They were soon dispersed but I'm sure it'll happen again

We need to say it how it is. These are white, vulnerable children being targeted by southern Asian males. I followed a case in Rochdale and a grooming gang were sentenced, yet on release were welcomed back into the community like nothing happened. It's wrong, it's vile and the police and government need to come down heavily on these beasts

Did anybody watch a show on Channel 4 a few years ago where undercover cops posed as paedophiles? Apparently hundreds and thousands of men in the UK are considered to be a risk to children, however the resources were stretched so thin they were forced to only go after the few they knew they could nail. Highly uncomfortable viewing and really stayed with me for awhile.