Met Police set to reopen 9,000 cases in major London grooming gangs probe

Someone said on the thread, sarcastically, that maybe they have taken all the police off investigating hate crime to work on this, to free up enough police -but this is the problem - the Gov made saying or tweeting something that could be deemed racist as hate crime - a CRIME, so which police person or social worker is going to say let’s concentrate on Pakistanis, or it’s mainly run by Pakistani men - NONE as it can be deemed a racist comment (as can be seen on here whenever anyone says anything about any minority group that isn’t flattering its ‘racist’) and they’d be sacked or sent on training courses -so one of the reason all this horrendous abuse is partly thanks to all you ‘kind’ inclusive types and MPs yelling racism at every suggestion of wrong doing by a minority and the hate speech law.

I completely agree with you on institutional failures and the purpose of discussing this is again to understand why the failure was so large. We do know that in the cases found Pakistani men are overrepresented. This is just true. Why that was case is a reasonable question.

The point is today, right now the focus is on grooming gangs and institutional failures in this specific type of offence. I think London is different because the Met have basically admitted they were too focused on the drug running aspect and thats why they didn’t bother. We also don’t know what the offender profiles look like.

The current mess around the enquiry has brought ethnicity around because Jess Phillips clearly tried to sabotage this enquiry from the beginning and theres a reasonable suspicion that it was to either soothe a particular community for votes or there are labour aligned people they don’t want to be looked at too closely.it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. Either way Labour have managed to shove the muslim community back into the spotlight.

The powers that are be are doing their damndest to make sure we don’t talk about race as far as I can see.

You are correct but in the Rotherham and West Yorkshire cases the Casey report noted’ a higher proportion id the perpetrators from a Pakistani back ground’ she also stated that ‘two thirds of sexual abuse cases did NOT have the their ethnic back grounds recorded’ and this fundamentally needs to change if our institutions are to investigate and understand the cultural levers that drive these heinous acts regardless of race.
I suspect that the institutions at the time could see a pattern arising and their ‘omissions’ to collect data contributed to ‘muddying’ the water.
Time and again, those who should have been shielded from harm were left unprotected, victims of an institutional indifference that is both shocking and heartbreaking. Prosecutions can not come soon enough.

Exactly this.

The children home in Wrexham. Few ever found accountable.

"North Wales child abuse scandal - Wikipedia" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Wales_child_abuse_scandal

The inquiry was always supposed to be about grooming gangs. You seem completely unaware of its purpose. Starmer didn’t want to have it, his hand was forced. This is because of public pressure. It was inevitable that the “scope would be widened” because that’s how the government (successive ones, both Tories and Labour) have deliberately and cynically framed it so the mostly Pakistani grooming gang phenomenon isn’t focused on.

As I and others have said, you have zero clue about this issue, which you’ve demonstrated on a number of threads, so please give the pompous lecturing a rest.

It’s the “sole focus” because there’s been a massive fucking cover up.

Well, let me tell you - it absolutely does happen in other countries.
Tragically.

This kind of things doesn’t happen in other countries

Oh please. It happens worldwide.
But I would agree we seem to operate under the delusion that our nation's attitude towards women is beyond reproach. With an underlying suggestion that it's only 'johnny foreigner' that abuses/disrespects women and girls. Which is patently absurd.

I admit I don’t follow world news all that religiously but I haven’t heard of a country that has a multitude of sexual scandals involving the exploitation of children across pretty much every sector from the highest of the high to the everyday working class Joe.

You think this doesn't happen in the Middle East or any other country?
Really?!

The answer to your question is nothing. People will just hand wave it all away by blaming Pakistani immigrants and not looking at how British culture specifically is so fundamentally broken that it sees young girls as ripe for sexual abuse. This kind of things doesn’t happen in other countries, we like to think we are so civilised in comparison to places like the Middle East but the truth is we just try to hide our barbarism better.

What because we're stupid?
We can acknowledge there is an issue with Pakistani gangs of men grooming children. And that culturally some have little respect for women and girls. That is undeniable. What we're suggesting is that it has become the sole focus for many people when discussing child sex exploitation in this country. Which allows the powers that be to claim that the issue is just racist rhetoric. Frankly Pakistani grooming gangs are just the tip of the iceberg. Our Governments and institutions are failing vulnerable children from all predators. Mainly girls and young women...but boys too.
If we have MP's who believe that girls are trash and are basically asking for it then we've got to go back to basics.
What are we going to do about the deeply ingrained misogyny (and classism) rooted in this country?

Yes absolutely, this is one of the problems with cousin marriage. I think some families normalise the despicable. I remember one story where a girl was regularly raped by a man and then his own son who would show up in his school uniform.

I don’t think a lot of white women understand the utter contempt they are held in by some men from ethnic minorities. I’m sorry but it’s true.

I agree we have to focus on victims but part of that is giving full justice to victims and full accountability. We know that in a lot of cases the ethnicity of the offenders was provided as a reason for why people were not brought to book. We know that institutions prioritised what they saw as racial harmony over children. The Met have basically admitted that when it came to grooming in london they were more interested in drug offences so they basically weren’t fussed about child abuse.

It’s not about stigmatisation of the Pakistani community, it’s about understanding the scale of the problem and how our institutions failed to take action for decades even though they knew. We can’t protect women and girls if we refuse to confront issues truthfully and honestly, we end up back at square one.

Look how much damage TRA’s did because so many struggled to articulate the simple truth that anyone who has or has ever had a penis is a man. Sometimes someones cultural background will inform their attitude to women.

When I read about what was done to these children I literally stopped caring about anything else to do with the cases. We must centre the victims and listen to them without prejudice and without a veneer of “don’t be sounding like a racist now”. I have to keep qualifying my posts with “oh and I’m brown” just to make it clear that this is not coming from a place of racism. It’s coming from a place of concern that we have a system that will sacrifice children, just kids to make sure that everything ticks over and people continue voting for the right people and no-one gets upset. It makes me feel sick that our society is so corrupt that this could happen.

Anyone claiming that Muslim grooming gangs are a racist myth needs to read this paper. It's no myth.

Paedophiles seek each other out and form gangs. I still remember the terrible case of Jason Swift. But they need to identify each other, which is risky.

OTOH if it's common for men in a specific cultural community to believe white girls in care are fair game and many men who share that view are in the night time economy it creates a perfect storm.

Looking at those men of Pakistani origin convicted of child rape, it was striking how many were related to each other. Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't think this is a common feature in white paedophiles.

Well, thats no accident.

The reason people are disagreeing with you is the fact that Casey raised as an issue. The survivors have also said it was a factor and they were told to try not to mention it.She also said a narrow scope into this specific type of offending needed dto be looked at due to the particular institutional failures. Now the offender demographics in London may be different. We don’t know. But the idea of widening and widening what is a very specific focused look at a very specific problem means we dilute the meaning of this.

Posted on the Sadiq Khan thread just now by @SidewaysOtter

From this evening’s Times (share token) - it’s the headline: https://www.thetimes.com/article/f9cc0cc0-826a-4b03-8b33-dfb8ea27fed7?shareToken=6b60f4463e735b046509b8448b04c730

Ah, Rochdale. Where those girls were treated like pieces of meat and no one in authority thought to stop it.

yes. given that there is convincing evidence that many men will commit rape if they feel they can get away with it, the most simple solution to preventing men from raping children where their identities are well known would seem to be to arrest them and put them in prison as a matter of routine, because what they are doing is against the fucking law, even if everyone involved thought it was all sunshine and kittens

I'd love someone to explain why this approach was not taken in Rochdale for example

Quite. My feeling is that unless he can prove he had very good reason to believe the child was old enough (i.e. they showed him a convincing fake ID), any man having sex with someone under the age of consent should automatically be arrested for raping a minor and imprisoned. They should then be placed on the sex offenders list for life. And any police officer who does not immediately arrest a paedophile caught assaulting a child should be charged with aiding and abetting, and should face the same or even longer sentence. This should be also be applied retrospectively. I would think the rapes would start to decrease fairly quickly. Best of all, as I understand it, this is actually already the law so we wouldn't even need to faff about writing a new one. Just tell the police to do their fking jobs and start protecting the victims, rather than the criminals.

You must understand, Mayor Khan had many priorities. Imposing 20mph speed limits all round the North and South Circulars and extending the ULEZ zones have been super high priority. Now, as MN always says, we can worry about more than one problem at a time. This is true. Nevertheless, the real question is in the list of priorities where does to rape of children and the investigation and conviction of that crime rank?

I happened to be in hospital recently with a woman who was probably the last person I expected to speak positively of Mayor Johnson. She spoke at length about his commitment to children in London and trying to avert their fate at the hands of gangs.

She quit her job several months into Khan’s tenure because he had no level of commitment to this vital program.

Now, I’m no fan of either Mayor and this was one woman’s account. But I’m pondering that conversation today and have to ask where Mayorial priorities lie today.