Yes, it seems to me that they were alluding to people they perceive as “far right influencers” eg Tommy Robinson types.

You’ve literally referred to the “motives” you’re drawing from people’s posts several times.

There is too much hate on this thread for reason unfortunately.

I agree with you @Imnobody4, and I’m sorry if I’ve contributed to derailing. My point was that a couple of people decided that they had better experience of what was intended because they had had “similar training”. I said that I’d had Prevent training which disproportionately focussed on the “far right”. An example of an approved narrative I felt existed, which we also see in how discussions about grooming gangs, sexual violence by immigrants etc are managed. That’s all.

The issue that I have with the choice of scenario is that I can't think of a situation in which a teacher could confidently know that a rumour is without foundation without this being properly investigated, and so I consider the premise of the question to be flawed.^

Yes, this is the point of the thread.

However, I don't think it's at all accurate to suggest that governors were being taught to treat alleged abuse by particular groups as disinformation, as that very clearly wasn't the case.

Except that, in that question, they were being taught that. You can never safely dismiss abuse allegations as disinformation, misinformation, or a conspiracy theory.

If the staff governor had reporting overhearing kids discussing an EDL video claiming that Muslim grooming gangs are everywhere in the UK coming for white girls and the kids were sharing it to try to keep each other safe, that might be a different matter because the EDL are known racists and the claim is not specific to the area. Even then, the failsafe option is still to refer it to DSL, because there might be a new technology (e.g. an encrypted messaging platform) or legal loophole being adopted by gangs everywhere to facilitate grooming. But the scenario was talking about a local gang deploying specific, novel tactics. This can never safely be dismissed without investigation.

I think it was clumsily designed in a way that wasn't intended but had the potential for misinterpretation (and also deliberate misrepresentation).

I was not familiar with the Governor Hub training site as the school where I'm a Governor doesn't use it, but I had a look at their website and read the statement that they had put out in response to the telegraph article.

The scenario that was provided in the example was not given in the context of training governors on how to respond to allegations of sexual abuse or grooming or exploitation etc, which was covered in a completely separate section or perhaps in a different training session altogether. The focus of that section certainly didn't have anything to do with how schools or governors should respond to such concerns.

What it was intended to do was to help illustrate the difference between misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories, and participants were supposed to identify which of those three categories applied to a series of different scenarios. With regard to the question that has been scrutinised, the scenario stated that the teacher "knew" the rumours to be false but was aware that the children were circulating them to help keep each other safe. Participants were supposed to select "misinformation" because the information was known to be false but was not being circulated for malicious reasons.

The issue that I have with the choice of scenario is that I can't think of a situation in which a teacher could confidently know that a rumour is without foundation without this being properly investigated, and so I consider the premise of the question to be flawed. However, I don't think it's at all accurate to suggest that governors were being taught to treat alleged abuse by particular groups as disinformation, as that very clearly wasn't the case.

Referrals can come from a wide range of sources, and inevitably there will be people who don't understand what Prevent is for. Hence there are many referrals which are outside the scope of the programme and don't result in any intervention.

It is my understanding that referrals are individually risk assessed in order to decide whether or not they should be adopted by Channel. So there is already a process of assessing the threat and allocating resources accordingly. I'm sure that there will be individual instances of that process not working as it should, but the overall principle seems sound.

Apologies if I've misunderstood, but you seem to be saying that the far right shouldn't be the focus because they don't present a risk of terror attacks on UK soil? Please feel free to correct me if I've read that wrong.

There is too much hate on this thread for reason unfortunately.

I'm simply trying to understand what you're actually saying. You're the one that seems to be jumping to conclusions about the "motives" that you think I'm attributing. That's a shame as I was trying to have a civilised discussion. Oh well.

I do think we should be able to debate issues freely. I agree with you about first cousin marriage and personally I would make it illegal. Forced marriage is already illegal.

But there is also a huge amount of hate and violence aimed at innocent Muslims. And indeed, often aimed at non-Muslims who happen to be brown because people can't always tell the difference. Do you not think that they need to be protected?

There is a vast difference between having a reasonable debate about specific issues and showing outright hostility/aggression towards people who are (or are assumed to be) from a particular faith group. Perhaps having a legal definition would help to distinguish between the two?

I'm not whatabouting about anything. I just don't think it's helpful to focus on Pakistani grooming gangs to the exclusion of all others. Yes, it was dreadful that nobody did anything, but it wasn't unique. We have problems with our society turning a blind eye to abuse in general, and not only when the perpetrators happen to be Pakistani. Think of the open secret that was Jimmy Saville.

I'm not sure why you're asking about threads on MN deflecting from the rapes of Epstein and his cronies. I didn't make reference to any such threads. What I did say was that our society has allowed such behaviour to go under the radar, and even now, there seems to be very little accountability or transparency for the perpetrators.

It absolutely isn't about minimising what happened in Rotherham and elsewhere - we have to face up to the truth of what happened to those poor girls and we have to confront the difficult questions about the role which ethnicity and race may have played in those cases. These issues have been covered up for far too long, and of course, we need to understand exactly what happened and what went wrong. But at the same time, it would be stupid not to acknowledge that the failure to act in Rotherham is part of a much wider problem that we need to tackle as a society.

Have you actually read what I wrote? "I may be making [an assumption] in my interpretation of the incomplete facts I have read about this."

Before I scroll, is there a report on this from anywhere but the Telegraph?

No absolutely didn’t mean to address it to you.
I know your stance. I’m not interested in further musings of someone with zero experience of it.

I think you meant to address that to me. If so, please re-read my posts. I made it very clear that I wanted absolute transparency, accountability, justice and truth with regard to the grooming gangs, both in relation to the rapists themselves and in relation to those who were complicit because they failed to act. The fact that I want to acknowledge that these things occurred within a wider context of the abuse and exploitation of girls being allowed to continue in other situations does not mean that I want to cover up the specificity of the reasons in these particular cases. I want to look at the detail of these cases and the bigger picture. I do not believe that you could read and understand my posts and genuinely take from them that I wanted to "protect rapists", you just wanted to shut me down by trying to be deliberately inflammatory.

Have you actually looked into the detail of this, or have you just read the Telegraph article? I think the training was fundamentally flawed for the reasons that I have already outlined, but I don't agree that the implication of the training was that rumours which "sound racist" should be quashed. That isn't what the training conveyed at all.

If the Telegraph article had focused on the question of how the teacher could confidently know that rumour was false, then I would have agreed with it. I can't agree with the suggestion that governors were actually being taught to dismiss safeguarding concerns as misinformation, because the evidence just doesn't back that up.

I agreed with you until your last sentence. There was, in my opinion, an implication that may not have been intentional, that because the rumour sounded suspiciously racist, it must therefore actually be racist, and racism isn't permitted, so the rumour must be quashed. It is very easy for us lo make assumptions – and indeed I may be making one in my interpretation of the incomplete facts I have read about this.

It is often stated that when someone alleges abuse, we must believe them. In my opinion this isn't quite right (and dangerously so). I think it would be better ti say that when someone alleges abuse, we mustn't disbelieve them. We should take their words, and their feelings, seriously; we should not display doubt about what they are telling us; but we are very rarely in a position to judge the truth of the allegation. Safeguarding means taking action to lessen the chances of [further] abuse, and reporting the allegation as appropriate to safeguarding leads (and it may need reporting to police). It does not mean taking sides when there are two conflicting stories; it does sometimes mean taking active measures to prevent the alleged abuser from being in a position to abuse.

I didn't make anything up. There are absolutely far right voices trying to push the narrative that this kind of abuse is predominantly perpetrated by Muslim men. If you haven't come across that narrative, then I'm glad to hear it. Sadly, I've come across quite a lot of it.

That doesn't mean that I think anyone who is disturbed by what happened in Rotherham and want the truth/justice/accountability etc are racist for feeling that way. Of course they aren't, and I share their feelings completely. But there are some racists who are more than happy to exploit the trauma that these poor women experienced to promote their own agenda.

I don't think we are really disagreeing - I would like to see justice for the grooming gang victims as much as anyone. I want to see justice for all women who have been sexually abused and exploited, regardless of the perpetrators.

Re JP - yes, there may be a conflict of interests, and as I say, she should step away if her involvement is going to get in the way of the inquiry. It had been my understanding that no steps had actually been taken to broaden the scope of the inquiry, and that this was merely a question included in the consultation with survivors as different views had been expressed. It was also my understanding that the women who were supporting Philips were survivors of the grooming gang abuse. However, there is so much conflicting information out there about this that it is hard to know what to believe, and I may well have got this wrong.

I’ve explained my perspective, and my reason for bringing it up. You do seem to be focussed on imagined “motives” rather than what people are saying.

Prevent is about ideology, and that includes both right wing and left wing ideology as well as religious ones. However, the number one credible threat to the security of the UK and its people is and always has been (after the Good Friday agreement) Islamist terrorism as the report was clear on and the government acknowledged. Yet most referrals are either not based on ideology (and aren’t taken up) or they are “far right” indicative that there is still a problem with people not understanding the focus of the programme which is to prevent terror attacks on British soil.

This is something of a derail, but my intention was to make the point that there is often an “approved narrative” that applies to these training sessions, such as my Prevent one. To me, this seems like an example of same.