to need the mathematics of Rotherham explained to me

[mydoorisalwaysopen]

So, the population of Rotherham is 258000 of which ethnic minorities make up about 8% most of which are Pakistani/Kashmiri. So that's 20640 of whom about half must be women and of the males it must be in the region of half that are children. So that's about 5000 men.
1400 girls and children were raped and abused by multiple men. Does this not mean that practically every Pakistani/Kashmiri family in Rotherham must be wondering if the men in their family are among the abusers?

AIBU to need someone to explain to me why this is not the case?

While I'm on numbers, 5 men jailed most of whom would have been kids themselves when the abuse started.

Because most abusers will have had multiple victims. If they abuse 20 girls over several years then suddenly only 70 abusers are needed for the number of victims.

Disclaimer, I have no idea what the actual numbers are, this is just an illustration.

One man called ASH had 18 known girl friends.

In the panorama documentary it also said abusers outside the home will more then likely be practicing abuse inside it as well.

yes that does make more sense.

Plus people from outside Rotherham were involved

Sex offenders are very prolific. Tragically it has a low rearrest rate because it is so under-reported and prosecuted.

"Does this not mean that practically every Pakistani/Kashmiri family in Rotherham must be wondering if the men in their family are among the abusers?"

I doubt it because you don't, do you? That's the sort of thing that happens in other people's families. If you knew 2 people in your street were sex offenders, you'd be looking at all the neighbours and wondering which ones, but you wouldn't be thinking it might be your own son/husband, unless of course you knew he was an abuser because of his behaviour at home.

Yes the girls were taken to other towns and cities where they were abused by men from those places. This often happens in this kind of exploitation.

By the way, Rotherham is not unique. The only unique thing about Rotherham is that the extent of the abuse is now known about. I don't believe that there is anything different about the actual extent of the abuse in Rotherham compared to other places.

I'm a social worker (not in Rotherham, and not in front line children's services) with extensive experience in these issues, from various locations.

Selks, the "problem" in Rotherham seems to have been that everyone was so busy not wanting to upset race relations that they felt they couldn't properly investigate because of the ethnic group the perpetrators were from. I apologise if I'm putting this clumsily, don't mean to offend anyone, but is that a fair assessment?

In your experience, is this kind of abuse more common in some ethnic groups than others?

I will watch the documentary on catch up. I expect it to show that wherever there are vulnerable children there are men that will exploit and abuse them. Did it suggest there was a particular cultural problem that makes Pakistani men more likely to do this than men from any other background? The extent of abuse in all areas of life seems staggering to me.

If the Rotherham victims were trafficked around the country then there must be many many perpetrators as well as the original abusers.

The abusers had multiple victims, not all of the abusers were from Rotherham.

And, as others have said, Rotherham is by no means unique.

Yes the girls were taken to other towns and cities where they were abused by men from those places.

But they were taken to other places by men from Rotherham who had already abused them. So sort of irrelevant to OP's question really.

Yes the men each abused many girls and the 1400 was over 16 years, so the number of abusers in Rotherham would be lower than you might think at first. Even if it was just 100 abusers (I don't know the numbers but suspect it would be much higher) That would be an average of 14 girls each.

100 abusers in a town the size of Rotherham is still very shocking to me. The fact that they seem to be all from an ethnic minority is even more shocking and worrying. Why is this?

"The fact that they seem to be all from an ethnic minority is even more shocking and worrying. Why is this?"

This gets to the heart of the problem of why it wasn't dealt with. Because the perpetrators were from an ethnic minority the authorities involved were scared that they would be seen as racist for targeting them. It is absolutely nothing new. There was a programme in 2004 called 'Edge of the City' about social work in Bradford which touched on grooming of white girls by Asian men. It was very controversial at the time and the BNP tried to cash in on it to raise racial tensions (bearing in mind this was relatively soon after the race riots of 2001 in Bradford). The problem just seems to have been pushed under the carpet, and now it is coming out. So far we have had large cases in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and Rotherham. It would be foolish to think there are not more.

There is widespread outrage about abuse by priests, and (rightly) condemnation of the response by the church to these issues, yet it seems very controversial to question Muslim leaders why this has been allowed to carry on. What is it about their communities that let this happen? Whilst there is obviously the issue of this being seized upon by racists to demonise Muslims, the difficult questions do need to be asked.

There's a class aspect to this as well

'Little chavs out on their own at night, would do anything for drink and ipads, not victim victims' sort of mentality

The Pakistani population of Yorkshire/Humber as of 2011 was 225,892.

Sorry my post was off topic a bit - I got distracted by the explanations of why these allegations weren't followed up. Excuse me!

Abuse isn't exclusive to Muslim communities (obviously) but unfortunately the culture of shame allows abuse to flourish both internally and externally. Muslim victims of sexual abuse who go to the police are ostracised for "bringing shame" on the community and usually their entire families are shunned whilst the community continues to support the attacker. Because of this families encourage victims to keep quiet for the "family honour".

I will bet good money that whilst the police were ignoring white victims of these perpetrators, the Muslim victims were too afraid to even come forward for fear of being shunned or even targeted by their communities. Many charities who support Muslim dv victims confirm that this is the case. I imagine this environment encourages those who would abuse to act in the full knowledge that they can do so with impunity.

7Days, I completely agree that there is both a classist and misogynist aspect to this. Definitely an attitude that the "dirty little slags weren't worth the time" as one victim's mother put it.

Here's a BBC report on 'The Edge of the City' from 2004.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3602854.stm

As you can see, the BBC suggests that the documentary has a duty, not to protect the children, but to be more respectful of the sensibilities of the city's Pakistani community.

I don't think it is so much that the BNP cashed in, but that much of what the BNP were saying (and have said for years) was true but was politically unacceptable, e.g., Nick Griffin and Mark Collett were prosecuted for saying (among other things) that Asians were raping white girls in the Bradford/Rotherham area, it has repeatedly been seen as more important to respect racial sensitivities than to face up to inconvenient truths about the Pakistani community.

I don't understand the racism angle.
How can we have the police, on the one hand, afraid to confront Pakistani because they don't want to seem racist but, on the other hand, they do disproportionate stop&search on the black community.

As an aside, can we try and keep a sense of geography when talking about these issues please?

One poster has referred to "the Bradford/Rotherham area" - there IS no such area. They are completely different places. One a large city, one a large-ish town, some hour-and-a-half's drive from each other, in different counties.

Yes, some of the abusers travelled from one place to another, but this doesn't make them the same place.

It's also been said that "The Pakistani population of Yorkshire/Humber as of 2011 was 225,892" - you are aware that Yorkshire is the largest county in England by some stretch, and is in fact made up of a number of separate counties?

Some posters seem to be viewing "The North" as one mass, when in fact there are several towns and cities all with their own issues, all with their own problems. Leeds, for example, is a world away from Rotherham. As Harrogate is a world away from Hull.

Indeed Aga. Though that is a review rather than news report so I guess is a personal opinion rather than editorial line, it does show the way this issue seems to have been approached over the last decade.

And of course the BNP were trying to cash in. That they were using truths to do so doesn't change that. Exaggeration, half truths, extrapolation etc are all part and parcel of the xenophobes arsenal. And by using the abuse of these girls for political purposes they probably made the services involved even more more wary, which could be part of why the abuse has carried on.

Here are the LAs of the UK with Pakistani populations in excess of 2%:

Bradford 106,614 20.4%
Slough 24,869 17.7%
Luton 29,353 14.4%
Birmingham 144,627 13.5%
Blackburn 17,801 12.1%
Redbridge 31,051 11.1%
Rochdale 22,265 10.5%
Waltham Forest 26,347 10.2%
Oldham 22,686 10.1%
Kirklees 41,802 9.9%
Newham 30,307 9.8%
Hyndburn 7,548 9.3%
Manchester 42,904 8.5%
Wycombe 13,091 7.6%
Pendle 15,320 7.1%
Calderdale 13,904 6.8%
Burnley 5,924 6.8%
Watford 6,082 6.7%
Peterborough 12,078 6.6%
Derby 14,620 5.9%
Woking 5,682 5.7%
Nottingham 16,771 5.5%
Hounslow 13,676 5.4%
Walsall 14,289 5.3%
Bury 9,002 4.9%
Middlesbrough 6,811 4.9%
Brent 14,381 4.6%
Sandwell 13,952 4.5%
Reading 6,967 4.5%
Ealing 14,711 4.3%
Bolton 12,026 4.3%
Barking & Dagenham 8,007 4.3%
Crawley 4,548 4.3%
Stoke-on-trent 10,429 4.2%
Sheffield 21,990 4.0%
Glasgow 22,405 3.8%
East Renfrewshire 2,779 3.1%
Merton 7,337 3.7%
Hillingdon 9,200 3.4%
Dudley 10,339 3.3%
Harrow 7,797 3.3%
Wandsworth 9,718 3.2%
Oxford 4,825 3.2%
Preston 4,425 3.2%
Trafford 7,027 3.1%
Aylesbury Vale 5,408 3.1%
Leeds 22,492 3.0%
Croydon 10,865 3.0%
Coventry 9,510 3.0%
Rotherham 7,609 3.0%
Windsor & Maidenhead 4,238 2.9%
Stockport 6,673 2.4%
Leicester 8,067 2.4%
Newcastle 6,364 2.3%
Tameside 4,910 2.2%
Newport: 3,127 2.1%
Bedford 3,270 2.1%