Aibu to think the parents of the Syria girls need to take a bit more responsibility?

[exmrs]

On the news today the parents are demanding an apology from the police as the police knew apparently a friend of theirs had already gone to Syria and the police didn't contact them.
I find it strange that they don't take a bit more responsibility to the situation.

Why didn't they know what was going on in in their daughters lives?
They are the parents and they seem to blame everyone but themselves or the girls.
To blame the police is ridiculous , the girls made the choice to go

Did the people saying YANBU actually tell their parents everything when they were a teenager? I certainly didn't.

The police need to work with the Muslim community to prevent as many young people as possible heading off to Syria.
Why is it the police's job to get involved within Muslim families? I'm certain the parents would have politely told them to mind their own business and that their children were good, obedient girls who would never do anything so foolish.

Religious extremism is based within closed communities, and its only those communities that can effectively tackle the problem. It's a bloody cheek when those communities fail to deal with it and then blame the police for not saving them from themselves.

That includes communicating effectively with them. A mistake was made, and it is right that that was acknowledged.
A trivial mistake in how a letter was delivered. A letter that would undoubtedly have been ignored anyway as being irrelevant to those 'safe' families.

The Muslim community, including parents and mosques, need to look at what they need to do as well.
Finally, you acknowledge the real problem. But please put it at the top of the list where it rightly belongs.

The police 1) told the school not to tell parents where the first "missing" girl had gone; 2) foolishly gave the letter about the first girl to the girl's friends and not their parents. They could and should have identified a danger to girls who were friends of girl 1, and as a bare minimum enabled parents to know that girl 1 had gone to Syria. There is an assumption by many on this thread that Muslim parents are blinkered and stupid. If told that their daughters' schoolfriend had been groomed and gone to Syria, I can't see any reason why they wouldn't have taken precautions over their own daughters. I suspect that more Muslim families will be doing this in future, after all this publicity.
We should not be writing off the Muslim community as "closed" with no right to any basic communication from the police. They have as much right to police assistance as any other section of the community. And they have as much right to complain about police mistakes. Doing so does not mean that they are not blaming themselves as well.
You have absolutely no reason to assume that receiving the letter would have made no difference. It very likely would have made some difference - eg the girls being spoken to and the passports being hidden. There's no reason to assume that after one Muslim girl has gone to Syria other Muslim families will assume that that risk does not extend to their own girls.

"Young people are allowed to travel alone, from much younger than those 3 were, under the airlines' own rules. There is no requirement on airlines not to allow them to travel, or to quiz them or report them."

Well, there SHOULD be. If a minor under 16 is to travel alone, a parent or guardian should be required to notify the authorities in advance, stating that they have permission and giving the reason for their travel. I am amazed that this is not the case!

Why 16? That's just an arbitrary age.

I'm sure that lots of children fly abroad every year - to stay with relatives, do foreign language exchanges, and so on. Our local airline requires children between 5 and 11 who travel unaccompanied to be looked after by a member of their staff, and they have to be accompanied to and from the airport. But from age 12 there are no rules - they can go to the airport on their own and fly on their own.

The police 1) told the school not to tell parents where the first "missing" girl had gone
Very sensible. No doubt they were making enquiries about connections with the first girl and could not risk alerting them by telling the school.

We should not be writing off the Muslim community as "closed" with no right to any basic communication from the police.
No-one has suggested writing them off. But the problem starts within the community and that is where the community should take action. The police are not resourced to go into every mosque and school, neither would they be welcomed if they tried.

I get it, but i feel so fucking sorry for them. I truly cant imagoine much worse than not knowing where your DD is, and suspecting they are with a woman abusing, murdering, and torturing sect.

its intretesting how much (not very well supressed) hatred there is towards islam, actually its really depressing

There is certainly a lot of hatred of British Muslims on this thread. Some posters are talking about the parents as if they are from some totally different species. We know where that line of thinking ends up.

I agree workplace.

Islam is unfairly suffering from the extremists' action. It's part of their philosophy to force a gap between Muslims and the other communities and create resentment between them, and we can see that it is working only too well.

That's why it is sad that there appears to be little action within the Muslim community to deal with the extremists within. I desperately hope that this can change, so that any resentment can be removed and the racists shown up for what they are.

This is far too wide and deep a problem to be resolved by (largely unwanted) probing by police.

Crossed with your last there vicar.
I disagreed with your previous posts but endorse every word in that last one.

Vicarscat my dh thinks it has a lot to do with a lack of identity or loyalty to this country. He thinks the UK is too soft with immigrants and thinks they should try harder to fit in. I should point out he is also an immigrant. I think he is quite an unusual case though. He and his whole family are well educated and widely travelled so perhaps he was raised with a different outlook on life. I certainly wouldn't have married him if he wasn't like that. Radicalization can happen in any family though. When his second cousin went to university he got in with a fundamentalist group. It was around the time of the invasion of Iraq. His parents were horrified because they aren't even strict Muslims. They worked very hard to get him away from those people. I think they succeeded in modifying him but it took a few years. They didn't go blaming anyone else but they rued the day he went to that particular university.

Puzzle - the parents have not joined "organisations like this."

I didn't say they had; the "victimhood" I referred to concerned their claims on behalf of the three girls - though also, admittedly, their many excuses for themselves

Lem - yes, similar here.

If you live somewhere abroad you need a degree of the attitude 'when in Rome' - so learn the language, attempt to understand the culture, history, society and laws, and bring up your family feeling part if the society in which you gave chosen to bring them up in. Even try the food that so many people complain about - although my relatives do adore good old shepherds pie, steak pie, mashed potatoes and fish and chips.

You shouldn't speak of the 'old country' as if its gods own land, and compare everything unfavourably with where you live now. I'm not saying kiss the queens photo every day and live in gratitude, but open your your mind and eyes to see the good and the bad, and try to understand. Understand that this society is multicultural - and that means you too. How can your kids even begin to feel part of the society if they are brought up to despise/ look down on it?

Superb post at 13:52:51 Sallyingforth ; it identifies exactly why it's so important that the few extremists should be challenged in every way possible

Let's not forget that the "vast majority" whose safety I've referred to includes the countless decent muslims who are no doubt just as appalled as everyone else - in fact maybe more so, if they feel events reflect unfairly on them. It's surely all the more reason for the community play a very clear leading role in dealing with the issue ...

I think posters are upset, angry and outraged. Scared too. Muslins are blaming the families as well, not just ukip muppets.

When I was about these girls' ages I had glamorous fantasies about the IRA.

That was because I came from an English family of Irish Catholic extraction and was a stupid child.

We didn't have the internet but I was groomed with tales of romanticism. I also knew what was going on but thought it was justified because I was a teenager who thought fighting for freedom, even thought it might end in a ditch with two bullets in the back of the head - and that's the best outcome - was justified.

I didn't run away to Belfast but if I had, I've no doubt that my parents would have been genuinely thinking WTF about my behaviour but they'd also have been asking why they hadn't been given every single bit of information possible.

They'd also have had more chance of getting my stupid arse back.

To the people who say they don't want them back: it's not a choice. They are British subjects. I don't think we should make special efforts to retrieve them but I also think that if they manage to make it back, we have to help them.

If they can be proved to have committed crimes, then we should try them and if convicted I'd be more than happy to see them serve time.

I think it was the blame game and yet with no signs of personal responsibility as to why they were attracted to isis and able to plot to get there etc.

If blaming police was part of wider picture, but media has only reported them as blaming police.

I also think the solicitors comment " what do we know of 15 year old girls, come on, how can we explain justine beiber" was woefully inappropriate thing to say when these young girls could be on the end of brutality as he spoke, or even dishing some out to the poor sex slaves, and women and children isis have captured. Rather different to a girl having JB pster on bedroom wall.

Limited even your dreams of joining IRA and all that violence are not on the scale of ISIS, and the horrific scenes we are seeing.

Sadly though, the extremists have more of a voice than the moderates. There was a march round here last year (they closed the road to accommodate it) - I'm not actually too sure what they were marching for as the chanting was in Arabic, but lots of the marchers were carrying signs saying "Our dead will go to heaven, your dead will rot in hell". For this a major London street is closed and a police escort provided which gives this whole thing a veneer of legitimacy and public endorsement.

I live in a very Arab area and I'm afraid I have seen this sort of thing but not the opposite. Obviously these are the extremists, and the moderates' voices are not heard. But they do need to be heard because even I, living here, don't hear the other story very much. I also work with quite a few Arabs who are frustrated that Arabs tend not to take a part in UK political life. The muslim MPs that there are are mainly of Pakistani extraction. Something about the Arab community inhibits this kind of role. It all plays into the problem that we hear the nutcases not the others.

So, fwiw, I don't think it's surprising that people form unfavourable views. There's a great deal of work to be done.

According to www.gov.co.uk, ISIL / ISIS became proscribed in June 2014, and the site has this to say:

Proscription makes it a criminal offence to:
Belong, or profess to belong, to a proscribed organisation in the UK or overseas
Invite support for a proscribed organisation (and the support is not, or is not restricted to the provision of money or other property)
Arrange, manage or assist in arranging or managing a meeting in the knowledge that the meeting is to support or further the activities of a proscribed organisation, or is to be addressed by a person who belongs or professes to belong to a proscribed organisation or to address a meeting if the purpose of the address is to encourage support for, or further the activities of, a proscribed organisation
Wear clothing or carry or display articles in public in such a way or in such circumstances as arouse reasonable suspicion that an individual is a member or supporter of the proscribed organisation

How the girls are dealt with (in the unlikely event they return) is another matter, but it appears a case could certainly be made that they've already become criminals, whether we like it or not

Tbh I feel the main theme of most of the posts I have read is not critical of the girls, it's their parents. I don't actually want to criticize the parents because there is a very high chance they will never see their daughters again. My message is that I strongly believe muslim parents must be vigilant about what ideas their children are exposed to and who they are mixing with. Perhaps my dh and I are ahead of the game because dh grew up in a country where fundamentalism was growing and his family were very against it, so they were careful about what their children were exposed to. Therefore it came naturally to dh to bring his kids up in the same way.
A couple of years ago my dh noticed our ds was watching videos about religious matters on you tube. Ds said it is because he wanted to know more about his religion. Dh was worried about the kind of things he could be exposed to. He arranged for a very educated Jordanian lady who teaches at our local university to give him weekly lessons so he knows he is getting the right message. Sorry to go on but I'm a bit fed up with people saying you can't know what your kids are doing blah blah. We are in the situation of raising muslim kids in a very difficult environment and we know it is possible to keep tabs on them and make sure they learn the right things about their religion. We also discuss things that go on in the world eg Charlie Hebdo to make sure they aren't hearing bullshit at school and on the internet.

The police have already made a statement saying that there is no evidence that the girls have been involved in terrorist activities and that they are not being treated as criminals

I'm sure you know that the police can choose to treat someone as a criminal or not, according to what's seen as the right thing to do at the time - it happens constantly, but it doesn't change the definitions on the government's own site, nor does it mean we have to agree with what they choose to do

And who's "tried and convicted" the girls?? Many posters have written quite openly about what they "seem" or "appear" to have done, but also accepted that action (if any) will have to wait until/if they return. Frankly there doesn't seem to be a lot we can do for them until then ...