To ask what has gone wrong in the UK

[Mumof56]

I'm talking about the latest sex grooming case in Newcastle. It's the seventh large scale sex gang scandal to hit the UK after cases from towns including Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Bristol

I have seen nothing on mumsnet about this (although maybe I've missed it). This is shocking and outrageous. How has this been allowed to happen in so many areas? What is the solution?

This is "rape culture". Where are the (peaceful) protests and the show of support for these girls?

We won't get nowhere until people stop moaning every time we bring up male violence. It's a fucking epidemic within our society yet as soon as we try Talk about it, it's all wahhhhhhh not all men.

It's counterproductive and offensive to group men as a single abusive class. They are not.... All you do is invite criticism that you're generalising unfairly and in so doing diverting attention from the issue.

Imagine if you posted that there was a problem with all Asians because certain Asians have been responsible in some of these high profile cases. You'd rightly be called out for racism!

I grew up in an area with a high percentage of British-Asians, my secondary school was 50% British-White, 50% British-Asian, mainly children from Bangladeshi backgrounds, but with some Pakistani and a handful of Indian heritage children too.
The sexual harrassment, sexual abuse, sexual assaults, and near-date-rape I have experienced (sadly I have experienced all these, seems pretty standard- I am a white British, MC, economically active, well-educated, comfortably-off woman in my 40s) has all been perpetrated by White British males. I was never once harrassed or slut-shamed by classmates, and that sort of behaviour just wasn't the norm at school.
But then, that was pre-internet age, pre-mobile phones, etc.

Some fantastic posts on this thread, thank you all who are discussing and debating intelligently.

Bertrand, if sex could only be consented to while sober, I'd be a 46 year old virgin.

This is Britain. We have a drinking culture. We don't chat each other up in coffee shops, we do it in bars.

Drinking and sex are inextricably linked and it's best to work generally with this, not against it.

To ask what has gone wrong in the UK

I don't think anything has 'gone wrong'...

On the contrary things are 'going right' in so far as this abuse is now beginning to be effectively tackled. All the indications are that this abuse has been there for generations, probably for ever, so nothing's got worse. Do you genuinely think after all the recent scandals (Catholic priests, Australian migrant children, Saville) that this is a recent phenomenon?!

Obviously there are degrees of sobriety. I was on a night out a few years back and a friend of mine got uncontrollably drunk, she could barely stand. We hustled her into a taxi and took her home but what really disturbed me was not one but two separate men trying to 'dance' with her when she was visibly out of it. She would probably have gone home with either of them if we hadn't intervened, but she was demonstrably incapable of giving consent. It's depressing to think men would want to use women in this disgusting, criminal way.

Where are the (peaceful) protests and the show of support for these girls?

But we seem to have a police force that is treating this issue very seriously and being successful in prosecuting these gangs.... so i'm not sure how standing with a placard on a street corner really help anything or cause anything to change. If you want to support, I'd do something practically useful like get involved with the NSPCC or a local rape crisis centre.

Can we just remind ourselves that one investigation confirmed that fear of racism was an issue

If you're referring to the Jay Report I'm afraid that trying to minimise the results simply won't wash. As I'm sure you're aware, this was a lengthy, wide ranging and extremely painstaking effort which encompassed evidence from a huge number of agencies, victims and more

I think women from every cultural back round should come forward and condem what happened. Also ban sharia law for all those poor women who have to go and ask the elders (all men) for a divorce against there abusive husbands

Oh, something I meant to say earlier. Re "I have seen nothing on mn about this". There have been a lot of very quickly filled threads on the yewtree investigation and then CSA in general, they are in "in the news" now, but started in chat.

coconut no one has said all men are rapists.

If they find it so offensive for people to talk about their male violence they should take action to tackle it rather than moan that they're being victimised

There were also (seperately) quite a few threads specifically about rochdale

Yes, NAMALT, but those that aren't - and the people who love them - need to stop acting like it's just as bad to be lumped in with rapists and abusers as it is to be abused.

"But we seem to have a police force that is treating this issue very seriously and being successful in prosecuting these gangs."

Of course. Everything is fine now.

The thing about cases like this one is that these gangs have been known about for a long time. I can remember reading about them in Marie Clare, back in the 90's when it it ran proper investigative pieces.

I do wonder if it's easier for those in the police or SW to say oh we couldn't touch these guys in case we stirred up racism than say we thought those girls were scum and not worth the trouble. You have to see the girls as victims if you want to help them and I don't think the police in particular did.

And then you get the people who are happy to talk about racial dynamics in some situations (example: predominantly white men abusing predominantly Southeast Asian girls on holidays in places like Cambodia), but then they insist that the grooming gangs issue had nothing to do with race or religion and was only about men abusing women. Of course race/religion/ethnicity were an important part of what was going on. The inquiries and reports that have been conducted into these affairs have said so, explicitly.

I agree. In both examples, part of the issue is othering based on culture/ethnicity. This ought not to be unsayable.

Sarah Champion, MP for Rotherham - where there were recentish similar convictions in similar circumstances -, was extremely forthright, and open on Radio 4 Today rogramme as to this isssue being both a racist crime and a cultural issue crime specifically.
As was Lord MacDonald, in an earlier interview on the same programme. He was previously DPP for England + Wales, andwas blazing on the racism inherent in these crimes.

This is a very specific issue + crime, and past refusals by Authorities and some of the left leaning Press to acknowledge that to be so has actually made the problem worse.

The justice system is terrible as well. In the Telford case, each defense barrister was allowed to cross examine the abused girls. Oh and the first trial collapsed so they had to do it all twice. And the victims say that a number of their abusers weren't charged. There needs to be far more done to stop this happening.

Very good posts on this thread. My two cents:

There is a problem with racism and misogyny amongst certain Asian communities in Britain. Growing up in the East Midlands, I heard comments about white women being "easy", "promiscuous", "slags" etc. This wasn't confined to any one group - I heard it from those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Turkish origin, from Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. As recently as 2010, a Sikh friend from Derby (a woman) told me she wished she had it as "easy as white women, because they can sleep around with whoever they want". Anyone who had visited India or Pakistan can confirm that there is a huge problem with misogyny in both countries. I think, that it found a comfortable home in the UK, which has its own brand of inherent misogyny and we have seen repeatedly over the years how women and vulnerable victims (children of both genders) are dismissed and disbelieved here. Add to that a class element - as most, if not all the victims of these grooming gangs were working class girls it is easy to see why it is so prevalent and endemic.

What is wrong is the persistent failure of the UK to tackle misogyny and violence against women. You only have to look at the treatment of the victim in the Ched Evans case to realise that these repugnant views are shared among all races, ages, genders and classes in the UK.

I would also add that the focus on the Asian grooming gangs is a good way to deflect attention away from the vast majority of abusers in the UK, who are white.

"I would also add that the focus on the Asian grooming gangs is a good way to deflect attention away from the vast majority of abusers in the UK, who are white."

And of the shocking treatment of children in care, and just out of care. It's an awful shambles.

It's just a shame that many people didn't get properly mobilised and angry about child sex exploitation until they learned about the ethnic aspects of cases like these. I personally hadn't seen angry mobs on the street protesting sex crimes until this year, when the case of an Asian attacker came to the fore. I thought the crowd was a mob of football hooligans at first, thus was their venom and their largely skinhead demographic.

It's perfectly understandable to be angered by these cases and indeed to acknowledge the racial dimension to the abuse but the selective anger we see, reserved for the Asian gangs, identifies people as ignorant, hypocritical bigots who certainly don't care for the victims as much as they think they do.

Yes, men never get her up about violence against women unless they can spice it up with a bit of racism............

Some people want to use these cases to push their racist agenda. Others say that it is racist to comment on anything to do with the culture of the perpetrators. Both are wrong.

I like what MP Sarah Champion for Rotherham said today -

"The government aren't researching what is going on. Are these cultural issues? Is there some sort of message going out within the community?"

"This isn't racist, this is child protection,"

That's the thing - it would always have been child protection. Why bring race as a reason into it in the first place?