Why does this country have very little compassion for the victims of grooming gangs?

[Louisaaa]

Firstly this is not a post about race! I understand men of all races have been involved in grooming gangs! This is mainly about why the British authorities and public have very little sympathy or will to try and solve the problem.

I find it horrendous how so many young girls have been exposed to the most horrific acts of rape, gang rape, murder, forced pregnancies throughout the UK over the decades etc...

Some of these girls where as young as 11!! Most where under 16 and grew up in care homes or came from very deprived backgrounds. Most where white.

When I see all the cases of this happening throughout the UK and hear how the POLICE, SOCIAL SERVICES, LOCAL COUNCIL and media gave it very little attention... Some of the documents showed that the council in Rotherham openly told it's staff to stop mentioning it in reports. The police would often lie blame with the victims and said it needed to tread carefully due to racial tension, and the social services would describe the men as their bfs..

• a girl of 16 had been raped by over 300 men before she turned 16
• some of them would disappear from care homes and where locked in flats for weeks where men would come rape them
• some girls disappeared completely (thought murdered
• some of them where trafficked around the country to be raped by other men
• some girls murdered
• 1400 girls raped in Rotherham under 16 and only 28 men have been convicted!!!

It shocks how people are still scared to talk about this or have no interest to do so... But when a woman is wolf whistled in the street.... Well conversations need to be had.

Is this because the children are white working class?
The majority of offenders in the cases are predominantly British Pakistani?
The children been brought up in care?

I do feel class played more a role, I feel if they were middle/upper class the authorities would have stamped it out immediately.

Yes historically, social care and police did not do enough. But things are very different now. Not saying it's perfect but is vastly better in terms of police and social care response.

I dont think that's true, the governments own reports show that police are still victim blaming children in grooming gangs cases.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67655654

Agreed! I think class plays such an important role in the UK in regards to all aspects of life.

I was reading a report that the BBC recently posted and it said police still don't understand the the complexities of grooming. It's to manipulate you into a relationship giving the false belief that they love you and you have to serve them to show your love.

Well I can only tell you from my experience working in this field.

Yeah and other experts can also tell us through the reports they conducted for the government.

I expect attitudes and training will vary amongst the police. While there are specialist police teams to work on child exploitation, there is likely to be varied attitudes and levels of understanding with the 'average' police, and we know anyway that mysogeny is rife in the police force. But police processes are much more proactive around child exploitation than they used to be.
I've worked in this and allied fields since 2001...I've seen significant progress.

I'm not trying to argue or disagree with you. I thought you might be interested to hear from someone working in this area however.

Thankyou for your comments. I hope they have improved.

There is always more that can be done and attitudes that need to be challenged. And it's just desperate the amount of men (and it is almost wholly men) who are sexual abusers and exploiters. That's what makes me despair the most...the sheer scale of sexual abuse

Because they know they will get lighter sentences... I think all rapists need to get mandatory terms in prison.

I'm all for educating men, however in the real world some of those men are never going to listen.

I don't think its a matter of educating the men who are raping children. Its educating everyone else that raping children is wrong.

And everyone thinks they think that rape is wrong. In reality, its wrong if its someone in your "in group". If they are not, its much harder for people to care. This was true for the perpetrators - if the girls are from a different ethnicity/religion/seen as more promiscuous they don't count. It was also true for all the people who turned a blind eye - because of class/background the girls didn't count. Its true when UN workers/oil workers/soldiers abuse children in other countries - their colleagues turn a blind eye because its abroad so it somehow doesn't count. Catholic priests could get away with abusing kids because they were more important as priests than the children (who were often orphans etc).

But that's where educating people, or just getting them to stop and fucking think for one second, is helpful and can make a difference. And I agree - all rapists should 100% go to prison, and the sentences should be longer.

Absolutely!
I was recently in Japan and they have very similar problems there... Not grooming gangs but sole men who groom school girls into relationships and it's very much accepted there.

I think it's due to their culture where many schoolgirls are fetishized in their media and society as a whole.

My ex bf who is Japanese and lived in Japan said his sister dated a man who was 37 when she was 14 and he said it was pretty normal.

Like he had no real problem with it and I think that's mainly down to their cultural society.

However I think grooming gangs are completely different as they where grooming but it was mainly to prostitute the girls out to their friends and members of their community.

@Louisaaa Yes, the actual groomers themselves are in my opinion just evil. I don't think people want to believe that evil exists, and so we have theories about people being damaged/unhappy etc. Sometimes that's true. But also some people are just evil. (There is the additional aspect of it functioning in the same way terrorist ideologies do, but that doesn't make them no evil).
Its the way that normal, non-evil people turn a blind eye when its convenient that makes my heart hurt though. That's where I think the explanations about ingroup/out group and culture come in.
There have been some absolutely horrifying stories about Japan (and online grooming gangs and lack of punishment whereof. I won't link because its genuinely soul destroying). Its a very safe, law abiding country in lots of ways but the trade-off seems to be some really dark stuff gets swept under the rug and hidden/normalised.

class of victims, mainly working class, many in care homes in northern England.

It’s also their legal status as children in care/care experienced. The reality is the general public has a very poor view of children cared for by the local authority - you only need to look at any thread discussing adoption on the main boards and attitudes about children being “damaged”, always going to have problems, never going to be “normal” come creeping out of the woodwork - and in those threads were talking about small children. By the time these kids are teenagers the rhetoric is that they are bad.

Teenagers in care are very easy pickings for anyone who wants to abuse them. Their attachment pattern means they are looking for someone to love them, their trauma history means they often don’t recognise abuse and control until they are in it very deep, their trauma history also means they don’t have many trusting relationships with safe adults who will help. Their knowledge and experience of the “system” makes them wary of rocking the boat lest they get moved again. They don’t have a loving, engaged parent to fight their corner.

Professionals working in this area have a lot of very skilled, long term work to build a relationship where they can safely intervene. Getting evidence is incredibly hard, the young people often really fear giving evidence and have long experience of not being believe or treated as credible, there are often things in their history that a good defence lawyer will use to discredit them. They’re described as taking risks or making choices.

Yes people need to be aware of grooming and how subtle those behaviors can be, attitudes towards particularly young women and girls needs to improve, and professionals need training but most of all we need to stop writing kids off at 13, 14, 15. And really need to change our attitude to people who don’t fit societies mould. Because that’s what allows these kinds of abuses to thrive.

This!!!

I think what makes it hard is that these girls have had many ACES, they are in survival mode, they can 'appear' strong and resourceful. They 'think' they are involved by choice, BUT, they have been groomed to be involved because the groomers identify their vulnerabilities. The girls also don't see themselves as vulnerable, they may even be offended at the thought of it.
Many professionals see it for what it is, they ARE getting groomed but are faced with having to get passed the above, convincing them that they are groomed and vulnerable so they can support them, others can't see it for what it is and wrongly believe that they have a choice.
That three girls serise showed this really well. The sexual health worker could see right through what was going on and had great difficulty getting through to other agencies and the girls, even when the police did get involved properly it was a mammoth task getting the girls to see what had happened.
It's heartbreaking to watch and shameful to think some professionals just can't see it but even when they do it's so hard reaching out to the girls as the groomers have done such a good job.

The OP was talking about the victims not the perpetrators!

It's heartbreaking to watch and shameful to think some professionals just can't see it but even when they do it's so hard reaching out to the girls as the groomers have done such a good job.

It can be very difficult for professionals to spot, I used to train people in this area and when you lay it all out in a coherent way, people get it. When you then look at how it might present in a young persons life as they come into contact with professionals it’s much harder. It’s really one of those situations where joining up often small pieces of the picture is important and those pieces will be held by a number of different people in different roles.

For example if a girl starts missing school are they truanting or is their groomer meeting them on the way and stopping them going. If they are missing at night have they stopped over with a friend or been trafficked by their groomer. Has anyone even noticed they’re sexually active and spoken to them about it. Does anyone have a relationship with them that isn’t about managing their behaviour - has that relationship changed recently and if it has is that just the normal fluctuations in relationships or is something else going on?

Victims don’t wear a sign saying it’s happening, and become very adept at hiding what’s going on through shame, because they finally feel loved, because they think abuse in relationships is normal etc etc. The answer is social work that is deeply rooted in relationships, but that takes time and resources that no one wants to pay for.

What relevance does this have to anything?!! Unless you are weirdly trying to say the girls were the true offenders?

To give an example, many schools will now alert parents/carer to their child being late or absent from class. Yes some of that is about their stats and reporting process, but it’s also a safeguarding measure - if a child is missing from class or late to class where are they in that time? It’s not unheard of for groomers to pick a young person up during the school day and return them before school ends - young person goes to and from school as normal but misses certain classes.

You then have parents annoyed at getting texts throughout the day saying their child was late (as per a recent thread here). Now the majority of kids will have taken their time getting to class, or couldn’t be arsed doing geography that day but there will be some who were taken out of school by their groomer. 10 seconds annoyance for me might build a picture for another child.

... the governments own reports show that police are still victim blaming children in grooming gangs cases

Well yes, but it's an easier option than causing "community tensions" by placing the blame where it actually belongs - and "community tensions", as we've seen so often, have become the be-all and end-all, which is a hell of a shame for the vast majority of decent members who'd also like proper action to be taken

I'd expect this, since the population of the UK is still mainly white
However when it comes to grooming gangs, I was interested to see the following from a FoI request to the Office for National Statistics linked below:

"Unfortunately, we do not hold data on victims and perpetrators of grooming gangs"

www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/ethnicityoftheperpetratorsandvictimsofgroominggangsfrom2000todate

I think you’ve got fixated on one example in the media. The majority of perpetrators and victims are white. Quite why they don’t get the same coverage is another question

There are, for obvious reasons, efforts to obfuscate the racially and religiously aggravated nature of these particular grooming gangs.

Yes, girls are groomed and pimped into prostitution everywhere by men who pretend to be their boyfriend. I think the average (mode) entry into prostitution is about 12-13. The race of the pimp is likely to correlate to the race of local girls in an area. Across the world, children, overwhelmingly girls, are groomed with gifts, attention and compliments by men who often seem glamorous and wealthy, and pretend to be their boyfriends. The word ‘pimp’ even has positive connotations of suping something up, making it eye-catching and glamorous ‘pimp my ride’.

This prevalent, perennial grooming into prostitution is being put into the same statistics to disguise racially and religiously aggravated grooming, rape and prostitution that we call ‘grooming gangs’, where the perpetrators deliberately target victims of a different racial and religious group than themselves, which they believe to be innately inferior, and who they can abuse with a clear conscience and still go to their house of worship at the weekend and think they are going to be favoured by God.

The reason for disguising and obfuscating racially and religiously aggravated grooming, rape and prostitution, and not properly addressing it in an appropriately targeted way, is because people are afraid of inflaming racial/religious tension.

As with most groups of child abusers I suspect that the perpetrators primarily target children they have access to (vulnerable, already from difficult backgrounds) rather than primarily a racial/religious background.

Most of the groups worked in night time/take away type economies where they had access to such children.

Whether they then go to their place of worship or are even religious is irrelevant.

What do we want to see happen? It’s definitely on the public agenda, most people and authorities are aware and taking child grooming more seriously than they did.

Safe Guarding has been updated, as we've seen above from those in the industry.

Are there resources on how we can protect our children? Ensure they can identify patterns etc? Although I suppose the DC of the parents who would do this will have already have protection just by background.

Are there task forces in all regions for child grooming? Because there’s also the issue of county lines and criminal/ drug gangs exploiting children. Is work happening there does anyone know?