To be horrified at how much worse the "grooming gangs" actually were than I thought

[OneAmberFinch]

There are several other threads about Elon Musk, Labour, Jess Phillips, etc.

I don't want to discuss them in this thread. The other threads keep getting derailed and I just want a place to discuss how absolutely horrifying the new details that emerged this week are.

I knew that there were "grooming gangs" who would entice girls in care or from broken homes to be their "boyfriends" by giving them cigarettes and vapes, for example.

I didn't know that girls as young as 11 were being brutally tortured and raped, that people had been killed over it, including one policeman who arranged for some of the rapists to get off, houses burnt down. I didn't know the details of the violent gang rapes which I won't repeat here but you can find on X.

I'm just genuinely shocked and horrified.

Some of the court transcripts circulating are from 2013. How did I not know?

Because the places you get your news from don't want you to know.

I agree, the details are horrific. It's actual sadistic torture. I'm not sure why these details are only really surfacing now, but yes, they make very harrowing reading.

It's not all men, but it is always men. Why can't they just calmly get on with life like women do, not causing harm or being criminals?

I also had no idea, I remember watching a documentary a couple of years ago with an ex - police detective called Maggie - I think her name was - who was trying to bringing to brings these gangs to justice when she was a serving officer, anyway I found that to be appalling but having read some of the court transcripts on other threads on here, it's horrific.

It’s more likely that the OP didn’t bother to read newspapers or watch the news. It’s been covered extensively by the media.

What disgusts me the most is how people were aware but turned a blind eye due to racial sensitivity and the attitude of oh well it's a teenagers right for some of the older girls etc. Makes my blood boil.

Some of the court transcripts circulating are from 2013. How did I not know?

Yes, where were the news agencies at the time?

The brutality and scale of the rape and torture of children is appalling.

Where are the court transcripts please? I didn’t know any of this
I haven’t lived in the uk for 24 years now, since I was 23.
I lived in the North and had many very frightening experiences with asian men approaching my friends and I, one time I was driving with my friend (we were around 21) and some men were in a car calling to us, we ignored them as we had boyfriends and also felt very uncomfortable, they tried to violently run us off the road, it was petrifying. Whole gangs would rule certain areas, you couldn’t walk in certain places. Gangs used to get on the a bus route to Manchester and storm the bus being violent with passengers and robbing phones, jewellery and money
This has been known about for a long time and going on for a long time

First post nailed it. It was actively repressed.

Articles from 2013

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/14/oxford-gang-guilty-grooming-girls

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/14/oxford-abuse-ring-social-services

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/14/oxford-sex-abuse-victim-princess

What do you think happens to groomed girls?
They don't get presents and asked nicely to perform oral sex for God's sake.
Do you really need to read transcripts of victims statements to imagine the horror of these men?

I’d agree with you I have heard about the grooming gangs but somehow the details skipped me by. It’s always been implied that these were older girls , sexually promiscuous and were somehow at least partially responsible.

I think this was the reason given that the police didn’t do anything when one of the girls complained. It was always discriminatory and awful but I feel like it was completely minimised.

‘Didn’t bother’ is putting blame (not particularly subtly) onto the OP.

It is not accurate.

I was teaching in Telford just three years after this happened. I was teaching there throughout the grooming gangs scandals and didn’t know a thing about it. And that isn’t because of my poor reading skills, it’s because the children it happened to didn’t really have any sort of voice.

So many girls got pregnant and there were resigned faces and sighs and what a shames sometimes. Mostly they just vanished and weren’t heard of again.

Yes, it’s been covered now, some ten, twenty years later, and our attitudes are slowly changing. But the full details are still emerging and the OP is right, they are awful. Denying that they weren’t addressed at the time because racism was seen as worse than child abuse does no one any favours.

I agree OP and what concerns me is that there’s still not enough of an outcry even with the horrific details coming out. Why isn’t this still splashed all over the news?

No, there aren't gang controlled areas in the UK - it's a far right online conspiracy theory. There are poor under resourced areas with crime, crap or underfunded police forces, and aggressive and nasty men all over the country however.

It WAS published, there WAS an enquiry, there WAS a government that did fuck all actual governing however.

If you read a lot of the media reporting, particularly earlier reporting, it gave the impression that these were young women from disadvantaged backgrounds desperate for affection who were given gifts and alcohol and mistook these men as their “boyfriends”, having sex and allowing themselves to be passed around in order to keep the “boyfriend”. When the media angle is presented like that, you can’t necessarily criticise people for not realising the true picture was very different.

2014

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28939089

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/rotherham-child-sex-abuse-police

@Birdscratch I don't think the 6 or 10 o clock news would be reporting in detail what we've seen online - multiple men raping a child at the same time, stretching arses so more men could be raping her! Branding them, burning them, dismembering them.

Grooming wasn't the word to describe the activity it should have been was tortured and raped! Grooming sounds like the girls got hoodwinked by gifts and niceities. Not the girls were petrified, no one cared and no one wanted the trouble of dealing with it!

It is shocking that these girls, were seen as fodder not just by the evil rapists but by police, councillors, social workers and politicians, because of their sex, race and class!

You didn’t know because it was played down by the politicians and media for years and anyone who did know and tried to talk about it were shut down by being told they were racist/farRight/Bigoted/Responding to racist dog whistles and/or were “Tommy Robinson” acolytes.

Right here on this board in the last few days I saw such accusations being made on one of the Elon Musk threads. There was also a post about a 13 year old girl being arrested while the multiple grown adult Pakistani men she was with were left alone, which was met with outright denial and accusations of it being a Far Right Talking Point.

Yes, I knew that they were being coerced and thought it was awful but that it was more a case of uneducated/disadvantaged girls who were out of the system being tricked into prostitution by thinking they were working for their boyfriends. Which is horrible but in a different way. I had concerns about the care system, about the way "sex work is work" minimised their cases, about working class girls being ignored because they were seen as asking for it.

I'm not minimising any of that and those cases obviously also exist and are awful.

But the new details describe animalistic torture. It's a whole 'nother level. As many people have said: "grooming gangs" itself is a minimising term.

Yes we do. Because some of these stories reveal an unimaginable level of depravity that has been actively suppressed from the very top of government down. We need official sources so that facts are not handwaved off as right wing hysteria.

Well let this be a warning to you about how news can be censored for political purposes.

My understanding of this is not complete, but it seems that the court transcripts for this were not released at the time. For reasons that I don't understand, a small section were made public in the past week, the details of which are being discussed on social media currently and causing this (justified) shock and outrage

There are ample transcripts still not in the public domain and the cost of making them public is prohibitive. There are crowd funders being set up now to raise the money for this.

What do you think happens in poor underfunded areas with limited police control.... oh yes gangs take over and control the area. You basically said the same thing as the poster you are trying to correct

Clearly you don't live in one of the areas this was happening. Or didn't go to one of the schools (or weren't in the same social group) that was targeted by these gangs.

I think women like her were so brave to speak up. I'm glad they're finally getting attention.