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?

What is?

It's not even the main factor... they certainly withheld information due to fears about igniting racial tension..
But the biggest factor really is institutional. It really is not understanding grooming, not thinking of teenage girls as children, thinking of care leavers over sexualised behaviour as "bringing it on thenselves"
And these are still massive factors we battle against today.
The police handled it badly and a part of that was trying to navigate social tensions... but the largest part was just not taking sexual exploitation and coercion as seriously as they should. Not pursuing things because they didn't have cooperation of the girls..
This is what we need to be extremely angry about and working to change.
And instead we hand this over to the far right as some kind of conspiracy about how the police hushed it all up because they just cared so much about the Muslim population. Coz they were just so so "woke"
Flagrant nonsense.
The police weren't woke at all. Their response had nothing to do with caring and everything to do with just not caring.

@321user123 I don't think a single person doesn't realise that a few women abuse.

Starmer set up and changed the rules on evidence to get more men, inc Pakistani men prosecuted, men were jailed for these crimes in the 90s, 00s and 10's... late year 22 men jailed for crimes committed in Calderwood.

But you and others aren't interested, its just about telling mis truths and making up alternative "facts"... i.e 100s of 1000s of girls raped... really? in Rotherham, its UP TOO 1200 girls over a 20 year period, terrible but not 100s of 1000s.

We know why you re doing this, its about discrediting Labour, you don't give a fuck about children.
You and all the others blaming Lab/Starmer had nothing to say when Sunak failed to implement the nation report findings, nothing to say over the decades these crimes were committed and nothing to say when the Tories slashed child social services and 20k Police, making it easier for men to attack children in care.

Playing Politics with the lives of children

It was a failure by the police to act and gather sufficient evidence. Sex offending is outrageous- but it is hard to prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt. The amount of resources you need is vast. You also need to support victims who, quite often, will return to circumstances where they will meet their abusers or those who are aware they have been abused. Predators like previously abused victims. They rarely give credible evidence if they dare to speak up.

What should have happened is a lot of preventative measures to protect these girls by preventing these predators from getting access to them.

What do you mean? Why on earth do we need "Gaza independents" in the UK? Gaza policy is not going to improve the lives of their constituents in the UK and that's the MPs main duty surely? Or are you suggesting that UK MPs now owe a duty to the constituents of other foreign countries? Because that's not exactly how things work.

What exactly has he admitted?

Yes interested in that one too. Surely a tabloid headline if so

This ^

I found it almost impossible to believe that could have happened, but Evan Davis was interviewing Simon Bailey on PM on Radio 4 on Thursday, and he seemed to confirm that police had "on occasions tragically, egregiously, turned a blind eye" to what they must have known was happening.

Davis also raised the issue of police mishandling stemming from a fear of offending "different ethnic groups" - around 36'00".

Bailey is a former Chief Constable of Norfolk and was National Lead for Child Protection on the National Police Chiefs' Council.

The topic starts at about 31' 42" and the interview starts at 34'05".

The "blind eye" bit starts about 37'30"

PM - 02/01/2025 - BBC Sounds

Another spot on post.

I think the worrying thing is that it is apparently still ongoing. But yes some of the details are harrowing. It’s awful and a stain on our institutions that this happened, was known about and nothing done.

It's a little hard to read your post but what I think you are trying to suggest is that you have personal information confirming that there weren't as nearly as many girls tortured and raped despite what was stated in the House of Lords, that Starmer actually did a great job notwithstanding the reports and his own admission that he failed and that the most important thing is politics and that we shouldn't criticise Labour and it was all the Conservatives fault? Am I on the right lines?

Mainly they seem interested in introducing blasphemy laws and making sure cousin marriage continues. Yes contributing loads aren’t they.

Could you be specific on this admission?

How do you stop the predators from getting access to them short of locking those naughty girls away from the men who cant control themselves round the "easy meat"? Presumably you would need to have an idea of the characteristics of who the predators might be and why particular girls would be targeted by them and in what way. I'd say that sort of thing would be useful.

For people who are asking.. why did no one did anything, why was there not outrage?

It’s because there were a lot of people like this commenter who bury their head in the sand.

Have you been listening to Carl Beech?

Operation Midland - Wikipedia

It was 1400 and Sarah Champion thinks there are more.

The taskforce that found 550 additional offenders and 4000 more victims was set up last year under the Sunak government. They found 4000 in the first year, how many more are there!?

What is this obsession some posters have with “not undermining Labour”. They are a political party not overlords, no-ones sworn fealty to them. This is not a party political issue imo, the failures span decades and both parties but no-one is obliged to not undermine the government. One of the sacred freedoms that British people have is being able to criticise their leaders without getting jailed or killed.

Yes precisely, when you see again and again men raping with their brothers, uncles, fathers and cousins and the pattern is repeated in groups that are not connected then there is a cultural element at play. The interference of community leaders in negotiating between the police and suspects is another thing. Do we all get a community leaders to run interference for us? No we don’t. Why specifically the Pakistani community needs community leaders to liase with the police is beyond me.

@Alexandra2001 apparently, KS did change rules, apparently rishi did implement task force and 400 ISH people arrested. Figs off top off head

i understand why Saville was protected all his life: he was a very powerful man, good buddy with top people in power (as in Margaret Thatcher and the royal family), he was always giving lots of money to charities, certainly not the case of these low life tw-ts grooming girls in the midlands, the question here is why did the police not cared and covered it up? Fear of racial riots? dismissing the victims because they were from poor backgrounds? exposing the lack of police resources? exposing political failures?

Not one single head rolled after Saville crimes were uncovered, all was swept under the proverbial rug while the
media sold it to us as "inexcusable", same with this case, they just want to sell newspapers but deep down they can't care less.

The utterly gruesome details of how the girls were abused weren't published. Previous posters have explained. We may have thought we understood - and the more jaded among us probably guessed at least some of it - but what OP's saying is that it was infinitely worse. And it still is.

Something else that is obscured by the phrase 'Asian grooming gangs' - the men running the business of sexually torturing underprivileged children were mostly of Pakistani origin, yet their hundreds or thousands of paying customers are not. They're black, white, brown men from all social classes.

Men would "ejaculate and then urinate in children's mouths". There were also allegations of "gang-rape by queues of men while girls were held hostage for hours, sometimes days—all the while being forced to listen to the screams of girls in other rooms with other men".

The quote's from a 2013 documentary. It's good that more is coming out now, though I'm among those who won't be reading the details: I find it challenging enough to live with the knowledge of man's inhumanity to woman.

Either way it needs to be dealt with, sensitivities be damned, I don’t care how paedophiles and their families feel. Nothing kills social cohesion faster than raping and torturing children. That is not on the rest of society, that falls squarely on the perpetrators and those who turn a blind eye to their crimes.

@user23124

That needs to be addressed and stopped, community leaders

I am no great fan of Starmer as PM, let's be clear. But he did preside over a wholesale re evaluation of how rape and serious sexual offences, and violence against women and girls generally was treated by the CPS.

He was DPP from2008 to 2013.

Non-recent CSE cases from that period and before are still winding their way through the court system.They are complex in very many ways and practically so as well, given the number of defendants often in each group.

The reason you may not hear yet of these cases is that they are very often split down into numerous separate trials, with reporting restrictions on each until the final one is heard- so as not to prejudice the remainder.

Of course, as victims of sexual,offences, the victims have lifelong anonymity, and many responsible journalists will not publish the most gruesome details of the abuse.The same goes for other very serious violent crimes. This is not evidence of any sort of cover up.

What did happen in the late 90s and I do recommend the Jay report on Rotherham - was an aversion on the part of the police to investigating these crimes in the name of community cohesion, and a lack,of proper or any, safeguarding for these girls who were very often in care.An appalling situation.

@AncientAndModern1 - thanks for your insightful contributions!