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?

Quite. None of this was in the reports I read in the media previously. It appears to have just been publicised.

@@thatcastlethere
I attached a link earliet to the testimony of a victim who explains the link between Islam and why the victims were targeted. It is harrowing and a difficult watch, I get it. But it might clear things up for you.

Here it is again.

Please can you provide some evidence to back up this assertion?
There are reputable studies showing that most child sexual exploitation is committed by white ( and non-Muslim) people (the majority of whom are men)
eg https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/dec/analysis-new-home-office-report-admits-grooming-gangs-are-not-muslim-problem#:~:text=For%20many%20in%20Britain%20today,offenders%20are%20most%20commonly%20White%E2%80%9D

There are plenty of things you could blame for this situation:
including patriarchy, men's attitudes towards women, child poverty, the hollowing out of social care budgets, the instututional sexism of the police etc.

Every time someone says something like this, it makes it harder for people to disclose their abuse at the hands of a woman. It's like you want us to choose between feminism and what happened to us. 😅 I won't choose. I am a feminist. Men are vastly more dangerous than women. My mother, all alone and without male encouragement, did things to me that I was 39 before I was able to talk about with a therapist.

I don’t know why people blame ‘the media’

these cases were reported widely at the time. There was a lack of an outcry because people didn’t really care about these young girls because they were seen as scum. They were written off.

I remember seeing a Question time around the time and was horrified that the focus among the audience and panellists was what had gone wrong with young girls that they would give blow jobs for a bag of crisps!

none of the panellists seemed to think it was wrong to blame the girls for going off the rails. One of them was a Daily Mail columnist ( ok, so the media). But as much as it’s a horrible rag, it really knows it audience. They wouldn’t spout such bile if it wasn’t lapped up by the British public.

there was much discussion around the time of the Soham murders too because Ian Huntley had a long history of 13/14 year old girlfriends. At the time, it was admitted that chances to stop a paedo were missed because it was considered normal and these children were ‘slags’

I saw a ( harrowing) video about migrants crossing to Europe- some from Afghanistan- and they were mentioning the “Lightly dressed” European women saying it wouldn’t be allowed (in. NWFP and similar regions).
It’s a cultural thing.

There was a pregnant woman on the boat who was not given ANY respect at all.

Imagine being an Afghan woman now under Taliban regime. Awful.

Personally I wouldn’t dismiss anyone as a ‘thick racist’, but by focusing on solely Muslim gangs we’re ignoring the numerous of other paedophile rings. We need to look at the WHOLE problem, regardless of colour with a heavy emphasis on police complicity. Same as ‘Me Too’. It focused on Harvey Weinstein, so once he was locked up the issue was forgotten, ignoring that there will be countless high-powered men of his ilk doing the same depraved acts to women.

First of all, the police have been very slack in collating crime by ethnicity data. And what data we do have isn't being released, despite MPs making formal requests in parliament. So we don't have good quality data. But what we do have clearly indicated that Muslims are disproportionately responsible for gang rape offences, data which is backed up in other European countries.

What is worse is the ample evidence that in many cases these crimes are racially motivated. The witness accounts from victims and other people involved make that very clear. These girls are being targeted precisely because they're white and non-Muslim.

The absolute hypocrisy of your position is that if this were happening the other way around - gangs of white men targeting and torturing Muslim girls - you'd be completely losing your shit about it.

And poor white girls weren't the only ones effected

You know we have to bring up these other cases because this does become fodder fir the far right to use as anti Islam propaganda.
And that doesn't actually help anyone.
It's rage bait.
There's a big problem with male predatory violence in the UK.
You Let this be made about Islam its an offense against the majority of kids in this country who are abused by white men.
This is about male predatory violence and the way its handled by police.
There were cultural factors at play in some instances obviously.
But you can't tolerate posters trying to edge into a discussion hat IS really quite racist... because they are trying to imply there's some deep seated issue with Islam in this country and we shouldn't tolerate it. When that just is not true!! There's no more problem with Islam being used to abuse or used as an excuse to abuse children than there is with Christianity!! The men will find a way to abuse kids. Even if they don't even have a religion.

Someone has already attached the excellentTelegraph article which I really recommend everyone read if they can but here it is again. Hopefully not behind a paywall. You may need to cf the date of certain offences with who was head of the CPS at the time...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover-up-oldham-telford-rotherham/

Best post I've seen on the subject.

Yes.agreed. Not just white Christian girls. Hindus and Sikhs were also targeted.

No.
They are using Islam to justify their behaviour to themselves in this instance because they are Muslim.
Men from other cultural backgrounds will use other excuses.
The excuse isn't real. They weren't compelled to rape girls because they are Muslim.
Majority of Muslims in the UK would never dream of doing such a thing.
Stop trying to make this about Islam.
You think white men in this country have a much higher regard for women?
There are similar lines of thought.. serial rapists who had wives. They thought of one group of women as good and another bad.
Serial killers who only targeted prostitutes. Or only targeted young women.
White men who went on shooting ramapges and only targetted young wonen. Or single mothers.
It's got nothing to do with Islam it's just how some men justify this shit in their head. You know that.

The race element is tricky. No one needs to live in the UK for 5 minutes to know the place is FULL of home grown misogynists.

but we cannot pretend there isn’t a cultural element here. A lot of these men were from rural back waters in Pakistan where the attitude is no different from Afghanistan. It is a factor - no question. I also think that the government should consider removing citizenship from rapist and perpetrators of sexual violence against women and girls. By doing nothing, we are reinforcing their very extreme views on women

It's not as if paedophiles haven't been discussed this century. There was an outcry re thr Catholic Church, Saville, historic boarding school abuse. This one is particularly heinous and of interest due to the fact those that were supposed to help victims (police, social services, CPS) betrayed them in the name of "community cohesion" and that it seems to be prevalent across the whole of the UK an in every major city.

www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-home-office-s-grooming-report-is-an-exercise-in-obfuscation/

It's the approach of the police etc that sets this apart. Hands off the paedophiles in vast numbers for the sake of avoiding being called Islamophobic. It needs to be aired in the open and acknowledged. Same as any other scandal.

Sexual abuse is a very wide term.

https://x.com/CompositeGuy_/status/1747687516751167981

Reposting this thread on how misleading this statistic is.

I actually agree though that calling them Muslim gangs is not really correct, it's not gangs of Indonesians is it.

Thank you for sharing.

Exactly. All the cases you raised were historic. I agree that there should be an inquiry, and the racism/anti-racism angle explored.

But the message that’s coming across on this thread is that people don’t have an issue with abuse by white people. It’s fine to hush that up and then throw up their hands in mock horror decades later once the abusers are dead, and pretend that nobody knew. But those Muslims need dealing with now.

And I hate the implications that I don't care or I'm not "losing my shit about it" just because i think the rhetoric in trying to say that sexual abuse has some unique link to islam, is deeply wrong.
I do care. I care about those girls.. I'd care just as much about them if they were Muslim girls being targeted by white men.
And actually in the instance you describe it would be ALOT easier for you to see that predatory men use any excuse to attack women. They often separate them into groups so they can justify it.
If a white Christian man targeted Muslim girls it would have some racial motivation according to that man in that instance. But it certainly wouldn't mean that there was some special link between Christianity and male predatory behaviour in general.. because as you full well know they will use any religion and if they don't have a religion they will do it anyway.

The focus needs to be on protecting girls in vulnerable situations.. policing taking abuse and exploitation of teenage girls seriously even if the teen is saying they consented.. police actually getting prosecutions for sexual crimes!!
Not what specific religious batshittery the men were spouting that time.

For the record I do have an issue with abuses committed by white people, but I was frustrated on previous threads when the reaction to this particular set of cases, which weren't mostly committed by white people, was drowned out by other commentary.

I think most people who are appalled by these details are also appalled at other cases and vice versa. We should be able to take that as read on Mumsnet I think.

Look. I get it's a hard thing to accept. Its monstrous that these men chose their victims according to their race and religion. But we need to deal with it. The.Catholic Church had to deal with it and no one made excuses for them. Why are some people making excuses on this thread trying to deny the reality? Don't you have any sympathy for the little girls? Or do you have more sympathy for "community cohesion"?

If you can provide examples of multiple nationwide Christian paedophile gangs specifically targeting hundreds of thousands of Muslim girls simply because they are not Christian and so are therefore "easy meat" and "dirty" and that the police ignored them systematically for fear of community relations disruption then please do provide links.

'The Holocaust was bad, but plenty of other people are homicidal maniacs, therefore we shouldn't focus on the Nazis or claim that what they did was uniquely bad.'

Your argument in a nutshell.