Brilliant article about the rape gangs in the UK

[Petrine]

I’ve put this on AIBU as it appears to be most read. A brilliant article about the rape gangs and the ensuing cover up.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/07/elon-musk-has-ripped-cloak-of-deceit-off-britain-scandal/

My (white) childhood friend feels the same. She is a child sexual abuse survivor and she feels very angry about all this, when she sees people like her white foster parents and foster brother continue to get away protected by other white people. She feels when people almost exclusively focus on Pakistani grooming gangs they’re missing the point.

Let’s face it most abuse is carried out within the same families /communities . It’s not the bogeyman from outside that is responsible for most of them. All manifestations of the vile evil that is sexual abuse must be looked at and addressed.

@FrothyCothy thank you for sharing your experience. I do think the "scared of woke/PC backlash" thing is a factor. I just also think there is out and out corruption as well.

I think part of the reason for the public anger on this is that we can see the solutions proposed, such as "provide safeguarding training sessions for the Pakistani taxi drivers", are a joke when you look at recent revelations that many taxi drivers were themselves rapists, or were actively allied to grooming gangs.

I'm picking on this one example to highlight a wider trend, which is responding to criminal activity with essentially a set of HR bulletins. See other posts across the various threads where people are frustrated at recommendations to create "toolkits" and "informational material". There is a reason the UK is seen as a soft touch.

The same (white) men angrily denying there’s an epidemic of violence against women and children, are suddenly all so happy to talk to about this. Hmm I wonder why.

Deflection.

My rapist should be off the streets. He's pure evil and a ticking timebomb in terms of his risk to the public. He's suicidal/homicidal and I am terrified.

@ChardonnaysBeastlyCat

Sorry! My apologies.

I'm from Rotherham, I was a teenaged girl when others from my cohort were being groomed, raped both vaginally & anally, sexually assaulted in ways women on this board cannot imagine, being impregnated , being tortured violently and sexually, being hooked onto drugs, being passed around between kebab houses and taxi firms, being shipped over county borders to be raped by others. Gang raped in so many cases. And then systematically let down by every authority you could imagine including Police, Social Services & the Labour Council because of who the girls were considered to be and because of who was doing the raping and torturing. Community Cohesion and the fear of causing racial tensions in Rotherham stopped those girls, my friends, from being given any form of protection and any ability of being able to move on. And it is still fucking happening. It isn't right wing to still be talking about, it isn't right wing to be pleased that it has been brought back into the public eye - not that it was sufficiently enough in the public eye to start with.

So many of you wanting to shut people up have absolutely no idea of the hell that was Rotherham and have no comprehension of why victims, their families and people on the periphery like me do not believe that the Government have the first idea of how to 'implement change'. If the Governments both past and present have a single fuck then it wouldn't have happened and it wouldn't be still happening.

NOT THE TELEGRAPH SUPPORTING THE ALT-RIGHT LOONS??!!

Whoever would have predicted it 🙄

There's already been an enquiry.

Time to ACT ON IT, rather than wasting yet more years on another one.

Which is a ball the Tories should have started rolling a while back.

As far as I'm concerned, this is just yet more division tactics, peppered with a ton of lies about Starmer from his time as head of CPS.

As an aside, these people DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT VICTIMS OF GROOMING GANGS. Their remit is stirring up hate for Reform support.

Fall for it if you want to. I won't be.

This whole rape gang thing is disgusting. For you to dismiss it as a "load of sh1t" is appalling.

Oldham Council is asking for a national inquiry as the issue is very wide spread and has national immigration level aspects to it. It is unfair to expect local Councils to be able to handle these things.

You are letting your hate of people like Musk overshadow preventing these crimes happening again. Frankly it's better for some people like you to hate than it is to want young disadvantaged girls to be safe. Shame on you.

I'd like to take an interest OP but I don't really like the messenger, I'm not a fan of the publication or their political bias so I'll give it a miss until the person raising awareness is someone I like.

MN is fucking shocking on this issue. Ann Cryer, Sarah Champion and Jack Straw all vilified but their own party and still there are people who would rather we didn't discuss it in case it harms Labours reputation.

I wonder when the victims, past and present, will become made the main concern.

It’s pathetic and sad conservatives are pretending to care just to win some votes.
I worked in education and social services before and during their 14 years of chaos. And I know that if anything their policies and their austerity etc, put children at greater risk. The political point scoring is disgusting.

Not to detract from Andrew Norfolk's work in the slightest but he was writing in 2011. He deserves a lot of credit but he wasn't the only person shouting about this in the mainstream media and he wasn't the first.

Julie Bindel had already published an investigation in the Sunday Times in 2007 - which she says she first offered to The Guardian but they were too squeamish to publish it.

And back in 2004 Channel 4's documentary Edge of the City was pulled on the advice of the Police who said that it would be used by the BNP for political gain.

Anna Hall who directed that documentary (and another on the topic) first heard about the grooming and trafficking of girls in Leeds nearly 30 years ago and has been investigating and documenting it ever since.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/21/woman-expose-sexual-abuse-telford

www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/20/channel4.broadcasting1

I hope you're being ironic.

@Dweetfidilove are you aware that Gordon Brown's government sent a dictat advising that the girls (aged 12) we are talking about were "making a lifestyle choice" and therefore it was not for the police to arrest any of the pakistani/bangladeshi men who were grooming and abusing them? What other group of perpetrators would you find a government doing that for?. And I speak as a police officer (at the time), working in Bradford. It is not racist to say that the labour councils in northern towns were/are absolutely politically motivated to not upset their electorate by calling out exactly what was going on. Everyone knew. And they know now. It is still going on as we speak. That is not to say other ra ea don't aside children. OF COURSE they do. We just don't have entire systems failing to acknowledge the issue because of their background

So what then? You want to allow this to continue and bury Labour’s reputation so much that the naive and impressionable working class vote back the conservatives…or heck even Reform? You really want that do you? Because that is what will happen if we don’t leave this conversation to the people who know what they are doing to sort it out, and get to the real issue which is undoing 14 year of Tory sabotage.

Ffs this is getting on my tits now.
im 40 and was groomed as a teenager in West Yorkshire. I was “lucky” to an extent as I ended up in a relationship with a man who exerted a lot of power over the other men who were grooming.
however in the early days I did see terrible things like a girl I vaguely knew going into a bedroom at a yard and the men queuing. I naively asked what was going on and was told she was “servicing” them one after the other.

truly awful. Unlike me she came from an unstable home and was far more vulnerable.
to this day I feel guilty for not comprehending the enormity of what happened ed to her.

my parents actually knew Anne Cryer (original whistle blower) on a personal level and a lot of Bradford lefties definitely did feel Anne was being racist. I genuinely think they just didn’t understand/ my parents definitely didn’t know the full truth of what was happening.

yes the men involved were British Born Pakistani however my real life experience is that not all BBP men were doing this and the vast majority utterly horrified.

people fucked up and some terrible crimes weren’t taken seriously however what is now happening is a fascist is using this to stir up hatred in the UK. This is also sickening.

wake up people these powerful men calling this out don’t give a fuck about young girls in the north of England.

sorry this was long. Needless to say quite triggering even all these years later and probably relatively outing but I feel so saddened by this

The second half of the article was interesting but I nearly didn’t get to it because the first half was just so badly written. The title about Elon Musk is very misleading but I suppose she didn’t get to choose that.

It’s absolutely terrible what has been happening. There seems to be a lot of focus on the race of the rapists with this being the explanation (certainly in this article) for a) why they did it and b) why they got away with it for so long. I’ve seen a lot of white faces on the awful articles that report the prosecution of these gangs too. Were they picked up more quickly, treated more harshly by the police? If not, why did they do it and why did they get away with it for so long? I fear with looking at race as the answer (and it clearly is one aspect), other things will be missed.

@namechangeGOT thanks for sharing your story. Yours is the voice people need to listen to. Not the politicians telling people they are "far right" for simply speaking up about the truth

So, working class people are thick and easily manipulated? It's fine, and in fact good, not to discuss the rape of girls if it means that labour's reputation will remain intact?

ever think that maybe more people are inclined to vote for parties on the right because of this kind of attitude?

And before you start, I'd never vote conservative or Reform.

Funny how the Tories and the far right suddenly care about poor, disenfranchised, vulnerable, often care experienced young women and girls when they are can use it to push an anti-multicultural agenda, but didn't care at all when they cut the services that support these girls and women to the bone.

The original reporting made it very clear that one reason this awful behaviour was allowed to go on so long was because the girls were seen by the police and the authorities as trouble, off the rails, not worth the effort, from workless broken homes etc rather than as children who needed help. So all that Telegraph rhetoric presenting them as pure innocents rings a bit hollow after that fact.

Your views are disgusting.

I'm sure the "naive and impressionable" working class don't need your fucking advice on how to vote.

Do you actually look in the mirror and think the person looking back is a good person?

@namechangeGOT
I am so, so sorry for everything you and those poor girls went through.
Maggie Oliver should be on every news programme and in every newspaper.
How anyone can make this about which papers they will or won't read is beyond me.
Mumsnet baffles me sometimes.
Nothing is more important than arresting the men who were allowed to perpetuate these atrocities in plain sight for decades.

You’re right @OneAmberFinch - there was a naivety at best and an outright ignorance/covering up at worst of the network involved in the mass exploitation. I’m only amazed that local authority hasn’t had its own Rotherham/oldam/telford day of reckoning.

Why do you want people to stop talking about it? Would you honestly rather it got swept under the rug yet again than “embolden the far right”, you sound like a pedo sympathiser. Actually you’re exactly what’s wrong with this country. Would rather everyone shut up and enabled people to get away with horrific callous crimes like raping children than admit that the “far right” have a point about something. Ghastly behaviour. You don’t have to share the same political opinions to admit that the girls who lived through this awful torture were not given the justice they deserve and something NEEDS to be done about it. My bloods boiling and if yours isn’t then you need to give your head a right good bloody shake

Well if the naive and impressionable working class ever listened to someone like me, we would still be upstanding members of the European Union right now.

But I am sure that to them I am just a ‘do goody, upper class toff’ so no skin off my nose I thank you.

@OneAmberFinch you make an excellent point. The taxi driver safeguarding training came to my mind yesterday when reading the court report from the murder trial of the 16 year old in Leeds who was killed with a machete. At the time of the murder, he was being driven round in a taxi to street deal drugs. Of course the driver knew what was going on. Safeguarding training clearly helped there!

I'm actually shocked to my core by the number of people who think protecting Labour's reputation and/or sticking it to the far right/tories are more important than those girls, and that we should all just shut up about it, and even more shocked that the people spouting these views genuinely think they are the kind and compassionate ones!

Nothing endears me to Labour more than being told not to worry my pretty little head about a little trifle like multiple gangs of child rapists emboldened by the inaction of those in power, and just let the grown-ups deal with it.

Bless. Hope Nigel is paying you well.