HELP! [Child rape gangs in Bradford]

[bradfordisdamned]

I know this is a horrible subject.

This news article from today shows how much it's being ignored here

After the death of Star Hobson, Bradford was stripped of its child protective services because it was completely unfit.

It continues to be an absolute disaster. I feel that this nightmare is being ignored because Bradford just so happens to be the city of culture for 2025. It's being ignored for many more reasons than that of course, but this is completely and utterly unacceptable. I think officials just don't want to be accused of racism and our children continue to suffer because of it.

Can you please help me make some noise with this? I am going to be writing to my MP, but this needs more attention. We need to put pressure on prominent people to get a public enquiry underway. Rejecting it is despicable. They just don't want to admit we have a major problem.

I am pasting the article here because unfortunately the newspaper site can be riddled with ads that sometimes make it unusable, but I didn't want to ask for Mumsnet help without providing sources.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable to want this enquiry to go ahead. I think Mumsnet will agree with me. Thank you in advance.

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Officials reject new calls for public inquiry on child abuse

A PUBLIC inquiry examining child sexual abuse in the Bradford area is "unlikely to provide us with any new learning", according to the district's safeguarding partnership.
In the House of Commons on Monday, Robbie Moore, Tory MP for Keighley and Ilkley, said "rape gangs and child grooming" have "haunted" the district "for decades" - and he again accused local leaders of refusing to launch an inquiry.

He added that he feared the scale of child sexual abuse and exploitation across the Bradford district would "dwarf that of Rotherham".

In 2014, a report by Professor Alexis Jay described how more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian males in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, between 1997 and 2013.

Phillipa Hubbard, of the Bradford District Safeguarding Children Partnership, responded to Mr Moore's remarks by saying: "The national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which was published in October 2022 and to which Bradford contributed, has made it very clear that this is a national issue.

"Like many local authorities up and down the country, we know that agencies in our district have made mistakes in the past.
"This is why we commissioned an independent review into child sexual exploitation which was published in 2021 so that all the agencies in our district who work with children can implement the learning from past cases.

"The review was extremely detailed and thorough, and was written by an independent author. It looked in-depth at local and national learning and best practice.
"In addition to the review, our multi-agency safeguarding team undergoes regular independent scrutiny from Ofsted and the partnership also publishes an annual report, which anyone can read and which is open to public scrutiny.

"All the local agencies who are working in our district to keep children safe are committed to continued development and improvement.
"The view of our partnership remains that a public inquiry would cost a huge amount of money, use precious officer time and is unlikely to provide us with any new learning that would better-protect children from being abused."

In response, Mr Moore said: "This is a complete and utter dereliction of duty.
"The Council says its 2021 review was 'detailed', but it focused on just five children.
"Meanwhile, the Rotherham inquiry focused on the experiences of over 1,400 children.
"The idea that a Bradford inquiry would bring about no new information is an outright falsehood - and I am completely shocked by these comments.

Many of the abusers are second generation Pakistani, they have been born and brought up in the UK.

For those who emigrated from Pakistani I’m sorry but I don’t buy your argument that the alien society is in some way an excuse.

These men came over from a highly misogynistic and uneducated part of Pakistan and saw their opportunity to abuse.

The comparison to a westerner moving to Kyoto is insane.

The problems have gone way beyond communities discussing what they want from each other.

You have also left out the other factors:

:incompetence in the councils , within the police and schools

Children in care not being protected

the liberal media giving sanitised accounts of the court cases.

I thought that Alexus Jay had said that abusers were not more from one ethnicity than another, including those who have acted together? They all need firm treatment, but with no help from the pussy grabbing USA, and its websites which allow all sorts of vice to go on.

I am very glad to see this thread is still here. I was afraid it wouldn't be.

Someone mentioned the Yorkshire Ripper who is now dead thank fuck, my mum was a young lady when he was at the peak of his violence. All the women were told not to go out alone ever, and the group of women she went out with lived a little bit further away from where she did. They all made sure she got home safely before they left. She told me it was a terrifying time and he got away with so much because of the dim view men had for sexworkers, although they didn't call them that then.

We have a male violence problem. It affects everyone, women, girls, boys, other men who are considered to be weaker, trans people, everyone. All men are a problem until they do something to address the violence of other men of any group, but the ones at the top don't care, as we can plainly see. Girls who are seen as disposable because they are going into care, are extremely vulnerable, from poorer backgrounds etc are nothing but meat to these men, and we can argue with each other until the cows some home about this. This is also part of the bigger picture, because if we are arguing about the intersections of this, it means we distracted by doing it.

We need action.

Women and girls know all too well how tough it is to live under patriarchy, and every time we say enough is enough, all we ever hear is NOT ALL MEN and THAT'S RACIST and YOU'RE JUST MAN HATERS etc etc ad nauseam ad infinitum.

Sorry I know I'm blathering here I'm just so angry and frustrated.

It’s not about looking at all abusers as a whole and then looking at their ethnicity to see which ethnicity abuses the most.

it’s about a specific issue - Pakistani men of mipuri origin acting in gangs to traffic and rape young poor girls in post - industrial towns.

Trump and Musk are not the issue.

The issue is that this abuse is still going on after the initial enquiry.

Oh god reading that piece by Alice Thompson made stuff come flooding back from when I was working in Bradford city centre as a teen.

I previously mentioned how a gang of men came into a shop I was working in and said awful things to me in Punjabi. They were relentless. They terrorised the entire shop because they were unhappy about our refusal to serve them. They would come in and smoke, blowing it all over the clothing. They would put the cigarettes out on the walls and clothes to damage them. They told me and the other girls they they knew where we lived because they followed us home and we were going to get raped. They said they were going to make us call them daddy and rape our mothers. They destroyed the alarm system on the door. We called the police and they said they couldn't do anything.

My mum was also working in the centre and she collected me every night so we could go home together and it was terrifying. I left the shop because I couldn't bear to work in there anymore. We asked the shop chain to put security guards in, but they wouldn't. They said the manager should handle things but he was fucking useless.

Other men were also a problem. They always came in groups and they were harassing female staff to ask them to go out with them. Said they would buy us nice things and drive us around in expensive cars. It didn't matter if we said we had boyfriends, they kept pestering and tried to lure us away on lunchbreaks if we were sat outside on one of the benches. I learned to stay inside at lunchtime because it was safer.

I went to work in an office job that was on the outskirts of the city centre which was safer at the time, and mum had left to go and work in Leeds. I would have to walk back into the centre to get a bus home because the office wasn't on the direct route the buses went through. The interchange was always bustling during the day as it would be because it was a travel hub, but if I was working a late shift, it was much quieter. One night I was walking through the interchange and there was a man sitting on the opposite side of the concourse and he saw me sit down. My bus was actually at the stop with the doors closed because it wasn't time for it to leave. The driver was sitting there reading a paper and saw me walk up. He looked away and I just sat down and waited for the doors to open as I would any other time.

The man sitting across the concourse came over and started talking to me and asking me to go out with him and I kept telling him no and to leave me alone. He reeked of weed and kept offering me a spliff. The bus driver eventually opened up the door and told me to get on, glaring at the man who was bothering me. He wasn't supposed to let me on early, but I'm grateful that he did because the other man wouldn't leave me alone, and it was past 8pm at night, and we didn't have mobile phones then.

I'm going to stop now because I'm getting upset, but I have so many other personal experiences I could share, all horrible.

https://archive.ph/DYfsm

Article about Keighley

In general, abuse is not linked to race or class or education.... Unfortunatelly, we have seen repeated rapes and abuses from all sorts. Epstein, Westein, the catholic church...
But, if there is an specific issue unfolding, with characteristics associated to race, religion, class, status... whatever, that gives us a clear pattern, we must talk about it openly. We need to point the finger to the specific issue, warn our children yet about this specifics. It is because this doubting and double checking and questioning so which leads to the fear of being accused of .... = inaction! Inaction in such a grievious matter
= harm to children.
First thing is to snap out of it and say it all. Otherwise people will keep quiet.

I feel one way of tacking this is identifying at risk girls, eg in a town where there is known gangs, or girls in care, and to educate them early in primary school.

If there are reports of the men outside a school or children’s home then quickly put a stop to it.

if the girls were protected the gangs would not target them. As it stands they know that no one cares about these girls.

THIS!!!

ENOUGH with the whataboutism

We KNOW WHITE MEN ARE BLOODY AWFUL

Honestly if schools asked for volunteers to stand guard outside schools to protect young girls from predatory men, I'd be there in a heartbeat with my dog.

2021 census said that people identifying as “British Pakistanis” represent 2.7% of the population. “British Asians” represent 8.6% of the population.

In 2017 an evidence based review by the Quilliam Founation conducted by British Pakistani researchers showed that 84% of people convicted for the offence of gang grooming were “British Asian”, predominantly men of Pakistani descent.

“Gang grooming” is different to paedophile activity where the perpetrators are almost all white.

Exactly. Well said.

Is there an actual copy of the report anywhere? I can see a press release about it, but no actual details.

Thank you @rumblegrumble and @Itsverycold . Rumble is particularly helpful. I know when I have travelled the world as a solo woman, there are countries I felt safe and others where I was seriously afraid of sexual violence. So there is definitely a cultural component - but obviously it is much more complex or everyone from that place would do those things. Seems like a new enquiry could implement the findings of the first and then do some more localized investigation and that there needs to be a rule that local investigations must be done by independent reviewers and not anyone employed by that organization.

It’s not a small subset of the problem, it’s thousands and thousands of girls. There isn’t a bigger child rape gang bigger than what we are talking about here. And a local inquiry into just one small town won’t cut it.

The inquiry doesn’t need to take years - they investigator need to walk the streets where the victims walked, and listen to them.

i despise making this political but I will bite. Every single one of the towns and cities this happened in was run by a local Labour government. The red wall fell mainly after the next GEs after the scandal broke and then people in these towns started voting Tory. It’s literally on the Wikipedia page for Rotherham.

labour lost a lot of votes in high Muslim areas because of Palestine. There was then a rise in independent candidates standing on pro Palestine policies. I don’t think it was the CSE that caused the vote change.

No one is framing rape as a race issue.

We are discussing a subset of Pakistani men and an issue specific to certain areas of the UK.

No one is scapegoating ‘brown men’

As you say, the issue is misogyny, these men are from a very misogynistic area in Pakistan. They were not prevented by committing these crimes because of the misogyny of the police and the councils of the area.

You don’t seen to understand the issue at all. If you live in the one of the areas as you say, did you grow up there ? In a working class area ? Because if you did I find it strange that you don’t understand the issues being discussed here.

The answer lies in protecting victims and potential victims.

Educate at risk girls at a young age.

Strengthen their prospects and make their education a priority.

Put money into social services so that the most vulnerable girls who are at home but being neglected or who are in care are protected.

Have no tolerance for cat calling, verbal abuse, loitering on the street and harassment of women.

Educate teachers and the staff of care homes, punish for turning a blind eye.

It is the victims that matter.

Inspirational TV programs will not help the victims of child abuse. We are talking gang rape and trafficking here, the Pakistani diaspora being underrepresented on tv is not the priority.

I think all girls (and boys, especially focusing on consent) should be educated on healthy relationships, and what is exploitative. Education should include what to look out for in terms of grooming and how to raise concerns.

I didn't receive this education in school, and my teenager hasn't either.

They are educated on this information but the responsibility should not be placed on children to spot grooming which professionals fail to spot. Kids will likely fail to spot it even when educated on it and it isn't fair if we put the lessons to them that now they know they can avoid being raped as that is not how things work. Also they will be less likely to raise concerns if they feel it was their duty to spot it before it happened as they will feel they have caused it by not spotting it. We should not be teaching kids that it is their responsibility to not get raped. A victim blaming education will not work. We need one that is supportive of victims and educates them but that places them as not being at fault if it does happen.

You have completely misinterpreted my post. I said nothing about victim blaming, and if you see my earlier posts on the thread, I am wholly supportive of victims. I find it quite shocking that you would interpret my above post, regarding education, as 'victim blaming'. I have said nothing of the sort.

This is part of prevention, as part of a multi-faceted approach.

Unfortunately education is not universal, as mentioned, my teenager currently in school has not received it. I also did not.

I didn't say you were victim blaming. I was commenting on how the education system should teach it but they do not. It is a victim blaming education system where they get taught 'what did the child do wrong' or 'what should she have noticed?' When that isn't how it should be taught. It is also retraumatising for many who are suffering it and having to sit there and be told what did the child do wrong.

RSE is all over the shop I agree Im surprised that grooming even online safety etc hasnt been part of yoir childs education at all. They should be taught about it in different subjects that groomers exist. She/he may get it in future. I wasn't taught it as it was classed as child prostitution back then. In fact the definition still uses that theory and puts the child as to blame within which isn't helpful.

We need to start with the definition and then once we have a definition that isn't victim blaming then education might follow that isn't.

Prevention would work better if we held them to account. Where I live was at level 2 out of 4 at safeguarding and was all about punishing the child and taking their phones off them etc. It is now at level 4 after I specifically said it was disgusting it is at level 2 and challenged why countless times.

We need to hold these ppl to account. It isn't an entry level crime. If we held them to account before for other crimes that came before we may prevent these.

You are talking about flaws with the education system. I'm sure they are many. It did come across as accusing me of 'victim blaming'.

For example, I had no education about safeguarding whatsoever. I'm in my 30s, and while I was at school there were 2 teachers who the pupils knew were peadophiles. I didn't know how or who to raise it to. I told my mum, who tried to raise it with the school, but nothing happened. Clear education and clear safeguarding could have prevented further victims.

I have asked my daughter's school extensively for better education regarding pshe and citizenship, especially considering the racism that she has experienced at school, but nothing has improved.