Hypocrisy in how we frame abuse. UK grooming gangs vs Epstein

[Bowcup]

I’m struggling with the inconsistency in how these cases are discussed.

Epstein wasn’t a one-off predator. It was a vast, organised trafficking operation that ran for years, across multiple locations, with dozens (if not hundreds) of victims, recruiters, enablers, and powerful men in the background.

And the girls he targeted weren’t random.

They were overwhelmingly:

• white
• working-class
• often from care, unstable homes, or financial hardship
• chosen precisely because they were unlikely to be believed or protected

That victim profile is identical to what we hear about in UK grooming cases.

Yet the framing couldn’t be more different.

UK grooming gangs → race, culture, religion endlessly foregrounded
Epstein → “elite abuse of power”, “institutional failure”, “one monstrous individual”

What makes this harder to swallow is that most sexual exploitation in the UK is not carried out by minority groups at all.

According to ONS data and multiple serious case reviews, the majority of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation are white British men. That includes street grooming, online grooming, and organised exploitation. But those cases rarely become cultural flashpoints.

So why is it that:

• when offenders are from a minority background, it’s treated as a racial or cultural problem
• but when offenders are white, wealthy, or powerful, it’s treated as an individual moral failing?

Why wasn’t Epstein discussed as:

“White men exploiting vulnerable white girls is a systemic problem”?

Why didn’t we have wall-to-wall discussion about class, care leavers, and the disposability of poor girls?

It feels like race becomes the story when it’s available as an explanation, and disappears when it would force us to look at who actually holds power.

I’m not denying patterns matter. They do.
But if we’re serious about safeguarding, we can’t selectively apply that logic.

Because right now it looks less like protecting girls and more like choosing who we’re comfortable blaming.

The Epstein scandal is horrendous, and despite not being under our jurisdiction, we need to get to the bottom of who was involved and to what extent, and what they knew. And if the law allows, we should throw the book at them. And if not, the information needs to be out there for the public to know.

But none of this takes away the relevance of understanding why the rape gangs happened, are happening, and were not properly investigated, prosecuted, and the women and girls involved protected. Either denying the role of race and culture in committing these offences and failure to pay them proper attention or trying to draw equivalences with other outrages in an effort to distract and minimise is an insult to the victims and the general public.

But many people involved in the cover up of the grooming gangs were social workers, local councillors, Labour politicians etc. I think the fear of being accused of racism WAS the main factor that stopped them tackling it, rather than that they saw the girls as 'white trash'.

I've worked in the public sector and I've seen this mindset at first hand.

Sort of, but there is another danger of 'antibody repelling' the criticism for the same tribal reasons in reverse.

e.g. if Protestant unionists (even extreme protestant unionists) had been the main ones calling out Catholic church abuse, that was still not a reason for the church to hide it or for others to avoid confronting the Catholic connection.

I think also that often people in these institutions lean too hard on the idea that others are criticising in bad faith, because (perhaps entirely subconsciously) it provides a justification for the comfortable preference to cover up. "This is shameful and embarassing, and will create a lot of work for me" is not a rationale that sounds honourable (to oneself, to others). "I must protect the good work of the church from those wish harm on it", "I must protect community relations from the bigoted right", etc. sounds much better.

Mostly but not entirely.

Firstly, some of the alleged crimes were UK.

Even for others, the UK asserts international juridiction for serious sexual crimes especially against children. Straightforwardly for UK residents who offend overseas (even if the act would not have been illegal in that location), and through a slightly more stringent process for non-UK residents too if they come to the UK.

The grooming gang perpetrators have SPECIFICALLY SAID that they target victims by race and ethnicity as they are considered less valuable and less moral. They are a cultural issue, and that's why they are reported as a cultural issue

@Bowcup

Re fewer instances of minority children in care that's a whole other Novel to write.

1. some minorities promote cousin marriage which can lead to women feeling more trapped into a family system with related aunts and uncles and grandparents where they can't say no ,escape or have a proper free life and voice.
2. abuse within some minority community is hidden because of aforesaid tight inter family networks...aand an heavy onus on women being to blame for rape and any sexual abuse from men !
3. some minority have an elder or community speaker who speaks to police and others on behalf of their community many girls of course who can't speak English . A girl abused ran away and was returned to the community whose speaker said she was x y and z and she was swallowed up back into this community.

We are supposed to be an open transparent liberal country where children have rights , we all have rights.

Abd yet there is a two tier system in play that what a white girl can expect is different to those living in more traditional style minorities.

Yes, agreed. Saying it's just men and their toxic masculinity feels like another part of the cover up.

Casey has reported that religion and ethnicity did play a part in grooming gang behaviour. Also the extent of it is often downplayed. It happened in dozens of towns and cities.

Also with Epstein, the fact that he was rich and powerful played a part.

The specifics matter.

This is tosh.

And so reminiscent of the 1970s onward assertions that "if women were in power the world would be a better place/companies would be run better/etc" based on the outcomes from just a few (the very best) having some power.

And lo, women started to be in power much more, and they proved themselves to be just as venal, incompetent, and mendacious as men.

The post office scandal for instance...

If women were exclusively in power I can guarantee that there would be some perfectly happy to abuse, traffic, and profit from girls.

Lovely as the idea is, women are still people and some people are just sh*ts!!!

I'm willing to bet that average age of marriage, to pick one measure, and women's economic success are a +1 correlation.

No, women aren't the same. And BTW I note that in your fantasy, the victims are still female. Which is interesting and telling.

What specific traits do Jimmy Savile, Tim Westwood, Gary Glitter and Ian Hawkins have in common?

NAMIMALT (not all music industry men are like that)

When I say this I speak from direct experience of Asian/Pakistani men and boys in the 90's/2000's in Northern England. They had zero respect for white girls, whatsoever. And I mean zero.

At school, we reported them to the teachers. Nothing we can do, they said, it'll be seen as racist. That's what the teachers said.

Gangs of Pakistani boys, following girls around, verbal/physical abuse, daily occurrence. Then the white lads would get involved, loads of scrapping as you can imagine.

On the outside of the school it was the same - older Asian men in gangs grooming young, disaffected white girls.

Absolutely shameless.

Whether they are billionaires (Bill Gates) or a poor market stall holder in West Yorkshire, if they can, they will rape women.

That's the crux of the matter.

And where are the parents in all this? handing these children over to these men

Agreed.

OP, all I know is that the venn diagram between the men who protest outside the migrant hotels to protect the women and girls and those who bend over backwards to defend Trump who is a massive criminal predator is a big fat circle .
YANB entirely U.

Yes women still breed with the men outside the hotels and the trump supporters and then create victims and perpetrators and hand the children to the perpetrators of the crimes and the cycle continues

This, they aren’t they same dynamic. If Epstein and his perverts had primarily been raping black children for example that would have been more directly comparable.

Also I would be delighted to see anyone who raped a child with Epstein's help imprisoned (executed if I’m being completely honest). But this is americas problem to solve, ours is grooming gangs we need to focus in cleaning up whats going on in the UK and we have plenty of evidence that race and religion played a significant role in the offending against children in the UK.

I feel like theres a lot of effort to minimise the race/culture/religious aspect of grooming gang offending in the UK and frankly I think it’s a barrier to justice. Can’t solve a problem if you can’t name it. I’m asian, I don’t give a fuck if some people are uncomfortable about being honest, I care more about the safety of children in our society than people feeling stigmatised.

I had assumed (having tried not to read details) that the age of the victims of the grooming gangs was far lower than the Epstein victims who were late teens (I think?) That is relevant when we are a society that only recently had countdown timers for girls turning 16 in national newspapers. The power and celebrity aspect also allows people to put blame on the victims and minimise it. Weren't they enjoying the high life? They'll say. "They got to mix with royalty!"

It was also based on misogyny, sex and class that the girls were seen as disposable, worthless and that they didn't matter. By the authorities as well as by the perpetrators. The police and social services thought the girls were making "a lifestyle choice". Lots of parallels with the Epstein victims and how people saw them.

Look at how the mainstream press wrote about women and girls only five minutes ago. Horrific sexism, double standards and misogyny. All part of the same culture and it's global. Many men see certain women and girls as objects for them to abuse and dispose of, if they can get away with it.

According to ONS data and multiple serious case reviews, the majority of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation are white British men.

That's because the majority of men in the UK are white and British....

Baroness Casey's report found an overrepresentation of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds (specifically Pakistani) among suspects in areas Rotherham where 64% of suspects were of Pakistani ethnic background, and Greater Manchester where 52% of offenders were recorded as Asian.

Asians make up less than 10% of the UK population, and 2.5% are Pakistani...

This is where the discussion often gets muddled.

Yes, in some specific towns there is an overrepresentation of suspects from certain ethnic backgrounds relative to their local population. Baroness Casey is clear on that, and no one is disputing it.

But when you look at national data across all child sexual abuse and exploitation, white British men are not underrepresented. In many offence categories they are overrepresented compared to other ethnic groups.

ONS data, NSPCC figures, and Home Office analyses consistently show that:

• the majority of offenders are white British men
• this remains true when looking at rates across the whole system, not just a handful of towns
• group-based exploitation is a small subset of overall abuse, and concentrating only on that subset distorts the picture

So while per-capita arguments can highlight local clustering, they don’t justify turning those cases into a national cultural explanation, especially when the wider data shows white men committing the majority of offences and doing so across every context, including family abuse, online grooming, care settings, and organised exploitation.

That’s why I keep coming back to access and institutions.

Girls in care and working-class girls are the most exposed group nationally. Who exploits them depends largely on who has access to them in a given area, not on religion or ethnicity.

My issue is not acknowledging difficult statistics. It’s the way selective statistics are used to tell one type of story, while equally important national patterns are quietly sidelined.

Epstein said he didn’t want any black girls on Epstein island. He specifically targeted white girls. The same type of victim that the grooming gangs targeted.

His clients were also predominantly white. Thats the point, the rotherham groomers were predominantly from one ethnicity and their victims were predominantly from another. That is different from the UK grooming gangs issue which is a very specific thing.

The 'reporting' problem with the Asian grooming gangs was that it was covered up and denied to be real by police, agencies and the press precisely because of the race issue. So the problem was exactly the other way round from how you present it.