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.

But race is not being factored in at all . That’s the OPs point. Some people are treated as a group to be tarred by the same brush.
When the perpetrator is brown -blame them all!
When the perpetrator is white- what an awful individual!

Precisely

You are absolutely right OP. The grooming gangs are apparantly a problem with Muslims. Despite no Muslim women being involved and non Muslim men also engaging in child sex exploitation. It's a deliberate tactic to shift the focus away from male patterned behaviour, so that we only look to subsets of men as perpetrators, seeing their ethnicity or religion as the common factor rather than their sex. Then to encourage us to view white men as safer, preferable and superior to others.

Either you haven’t read any of the responses or you haven’t understood them. For the grooming gangs, ethnicity and culture were what motivated the crimes (they thought white/sikh girls ‘deserved it’), facilitated the crimes (they acted together in kinship groups) and meant the crimes were ignored (authorities didn’t act for fear of being seen as racist).

For Epstein et al, ethnicity wasn’t a factor in motivating, facilitating or covering up the crimes. The relevant factors were money and power, which have been widely discussed. They were all rich, famous men who could hide their crimes easily and were arrogant enough to think they’d get away with it.

Why do you want people to discuss ethnicity when it wasn’t a relevant factor in the crimes?

Are you suggesting that there is something inherent to being Pakistani and/or Muslim that 'motivated' (your word) these men to commit the crimes? Because what you've spoken of that links to ethnicity and culture (choice of victim, ways of operating) relates to the methods used by the men. It doesn't demonstrate that their ethnicity and culture predisposed them to commit the crimes.

For the Pakistani rape gangs to have operated for so long and be so widespread, of course it needed the complicity of women in that community. And men. The communities closed ranks. If you knew that your brother, father, cousin and husband were all participating, and you keep quiet and defended them, and justified it, you're not too far behind them in terms of your evil. Goodness me, a man convicted of the repeated rape of underage girls had his adult daughters screaming that they love him as he was taken down to the cells from the dock. Christ I'd never want to lay eyes on a family member who had done that, I'd burn their photos and try to pretend they never existed.

Yes, this is a male problem, but lets not pretend that the womenfolk in those communities were all appalled and cooperated with investigations.

But the Rochdale grooming didn't take place withing the mosque sector, like the abuse in Catholicism. It wasn't happening in close connection to religion.

The girls were being targeted in the streets, not because they came into contact with these men in the context of Islam.

So it is a bit different.

But it's interesting that nobody mentions Epstein's religion? Or the religion of his co-conspiritors. I suppose his religion was money.

I think the Epstein abuse its about well known individuals that are also stinking rich - the media is picking out the individuals because their names mean something to ordinary people... it's spinning a story and click bait.

The grooming gangs consists of unknown individuals therefore they are reported on their common denominator. Individual names don't mean anything to the general public. Their lives are more ordinary on the surface, so less of a downfall, less click bait.

The sad thing about all of this is that there isn't any consideration for the victims. Many are unknown and will never see justice. Yet all that abuse gets dragged through the media. Some will be re living this awful time of their life and have nowhere to turn. That's what we really should be focusing on.

Totally not justifying it, it is disgusting and I myself am an abuse survivor. BUT..factoring in religion where literally these girls are seen as the cause not the victim by these offenders - it's their fault for dressing a certain way or even just for being there.

Our country is often targeted by overseas predators because of our lack of moral framework. Many muslim girls have to adhere strictly to a code of behaviour, ours are available.

The overall problem, imho, is that many of our kids become disposable. There is a lack of love and care and they are just either shoved in homes and forgotten about or just left to their own devices. Maybe we, as a society, all need to work on ourselves first!

Speculation about the possible collusion of women in cases of male sex crimes doesn't change the fact that no Muslim women were implicated in the crimes of the grooming gangs. My point was not to suggest that women never fail to expose or challenge male sex criminals, clearly this is not the case. My point was that if this was a crime motivated by being Pakistani and Muslim, rather than by being male, we would have seen equal numbers of Pakistani and Muslim women as men found guilty. We did not. Not one woman was found guilty of any sex crime, so obviously the characteristic of relevance here is sex, not ethnicity or religion.

I do think that this has more to do with culture than it does the actual religion. Perpetrators use religion as justification, with white, troubled girls being disposable in their sick minds. So it is not as simple as Islam permitting systematic rape of white girls, but a predominantly Kashmir heritage group using religion as a justification.

Of course this is a male crime. And the males in question must be brought to justice without any regard to community relations and perceived racism.

And while the wives, sisters and mothers didn't directly participate, they have their own culpability, if not in law, then morally. As does the whole community that allowed these creatures to carry on.

Long term, we cannot shy away from the attitudes of communities that display such distain for vulnerable young girls.

To put in crudely, on a scale of 1-10, the problem of male sexual violence to women is a 3 in the general population, and a fucking 12 if these rural Kashmir communities, and we need to stop sticking our heads in the sand and just say its a male problem, because its dishonest even if it gives our collective white guilt some comfort.

Yes, as I said in the post you quoted, they had an antipathy towards white/non-muslim girls: "they thought white/sikh girls ‘deserved it’". That has been proven. It's not inherent to being Muslim or Pakistani per se, but was endemic in that particular Pakistani culture.

Nothing inherent in their DNA, but it is unavoidably apparent that their is something inherent in the culture.

So, to be clear, are you saying that there is something inherent to being Pakistani and Muslim that makes a man more likely to be a rapist and pedophile than a white man? And that this exists in men from this demographic regardless of context?
Because I would say, difference in offending rates in different societies reflect the difference in protections afforded to women and children and the levels of deterrents to men in those societies, rather than the predisposition of men of a certain ethnicity to be a sexual criminal. As we see if we look back at white British history at how women and children were treated before it became illegal for men to do so.
So basically, men, regardless of ethnicity or religion, who are so inclined will abuse women and children to the extent the society they inhabit permits.
It's that uncomfortable truth that we seem to want to stick our heads in the sand about. And telling ourselves it's a particular type of man, from a country that isn't here, with a skin colour and a religion that's different from ours helps.

Nothing in the DNA, but as a product of their culture, yes, a man from a culture originating in rural Kashmir, per capita, is far more likely to have participated in the organised abuse of vulnerable white girls (also Sikh) than men from other backgrounds.

The fact that this doesn't fit the 'appressed minority' narrative is extremely uncomfortable, and the squeamishness is a large part of the reason that these offenses were not properly tackled.

You’re straw-manning the argument. The perpetrators had negative views about white and non-Muslim women. That’s why ethnicity and religion matter here. They were part of family and cultural groups that shared similar beliefs and thus facilitated the abuse, that’s why culture matters. This culture is not shared by all Muslims or all Pakistanis, of course.

A lot of the deterrents you talk about relate to social and cultural norms, not the rule of law. The reason British men tend not to abuse in large kinship groups is not because the police prevent it but because it is not culturally supported. The reason British men don’t usually target ethnic minority girls is because there isn’t a culture of viewing them as ‘sluts’. Obviously that is not to say British men don’t abuse because of course they do.

I think a lot of the girls in the reports pointed to repeated use of racial slurs against them, it was extremely common. Clealry when people from group X target people from group Y specifically then yes race is clearly a motivator. Two skih women were raped recently and in both instances racial slurs were used, we don’t ignore it, it was clearly and correctly identified as racially aggravated crime. We shouldn’t ignore it when victims also believe their race was a factor in their targeting in the grooming gang cases. The perpetrators also brought up religion during abuse and during sentencing as well (including accusing everyone of Islamaphobia).

I’ve read some of the court papers, it’s painful to read what happened to these children. I encourage people who have the stomach to do so to read them to fully understand how much race played a part in the abuse.

I don’t think anyone would seriously claim that all muslim or Pakistani men are rapists because it is clearly not true. But this type of specific offending sees a massive overrepresentation of Pakistani men involved. Much like knife crime in London is predominantly black kids as the victims and perpetrators. Stating the obvious is not racism. It may be uncomfortable but it’s not racism.

Right. So a man in a place where its easier to commit sex crimes is more likely to commit sex crimes? We know this already from the historical behaviour of White British men in our society before laws changed, and of the behaviour of white British men today when they are in countries with laxer laws, or like Epstein, are wealthy and privileged enough to feel above the law.
Still not getting the causal link between ethnicity and predisposition to sex crime that you think we should be discussing.

If this was the case you would see equal numbers of white/sikh/nepali/black men offending with family members at similar rates per capita. But you don’t, you see this specific crime dominated by Pakistani men. Thats a fact. If you have other facts about group based offending that prove that wrong I will absolutely retract anything I’ve said.

That is noteworthy as an outlier. Why is this is the case is the question. Why is it that one ethnicity dominates this type of offending.

Well thats the question isn’t it, why are pakistani men overrepresented in the statistics in relation to group based offending given that care homes operate all over the country. These children are as accessible to men from any other race or religion as they are to Pakistani men.

Well, that happened under the American system, so we weren’t involved up until recently. We have no control over what America does.

The so called grooming gangs were in the UK, so we should have been involved earlier - but weren’t.

Any other UK cases should be investigated promptly, but often aren’t.

But, yes, having worked in Child Protection, I’d say all minors should be protected - by parents and the state. 🤷‍♀️

Both fail miserably at times.

So ethnicity and religion influenced the choice of victim and the method of committing the crime. But not the motivation to actually commit the crime itself. Which is the important part. Unless you're suggesting the crime was somehow worse because certain girls were targeted rather than chosen at random, and because the men concerned worked with members of their family rather than in groups organised around other things (such as being part of an elite, or supporting a football team, or sharing a postcode)?

If you think a certain group of girls are asking to be abused because of their ethnicity/culture, you are more likely to be motivated to abuse them. It wasn't really seen as abuse because these girls were thought of as either asking for it or enjoying it or subhuman and therefore not worth thinking about.

I think you're asking, 'aren't all men motivated to abuse?'. The answer to that is yes, as a class (obviously not all men) men may be motivated to abuse girls. But any human is more motivated to indulge themselves at the expense of their victim if they have classed that victim as deserving of poor treatment or as subhuman. You only have to read Lord of the Flies to see this phenomenon in action.

In this specific context, the predisposition that any man might have to abuse was increased in these men because they had access to girls who were seen as 'less than', because of their race.

So ethnicity and religion influenced the choice of victim and the method of committing the crime. But not the motivation to actually commit the crime itself

I've looked at stats from various European countries that do record crimes, including sexual offenses, by nationality (obviously in the case of the grooming gangs, many perpetrators had naturalised, so that wouldn't necessarily show up).

It's definitely the case that men from different countries commit sexual offenses at different rates - countries like Sudan, Afghanistan etc commit these offences at far higher rates than eg German or Swedish men, and I don't think that's going to suprise many people given the difference in attitudes towards women and girls in these cultures compared to European ones.