I’ve just found this thread. The sad thing is, I haven’t read the report (I will on a few minutes) but I don’t think anything in it will surprise me or be anything I don’t already know.
Like a few others on here, I grew up in a northern town in the 90s-2000s. We all knew it was happening, no one living in my town didn’t know about it!
I was approached by one of the men when I was aged 11. Because I knew the adults around me were saying they were bad men, and because I was from a loving home, and because I wasn’t particularly vulnerable, I wasn’t taken in by him. I managed to get away from him before anything happened.
Like pp have said, they get the young, good looking lads that are 18/19 to do the grooming at the start. The girls think they have a boyfriend that cares about them. That’s how it nearly always started.
We all used to see very young girls staggering out of cars with music blasting. We used to see the graffiti on the walls that the abusers wrote “Gemma is a slag” - they’d sometimes write the girl’s surname too to add to the humiliation.
I spent my childhood and teenage years being followed home by Asian men in cars (always Asian men, never white men), I’d have to walk fast ignoring them and hope they’d give up. When they didn’t, I’d have to literally run away down back alleys so they couldn’t catch me - being followed home was a daily occurrence where I lived.
I was always very aware I could never report any of this to the police. We all knew some of the abusers were police officers, solicitors, worked in children’s services, some of them were local councillors, they were heavily involved in political parties, they were local businessman, etc. They had a lot of power and did a lot of good things for the town, they were untouchable. It was an open secret.
If anyone ever dared to speak out about it, they were accused of being racist. Of course, accusations like that and speaking out publicly could cost people their jobs. It fuelled a lot of real racism actually - genuine people with genuine concerns but who didn’t have jobs they were afraid to lose would speak out and then the racists from other parts of the country would join forces and create it into a horrible race riot “get all immigrants out, whites only”.
That then shut down any possibility of sorting this very real issue out. The issue has never been “all immigrants are bad”, it’s been this very real problem where the government seemingly let any dickhead in the country with no consideration for how their culture and values fit in with the country. These dickheads have then had children and so we now have British born dickheads too that obviously can’t be deported anywhere. Not that anyone was being deported anywhere in the first place!
When I had my daughter, I moved far enough away so that she wouldn’t have to deal with what I did growing up. I still visit occasionally and from what I can gather, these abusive Asian men are even more embedded in the power structures than they were before. We all know some of their names.