Abuse of hundreds of girls as young as ten covered up by police and social services

[edam]

today's Times - sadly behind a paywall but you can see the first par here - has a major investigation into appalling, widespread organised rape and abuse of girls in South Yorkshire.

Not only did police and social services fail to help the girls, let alone prosecute the offenders, they actually charged victims and their parents - one girl was charged with using drugs, while the men in the room with her went free, while one father who tried to get his daughter back was charged with racial harassment, ffs. AND his poor daughter, who had been drugged, was charged with assault. Another parent was charged with breach of the peace, another girl - only 13 - was arrested for a public order offence and convicted, while the men went free.

It beggars belief. The Times has seen more than 200 confidential documents from Rotherham detailing the crimes which were often not investigated - even though police and social services knew full well who the perpetrators were. But they were more concerned with hushing up the heritage of the offenders - Pakistani, Kurdish, Iranian and Kosovan gangs and families - than investigating hideous crimes.

In one case, police in Bristol rescued two girls who had been kidnapped but South Yorkshire police (where they lived) didn't even question them.

Neither the police nor the council apologised, btw. Oh no, the council just says ofsted think they are great and 'some work with individuals did not lead to court cases for a variety of reasons'. S Yorks Police say now they have eight officers looking into child sexual exploitation and they are 'a leading force in safeguarding vulnerable children'.

No, I'm not victim blaming, edam. That's why I am focused on the idea of educating both sexes and especially boys who are the main culprits. I'm into telling boys to "keep your penis away from between girls' legs, butt cheeks or lips" more than I'm into telling girls to "keep your legs together".

Which is why Nadine Dorries' abstinence suggestion for girls only was fucked up and it being voted down wasn't really bad like I first thought it was although pro-family groups were upset. It would just have perpetuated already serious and dangerous gender disparities.

Ok, extro, glad to have your clarification. You have an unusual perspective.

Extro, your views are interesting but there might be another thread in which to discuss abstinence and promiscuity.

This thread is not about the innocent exploring of teenagers, this thread is about the dark side of sex - sexual exploitation of children, this is about middle aged men exploiting vulnerable girls, and using their bodies to make money for their mates. It is about the systems which allow such Dickensian scenes to take place in the UK in 2012.

You're a feminist edam, is it really so unusual for you to hear someone saying that boys should be taught to control themselves and the sexism promoting a blind eye to abuse of girls and women should be challenged in schools?

I thought this was a mainstream pro-woman perspective.

What achillea said, with bells on.

Extro, achilllea's made the point - this thread isn't about teenagers having relationships with other teenagers, it's about adults abusing them. Teaching teenagers sex is wrong won't prevent that and may make it even less likely that victims will seek help.

I know the difference between teenage sexual experimentation and exploitation. I'm not dumb, if you haven't noticed.

And teaching teenagers sex outside marriage is wrong could be done in the context of respect, surely? It's not exclusive to teaching about coercion and abuse and telling them to report any older man who tries to get them or their underage friends to be sexual.

You seem a little confused Extrospketiv.

You are arguing that Muslim parents withdraw from mainstream education because it is too permissive.

That might be so, but it doesn't follow from that that those children educated in Islamic schools are disproportionately growing up to be abusers of white girls.

I really don't see any correlation at all.

There are obviously sound reasons to try and keep British-Pakistani children in mainstream schools, and perhaps sex education concerns might be a way of doing that, but it's not going to change the attitudes whereby Pakistani girls and women are expected to preserve their honour so Pakistani men seek an outlet for their sexual energies in white women, from a culture (white British where such attitudes are largely or completely outmoded, depending on the individual's family background.

Apparently only 3% of British Muslim children go to Muslim schools anyway. Whether it is more popular for Muslim girls or Muslim boys is obviously irrelevant given that 90%+ are going to mainstream state schools, so these abusers are not coming out of madrasahs.

I do get what you are saying Extro and I think it's an important viewpoint but when people are not educated about sex, which seems to be what some portion of the muslim community want to avoid, then it becomes something that is not talked about and leaves people more open to abuse.
Promoting abstinance while at the same time educating about contraceptives, disease prevention and other sex related issues will not bring the segregated community any closer to the mainstream.

That 3% will go up big time if parents don't win these battles against schools which deny their morals or attack their rights to know what's going on with their children.

10,000 parents just in Tower Hamlets signed a petition by a relatively small organisation (SPUC)- not even the Muslim Council of Britain- against explicit sex ed in primary. The next step is huge campaigns against certain areas of cities where secondary teachers are attacking parental rights. I know, because I'm in touch with plenty of Muslims and one of the campaign leaders. They are getting more and more disillusioned.

I am not saying abusers come out of madrassahs or education in Islamic schools- not qualified to say either way. I respect these schools very deeply. I support them. I would prefer if mainstream schools did not do things which drive parents to setting them up or home-educating and will increasingly do so in future.

And the solution to "outmoded" (I am white British with two parents very much sex positive and very experienced before they married at 35 and 33 respectively, and reject this culture in favour of abstinence until marriage as a moral standard, I would like to encourage more white Britons to do the same.) is to bring back traditional values for whites and all young people in this country, rather than trying to oppose the strong morals of ethnic communities.

Pakistani men wouldn't have such an easy "outlet" (I'm talking adult men with adult white women here, nothing to do with abuse or rape) if white women were not so prepared to be promiscuous. Changing white British and European culture over time towards a better moral standard is certainly possible. Not everyone will comply, and I'm not intending to try to force them to- I'd just like it to be much more popular than it is now

And i hope they do it as well

I thought the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children campaigned against abortion, not sex education.

I think we also need to take a sober look at particularly how sexualised messages in popular culture effectively help to "groom" girls in such a way that they are perhaps more susceptible now to sexual exploitation than ever before.

I think what is needed is to take a long hard look at the messages boys are getting and how sexualised messages in popular culture affect the way they view themselves relative to girls and women. Girls are not doing this to themselves. They are not sexualising themselves and pimping themselves out. They become the victims of men who see themselves as an owner class and who see the girls as property, a collection of handy orifices on legs. What are the messages these men have absorbed about women? This is the question we need to ask.

Extrospektiv -- victim blaming much there?

Victim blaming where math? I have carefully made it clear that I want to challenge sexism and the culture of male entitlement, and that teaching must focus on boys (and the men they will grow into) keeping their penises away from women, not girls/women keeping their legs closed. So abstinence as the ideal, but a feminist version with a very strong message that girls and women were not put on Earth to be used as males' sex toys- built into a wider package of measures for integrating all into a non-sexist society.

I said teens/preteens who men were attempting to victimise should report it, not suggesting any of the usual "don't go out alone/wear short skirts/drink alcohol" routine.

The only females I blamed were adult white women who consensually gave themselves up to hypocritical Asian men who are repressing the women in their own culture. Whether women believe in abstinence until marriage on moral grounds or not, women should be saying "NO, I will NOT sleep with you, going out on the town looking for whites to get drunk and satisfy your lust then telling your daughters and wives you'll batter then if they disobey you and going on in mosques about morality on Fridays. You respect my sisters in your community and I might consider you." If women were not so available the abusive men may not then see white teenagers and children as sex objects either, lowering abuse and the amount of hypocrisy these men can get away with.

Pakistani men wouldn't have such an easy "outlet" (I'm talking adult men with adult white women here, nothing to do with abuse or rape) if white women were not so prepared to be promiscuous.

and:

If women were not so available the abusive men may not then see white teenagers and children as sex objects either, lowering abuse and the amount of hypocrisy these men can get away with.

both indicate that the poor bewildered Muslim men do not have some sort of problem that could be called racism when it comes to sexual morality.

What you are suggesting is that they would have an easier time keeping their trousers on if non-Muslim women and girls were more like Wahabi inspired Muslim women and girls.

Which is to absolve the men of responsibility for their own actions.

Where this all ends up of course is the necessity for 'decent' women to wear a burkha. Because for some men in the Muslim world nothing less is acceptable and anyone not wearing one is fair game.

Extro you would need a huge cultural shift for that to happen and in my opinion would need to take down the patriarchy first.
Everything in modern western society is geared towards telling women that they only have value if they are capable of being appealing, pretty, well dressed, fluffy.
I don't really get your comment on modern white women who give themselves up to asian men, this thread was started about vulnerable girls who have been abused.
It is a basic pyschological fact that if you are starved of affection you will be more likely to respond to people who are out to manipulate you.
This is about more than instiling abstinance in society, though I do agree it would be wonderful if we could downgrade the sexual messages that are happening today.
This is about the care system, children being born who are then not given the loving support of two parents, who are then left vunerable and unprotected in the places where society places them after being removed from the parents. And then the failiure of society to ensure that people who take advantage of these vunerable members of society are punished appropriately and in a manner which will deter others from doing the same.

Well all I'm speaking about is white adult women not having promiscuous sex with them. Your extrapolations, math- and given my series of pro-woman, anti-porn culture/sexualisation/objectification/sexist double-standards posts on this thread it should be obvious that's not what I believe. I didn't say they should not wear Western clothes, or drink "out on the town" in the first place or anywhere else, or do other things these men consider as signs of sexual availability or consent. I believe the men are wrong for seeing these things as signs of availability and there is no fuckin' doubt they are wrong to believe anything but CONSENT is consent. And all I say is- women should not give that consent to casual sex with misogynist troglodytes! Even if they disagree with my moral ideology that casual sex is wrong full stop, their stopping would help to change these men's attitudes.

That doesn't make rape or child abuse victims responsible AT ALL and it doesn't make the women responsible for abuse, only for encouraging the stereotypes.

In the same way, black men who join violent gangs in the inner cities and commit crime encourage stereotypes of blacks, but they are not responsible for white people's racist attacks or attitudes; that remains the fault of the racist for failing to see that most black people don't fit the stereotype and the system is biased against them.

And they're rapists and/or child abusers to me, not poor bewildered men. Seriously putting words in my mouth which would never come out of it.

Are you saying that "reverse-racism" is actually a thing? Given that whites are the privileged and majority ethnicity in Britain and Muslims/Asians aren't.

Yes, I believe that every child should grow up in a loving home with a mother and father. Part of my traditional moral values.

Yes, where circumstances exist that make this impossible, the state should endeavour to provide something as close to a loving family as possible.

Family values and safeguarding children can coexist with better standards of (especially male) sexual self-control. Nothing is mutually exclusive and all would help.

It is not just 'promiscuous white British women' who experience horrible treatment at the hands of Muslim men.

There is an epidemic of sexual harassment in Egypt, so much so that women staged a march to protest it but the march was ambushed by men who assaulted and groped the marching women in broad daylight.

Racism is racism. Misogyny is misogyny. Bigotry is bigotry. Warped sexuality is warped sexuality.
When you get all four mixed up together and given a veneer of acceptability by alleged fidelity to a holy book it is not a pretty sight no matter who the perpetrator is -- and yes anyone can be a racist, misogynistic bigot.

I know that Muslims oppress their own women worldwide, in most Western countries that don't have the spine to do something about it, and as a permanent way of life in those countries they have control of.

Here we are talking about Britain. And the fact there is a difference in morality between most Muslim women and most white British women, with white Britons tending to reject abstinence-based views. The Muslim men then extrapolate from the majority of women here being subscribed to the sexual revolution (which is a male-centred, male-benefitting revolution that only seems pro-woman to some because of the outright patriarchy it replaced- compared to a world where most men and women in equal measure waited for sex until they were ready to enter into a lifelong monogamous sanctified relationship, and the culture was not highly sexualised, it is very much anti-woman) to assume that all women who behave and dress in Western ways are easy sluts who are fair game, and some extend that perspective below the age of consent.

If more white women rejected free love, which leads to men seeing no need to control themselves (without denying men's responsibility to do so) and as you said in a previous discussion tends to saddle females disproportionately with childcare responsibilities when pregnancy results, and so this moral difference was much lesser or non-existent, would such crimes be as likely to happen? Or would sexist Muslim men learn finally to respect all women and girls?

You cannot speak about Muslim sexual morality without accepting that what this means is making women responsible for men's actions. All women, responsible for all men's actions. What it is is carte blanche to treat women as if they were second class citizens, to act out all sorts of sexual dysfunction and warped ideas about what it means to be a man and to be a woman.

So I reject your idea that western women need to be more Muslim and that this would be a good thing. The Muslim world is the mirror image or maybe the other side of the same coin of the sexual revolution: it is male centered, male benefitting, sex centered, sex obsessed -- it only seems pro woman because on the surface mouthing platitudes about the sanctity of women sounds good.

A culture that places responsibility for the actions of one half of the population on the shoulders of the other half is a culture where nobody has any respect for the burdened half.

The ideas about the place of men and the place of women are fundamental to how a lot of Muslims organise their families and their communities. You simply cannot get away from this incredibly distasteful aspect of Muslim culture, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the cultures that Muslims come bang up against in the west. The most virulent expression of hatred and fear of women is seen in Saudi Arabia and remote places on the Arabian peninsula and in north Africa, places that are not melting pot societies by any stretch of the imagination.

I very much doubt if I said what you report I said. I do not make a habit of referring back to previous threads I have taken part in.

To answer your question 'If more white women rejected free love, which leads to men seeing no need to control themselves (without denying men's responsibility to do so) ... would sexist Muslim men learn finally to respect all women and girls?'
No. Their disrespect for women (for all women) comes from their religion which legitimises their feelings of superiority towards women including Muslim women, and towards all non-Muslims. There is nothing outside of the Muslim religion that will ever change the way many Muslim men see themselves and see women. The way they see themselves and women has absolutely nothing to do with the behaviour of any women, Muslim or non-Muslim.

And you can't have it both ways here. Either it is or it is not every person's responsibility to control him or herself. You cannot say on the one hand that women behave in a way that leads to 'men seeing no need to control themselves' and then on the other hand say it is the responsibility of men to control themselves blah blah blah. Men are 100% responsible for deciding there is no need to control themselves.

You are placing the blame for rape and sexual abuse of children squarely on the shoulders of western women who have sex outside of marriage in that last post of yours.

You seem to believe Muslim men's attitude to women and children is something fairly new and forged only when Muslim society came up against western society. Here is something I hope you will consider an eye opener.

Or you could watch The Kite Runner.

I have watched The Kite Runner and it was horribly disturbing. You seen The Stoning of Soraya M. and the Silent Witness two-parter about a ring of Asian sickos who go to mosque, say their salat then feed 14 year olds in uniform oxycontin tablets with their booze then drag their sleeping bodies in a car to locked rooms where they are kept as sex slaves and made to smoke crack, with the result of three dead teens (a murder, a suicide by a girl with nowhere to hide from them and a girl dying in a blaze when she deliberately sets off a fire alarm in the hope she'll be rescued from the locked bedroom she's found herself in)?

But you're a Christian and regular Catholic Mass attender. You must admit that Christianity was used in the past based on specific scriptures to promote patriarchy and hypocrisy, most flagrant in the Elizabethan era (public execution for fornication for fallen women, but men will be boys) and the Victorian era. People- men - took physical realities of the pre-modern era (low life expectancy, lack of reliable birth control, subsistence lifestyle requiring manual labour and physical strength, frequent hand-to-hand war) which pushed men into the public sphere and women into a private sphere seen as undeserving of the same esteem, added some selective scripture-quoting and dodgy theology, and tacked on oppressive power systems to create a world of a first and second class gender roles which allowed them to feel holy while massaging their ego with the tears of subjugated property females and following worldliness, the flesh and its lusts. Jesus challenged this; a lot of His followers sadly reinforced it- many of them still sceptical about women's equality today. But most Christians today reject the more blatant forms of misogyny, and very few defend the levels of misogyny in the Islamic dominated world- a lot of the components were common in the Christian world of 200 years ago. This is one thing that had led some people who were religious before they found feminism to become atheistic or adopt alternative spiritualities.

If Islam is nothing but a system of oppression of women that leads to their rape, sexual abuse and murder and it cannot be changed, then it stands to reason Islam must be banned. There is no such thing as Islamophobia, because it is rational to fear rape, paedophilia and murder and rational to hate a belief system that inevitably perpetrates such crimes. Is that what you are saying? It is pure woman hating evil, and no interpretation of it can be made that supports women's equality or liberation from patriarchy?

I acknowledge how grim the present situation is but I see more hope for the future than that.

I believe in the sanctity of women, and the sanctity of men, in equal measure. Unlike most Islamic practice, unlike most of the societies that do or have ever existed, and unlike the misogynist twisting of Christianity that some pull. Oh, and if you're trying to characterise sexual abstinence as bad just because it's "more Muslim" for women that is the same sort of fallacy as the "Hitler was a veggie- don't be one" argument.