9 men found guilty of 21 counts of sexual abuse

[SnapesOnAPlane]

over a 2 year period
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rochdale-grooming-trial-nine-men-824109
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9239126/Rochdale-grooming-trial-gang-convicted-for-sex-trafficking.html
It's currently on Granada Reports 6 o'clock news, but I don't know whether it's on national/other local news channels.

One of the men found guilty today is already planning to appeal (according to GR6pm)

They have also said a school in Rochdale are now teaching young girls how to recognise signs of grooming, which I'm very glad about. Could this be implemented on a more national scale?

I have 2 teenage DDs who are prone to prowling the streets with their friends in that same area, so this has really struck home.

callisto, I'm pretty certain they're just targeting vulnerable girls from not very supportive families who are hanging around in the street. These girls just happened all to be white.

The issue is men getting together and seeing vulnerable girls and exploiting and raping them. Just as priests in the catholic church use the respectibility of their vocation to hide the fact that they are abusers, these men use white girls who aren't part of their community and probably won't be listened to by anyone to hide the fact that they are abusers. What is needed is strong government to expose the issues and listen to the victims. Keith Vaz needs to engage and explore rather than deny the issues.

Well, I kind of agree and disagree with you Duchesse. I think that the 'availability' of these girls makes it easier for the men to take advantage, but I also think that there is an element of dehumanising - that these men don't see the girls as equal in status or importance to their 'own' girls. Interestingly, on the thread in AIBU, the issue of how some muslim men perceive women in general has been raised - as a possession rather than a person. If they perceive a muslim woman as a possession to be married off or honour-killed or whatever, they will have far less respect or empathy for a non-muslim.

Callisto in fairness you don't know what these men might have been doing with their "own" girls

You also don't know that their view of white girls is worse than their view of their own girls.

If there is a cultural issue it is that some people in some communities see women as unimportant, there to serve the men, to do what they men want, and are disposable. They don't matter. Note plenty of white men british men feel this way too.

It is an issue of sexism and male violence. I really think that focussing on race is to focus on the wrong issue.

Focussing on race won't help girls being gang raped and passed around amongst gang members in some inner city gangs - a predominantly black problem.

And it won't help with groups of white men getting together to rape predominantly white children in the UK.

And it won't help with groups of white men going abroad to rape young asian children.

There is a very simple story here which is never confronted - the problem of sexual violence - inflicted predominantly on women and children - by men.

If you look at the relationship boards you will find that there are plenty of abusive horrible white men in this country who don't give a shit about their wives and daughters and are basically misogynistic bastards.

I agree Sardine Queen -

People like to focus on anything but men taking responsibility for being rapists. Saying it's a racist thing or it's a cultural thing detracts from that and is pretty much going back to the view 'these girls make themselves available so the men can't help themselves'.

Yes, if this is happening in certain cultures then the people in those cultures need to be saying it is unacceptable. I know though from living through a paedophile teacher being 'outed' that many people in a community will refuse to accept that someone in a position of respectibility in a community are in fact abusers. So it is very difficult to 'out' these abusers.

I'm using the word 'out' because I can't think of another way of expressing the scenario where many people know what is going on (perhaps for years) but there is no firm evidence just suspicions and no one wants to put their hand up and challenge what is happening.

Yes, I'm not denying the institutionalised misogyny in the UK and nor am I saying that only muslim men hate women. And I am pretty sure that a man who can do this to another human being is incapable of any kind of empathy with anyone else of whatever race or sex. But on this particular issue there is a racist element which should not be ignored because it damages our society as a whole. I don't think that the race issue is more important than the sexual violence issue in this case but it is part of it and denying or ignoring will not help to prevent this sort of thing happening again. Anyway, I'm going to bow out here, no point flogging a dead horse.

Was just coming on here to post my views after reading some of the online comments below the newspaper reports of the case, but I see that lots of people have got there before me.

It struck me that the tone of the comments was "How dare these "Asians" come here and treat our women like this - this is a civilised country and "we" don't treat women that way".

Which made me think - exactly as Sardine says - that some people are using the case to draw dividing lines between different races and cultures instead of recognising that "we" very much do treat women that way.

I watched the same programme that LemonTurd referred to and the words about "what do they expect if they walk around like that" could just as easily have been said by a white British man - the attitude behind these rapes is common to all cultures in this country.

The cultural element - if there is one - is that girls from the same culture as these men are kept at home and not allowed out in the first place. If they had become a victim of rape, they would have been regarded as every bit at fault as the group's white victims. Also, the strong community bonds would have warned them off each others' sisters and daughters.

I agree with SQ.

Apparently the judge said these men did this out of "lust and greed". Greed, yes. Lust, no no no. It just seems to imply that they were taken over by their feelings. Bollocks. This was all about power, control and misogyny.

I think "othering" is a clear way of thinking used by rapists/abusers to diminish what they have done. And that way of thinking cuts across lines of ethnicity or culture.

Yes, I have met Muslim men who believe that white women are "asking for it so what do they expect" but I have also met English men and women who feel the same way about women who go out dressed scantily on a Saturday night. I remember reading an article on rape in Sweden where non-Swedish men expressed the opinion that it was less cruel to rape a Swedish woman because there was less stigma for that victim.

In Half The Sky, the authors talk about how trafficked victims are taken from a particular low social class to preserve the purity of nice middle class girls. This constant splitting of women into "worthy" and "unworthy" is the main problem here because it dehumanizes one half of women whilst putting the other onto an unrealistic pedestal, and never ever focusing on the actions of the men involved.

This is a crime that involves both sexism and racism, as does the comparison with white British men going to countries like Thailand as sex tourists.

Saying that there is no racist element to it because women of other ethnicities get abused is like saying that there is no homophobic element to people who target lesbians because straight women get targeted by other groups too.

There are of course, various different specific problems in other areas of the country. Somebody mentioned gang culture for example. That still doesn't mean that this is a racist problem. I live near to the areas where these things have happened; I don't live in an area of gang culture, so I do (or more precisely my DD) will have to deal directly at school with children from the cultural groups involved.

It doesn't mean she does not have to deal with all of the sexism from white boys; that will all still be there too. But there will also be a second cultural group with its own form of combined sexism and racism she will have to deal with.

Seahorses - I find that is an issue as well, the complexity of our society has grown considerbly, we need to recognise that complexity and that things aren't simple.

OK, so we are trying to be grown up here and leave the "r" word out of it. Fair enough. God knows there are enough white bastards to rail about without making racism a part of it.

However, the defendants don't feel constrained by any such niceties. The solicitor for one of the defendants, on BBC today.......

His defence barrister, Simon Nichol, said his client "has objected from the start for being tried by an all white jury and subsequent events have confirmed his fears".

"He believes his convictions have nothing to do with justice but result from the faith and the race of the defendants."

So, if he were white he would not have been convicted. Yeah, ok...

Excellent observations here particularly from SQ, Artex and messy. The big underlying issue here is institutionalised misogyny and one of the means of perpetuating this is dividing and othering women and girls into worthy and unworthy.

I don't want to go into too much detail for reasons that may be evident, but at the moment I have some "involvement" in a situation involving a group of 12-14 year old girls at risk of commercial sexual exploitation. Those at risk and those putting them at risk are from the same area, same socio-economic background, same ethnic and cultural group. The only difference between is sex and age and with both of those factors, power, control and influence.

It's not just being politically correct to warn against the framing of the Rochdale situation along the racial/religious/cultural lines of the perpetrators and the social class/dysfunctional family lines of the victims. That "permits" us to "other" the whole lot of them - we can tut and hiss and indulge our collective prejudices about Asians, low class people and broken families, but can afford to ignore what happened because it's over there and doesn't affect us "good people."

But, that's bullshit! Yes, it is true that race, culture, religion, class, education, family support, local traditions, accessibility, all those things are part of the mix of factors that allowed what happened in Rochdale to happen, to go on unchecked for so long. But, there's a massive risk in focussing on one or two of these factors while ignoring the main massive at the centre factor - the institutionalised misogyny. That IS the common denominator in cases like this be they in Ipswich or Inverness, Carlisle or Cardiff. And, we only have a chance of halting the damage if as a society we are prepared to accept that fact. I wish I could say with confidence that that's likely to happen soon, but I can't. That does't mean though we should give up on naming it for what it is, over and over and over.

Oh, and the defendant throws in the usual victim blaming too for good measure.

"He further believes that society failed the girls in this case before the girls even met them and now that failure is being blamed on a weak minority group."

Because of course, men can't be expected not to abuse, assault and rape can they, poor darlings.

BTW - this doesn't mean that I don't agree that misogyny is not at the very heart of what happened.

Grimble, with respect, few people convicted of any crime tend to put up their hands and say, "it's a fair cop, I did the crime, I'll do the time," nor do their lawyers! Nope, particularly when it comes to sexual offences (can we all say "Ched Evans"?) even when there is a rare conviction, there tends to be denial of guilt by the convicted man and their supporters. The reasons why they felt they were wrongly convicted may vary, but again, the common denominator is men who feel entitled to have done what they have done with impunity.

X posted Kritiq. I hadn't made it clear that misogyny is the real elephant in the room. I was just saying that the defendants are willing to play the race card when it suits them because, as you say, they don't have any other defence going for them....

Yes, but defendants will play ANY card if they think it will help their defence or their chances of appeal. Evans and his supporters used his fame (i.e. "women through themselves at him, why would he need to rape anybody?) and the victim's alleged reputation (i.e. gold digger, slag, lied about rape before, etc.) to make their case. The dude you mentioned seems to be blaming the unrepresentative nature of the jury and the damage already done to the victims "by society" before he got near them. Different arguments, same purpose - denial.

There's a nasty, nasty tone of racism (imho) running on the "In the News" thread that's making me quite sick to my stomach.

I think this is getting a bit patronising TBH. It is all very well talking about the common denominator of what happens to people 'over there.' I do live 'over here.' I live in this context. We are talking about Lancashire and (in other similar cases) Yorkshire. We are not talking about the moon or Alabama. My daughter will go to secondary school next year with children from these communities. My neighbour teaches in the schools in one of the specific areas where these things happened. People who live in the North, of all ethnicities, are not 'over there.' We are part of this country.

It is very simple. Sexism exists in a cultural context. Women have to cope with the context that is particular to that culture. The particular ways we are expected to respond and cope with sexism in Britain is different to that of sexism in Russia or Indonesia because there are cultural differences.

My daughter has to live with two different types of sexism, because we don't live in a multicultural area, we live in an area dominated by dual cultures. She will have to deal with white people who have a combined set of sexist and racist ideas about white girls and Pakistani girls, and she will have to deal with Pakistani people who have a combined set of sexist and racist ideas about white girls and Pakistani girls.

That doesn't mean this case is more about race than sex, or that Pakistani culture is more or less sexist than white culture or that all Pakistani men are more racist and sexist than white men. But it is necessary for people to who live with it to understand the specific nature of Pakistani racism and sexism against white girls, so that they can find ways of either dealing with it or challenging it.

Feminists are always looking at things within their cultural context. Why, just because it involves Pakistani people, are we saying that their culture is insignificant in this case?

Because the press and media and public focus on the "racism" will once again mean that the basic fact that it is men abusing girls isn't commented on or even consciously noticed.

Who on here is saying "over there"? The people focussing on the ethnicities and backgrounds of the children are the ones who are "othering".

If it's all to do with asian gangs up north then I don't need to concern myself with it really, do I. That's what a large chunk of the population are subconsciously thinking when they focus on race.

The racism is your perception Kritiq.

In all of these cases the backgrounds and circumstances of the attackers and victims are scrutinised.

What is never scrutinised is the fact that it's male attackers and young female victims.