Child abuse / prostitution in Glasgow - Times investigation

[norahnamechange]

The Times has published a shocking investigation into systematic abuse / prostitution of children in the Govan area of Glasgow.
Children, some as young as 5 / 6 , are being openly sold on the streets. They come from one particular group (the Roma community) and just as with Rotherham and other towns where we had systematic organised abuse, there appears to be the same lack of effective response from the Police / social services for fear of appearing racist / targeting a particular community?
I can't cut and paste but here's a link to one of their articles (behind a paywall):
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/govanhill-child-sex-trade-there-are-so-many-it-s-easy-pickings-for-child-abusers-m2swzc63h

Utterly appalling

I agree with you Lass that Sturgeon should be ashamed - this is her constituency! The police should be coming down on this like a ton of bricks.

If anyone's on Twitter, Kit Malthouse MP has tweeted this (and India Knight has RT) - maybe if we all RT it will help start to get this some attention.

Oh don't worry queen she's fannying around giving people cool scandanvian baby boxes

but in the meantime use the law there is

Agreed.

I did not mean to imply that the children are being punished directly, but they are at the receiving end of appalling sexual abuse and violence and 'punished' by how normalised their circumstances are for them.

ASAS seems to have some direct experience of the situation and I can understand how frustrating and disheartening all the efforts on the ground must be.

I knew Govanhill was bad but this is devastating to read, I had kind of assumed that the gentrification that had affected so many parts of Glasgow would have had a trickle down affect here with people who couldn't afford shawlands/strathbungo buying here. It seems to be a ghetto and, by the sounds of it, a no go zone for the police.

RebelRogue conditions in the Glasgow slums were little better than that before WWII and people did not pimp their children outside pubs. This is not about poverty and it’s highly offensive to poor people to suggest it is.

Lass I agree the current laws should be better enforced but I also think stronger laws and enforcement against the punters is the way to tackle this.

I would support the chemical castration of known paedophiles as a condition of their release. If there’s no market for this then that would help a little.

I struggle with Jayne senior being called a hero. She's told some lies according to one survivor who's sister was murdered. I'd really like to know why she chose to break the trust of a CSE victim grieving for a murdered sister.

Maybe she is a great woman who's doing a lot of great work. Strikes me as a bit fishy she'd tell lies though

From today's Time:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-to-launch-inquiry-into-roma-sex-abuse-claims-in-govanhill-nzmcldp7z?shareToken=7be9794f615fecffe8ee62ab8a66c6e0

WHO is using these services? Is it Roma men, locals or sex tourists?

FloraFox maybe not after second world war, but go back 50 further years, and people certainly were pimping children, not just in Glasgow, but everywhere in Britain. Many of London's brothels were selling children's bodies for sex as well as adults'.
Probably never stopped, just went underground.
"Normal" people just don't know about things like this.

Fairly sure it was mentioned by contemporary authors (Dickens, Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Haskell) as well as modern (Sarah Moss for Manchester, Sheri Holman for Sunderland, can't recall others at present)

Gaskell sorry

People were not routinely pimping their own children openly without censure from their own community as is happening in Govanhill.

I’m not sure where the desire to normalise this comes from, as if it could happen to anyone. It couldn’t.

People sold their own children.
To people that then pimped them, or worse.

This 21st century Britain though. Its like with the recent spate of acid attacks and people talking about 19th century oil of vitriol throwers.

@rjnomore1 I would imagine its local men or at least men from West Central Scotland in the main. It goes without saying that they should punished to the full extent of the law.

Our society is 21st century, yes lessworried, but these people live outside our society. They have come here being outsiders and persecuted from post-communist societies. Their lives and norms are certainly not our own. There are places in the world where life is very cheap, people are bought and sold. Children are included in that. (I read another thread the other day about India, Nepal and Bhutan, where prostitutes were also forced to sell their skin to biotech firms, and organs. Look at the threads about Dubai and other ME city-states)
When people say we're all equal, well actually - no, not all cultures are equal or deserving of respect or emulation.

This is JUST like what happened in Bradford and Rotherham.

For as long as I can remember, Govanhill has been one of the areas of Glasgow with the highest proportion of immigrants. In the 1980s and 1990s it was people from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. Govanhill was where you went for your authentic cooking ingredients and lovely Asian fabrics.

Now the Roma have moved in and the dynamic has changed. This story is just the last in a long line of stories about the area - there was a big story in early 2017 about people trafficking and women being brought from Slovakia/Romania and either being forced into prostitution or into sham marriages with men from outside the EU.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/15083908.Trafficking_ring_which__sold_teenagers_and_women_for___10_000__busted_in_Glasgow/

It's been very hands-off from what I can from Police Scotland, they don't want to be seen as targetting a particular group for fear of being branded racist. Just as happened in Rotherham and elsewhere. They do the easy stuff - there used to be an issue near me with Roma people aggressively begging at traffic lights and that was stopped, but there's no will to tackle the bigger problems here. From what I know it's very organised, the heads of these crime operations aren't in Govanhill, they're directing operations from their home countries and using henchmen in Glasgow. The child sex pimping is far and away the most awful thing they're up to, but in my area there are Roma people begging, selling the big issue and busking (badly) too.

Having said all that I have no idea how you start to tackle it all with a community who are fearful, suspicious of the Police and authority figures like schools and social workers, have poor English and whose very worst fear is having to go back to what they came from.

I agree with you 100% Philodox.

Poppypopcorn I think the sad truth is we need to send them back where they came from.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39855287

We stayed in Govanhill when we first moved to Scotland. Air bnb.

... we walked to Victoria road I think is its name. I was quite surprised at just how much the place felt like a ghetto/slum. Children on the street... rubbish every where and men huddled in groups in the corner. Most of the girls looked between 5-8 heavily covered in make-up, which I found odd. It just seemed as though they had no parents around, although there were some women on the streets.

As PP said about the car washes... I now understand why there are so many of them in the one area!

This is just sick! Nicola should be ashamed that this is happening essentially right under her nose.

If undocumented kids are there then how can police/ social services know to check on them?

If they aren't in school and don't get registered with a gp or use the NHS no one will know they are being harmed.

Are people reporting this and it is being ignored? I can't imagine that if my husband or son were propositioned by an 8 year old girl that they would not report it.