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

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

This. My friend works with the Irish "traveler" (quotes because they are mostly settled) community. She tells me that domestic violence is rampant and horrific but the women find it impossible to leave because it means giving up their children because they often don't exist in any legal sense.

I have some experience of police and SS trying to work with traveller families and I can only echo the poster above. I imagine the Roma will be much harder as there are fewer and they are far less integrated.

Wasn't it the Victorians that invented the concept of childhood in response to how they were affected by the Industrial Revolution? Children were working as prostitutes, up chimneys, in mines and factories. They had no schooling or medical care unless they had a parent who could pay.
If children are for sale, there's a market for them.

Govanhill has always been an area for new immigrants, with Irish and Pakistanis in the 60s/70s, then gradually becoming more Pakistani as the Irish moved out. So it was always poor but reasonably respectable and the schools were good

From around late 90's/2000, there were also several guest houses and hostels which accommodated a large number of heroin addicts. At that time, I believe Glasgow City Council was one of the few councils which housed many drug addicts in the same place, the other councils in Scotland would dump their addicts and GCC were happy to take them. I had a house one of the nearby areas and would often have addicts showing up at my door looking for money. The area changed from being friendly to very threatening

An entire Roma village was moved to Govanhill some years back. There was an immediate effect with increased crime etc.

There is a view that GCC (Labour council) are more than happy to dump problems in Govanhill because it is Nicola Sturgeon's constituency. Childcare, housing, social work etc are run by the council. Not necessarily trying to defend NS as such, but it is a convenient truth for Labour councillors

But certainly, having lived in Govanhill several times in my life over decades, the truth is I wouldn't even walk down the streets now. Victoria Road used to have lovely shops but is now betting shops, charity shops and payday loans places. Queens Park feels very unsafe. There was a horrific murder of a local woman, Moira Jones by an Eastern European immigrant. He dragged her to Queens Park, raped and brutally murdered her. We lived nearby at the time and it was the final nail so we moved away.

The local schools now have a large majority of children whose English is poor, which is obviously going to have an effect on the quality of the education. One of my clients sits on the Children's panel and tells me that the parents of Roma girls simply don't see the value in educating girls and actively prevent them from going, so that they can do domestic duties.

I would also like to know the answer to @RJnomore1 ‘s question, of who it is using the sex slaves. I live right in the middle of this area and honestly, if I bump into another Scottish person nearby I’m surprised.

If the people being offered are the people who think it’s normal, who will report it?

Assignedperfect, thanks for that background information.

I'm about an hour out of Glasgow and I know the w of Scotland culture isn't one where child sexual abuse is ok. (There are obviously abusers but the majority of men are disgusted by it)

Which makes me wonder where the demand is. If it's within the community it needs dealt with one way. If it's sex tourists another way. I don't think it's Glasgow men in general. I could be totally wrong.

However cut the market and surely that helps somewhat?

Assigned I was just going to post something similar to what you have. I grew up in Govanhill in the 70's and it has always been the dumping ground for immigrants.It's surprising how little regeneration has taken place there compared to other areas of Glasgow, or even just on the South side. Its GCC that make those decision not the local MSP.

I left there in the late 90's and it was a pain walking about then, the hassle and catcalls you got walking down Allison St in particular. Even then there were rumours about children being sold. There was chatter in the Social Work dep. about how true the rumours were. Hopefully the police will be forced to investigate this seriously and find out what is going on. I'm sure they will find something because this type of thing goes on in every city.

But, I would also like to add that whilst I hope any abuse of women and children is dealt with there is quite a bit of racism towards the Roma and I hope this isn't being used to target this group. There is a fair bit of academic research going on in Govanhill just now on the Roma community to find a way to improve integration and remove stigma.

I think that like Rotherham/Rochdale services are wary of targeting a racial group for fear of being accused of racism.

They wouldn't be targeting a racial group. They'd be targeting individuals about whom they have provable evidence.

I do feel Nicola sturgeon should be thoroughly ashamed. Everyone knows this is going on.

I also think the police and sw know exactly which communities are buying

also think the police and sw know exactly which communities are buying
Can you please elaborate?

I’ve heard so many stories about this along the years. That police know, sw know. That police make deals with the gangs to ensure kids go to school at least. I can’t elaborate factually but I live in Glasgow. You hear these stories all the time. They know.

This is truly horrific and disgusting. I am shocked that SW’s cannot get enough evidence to remove those children.

Unless there is some larger ongoing intelligence and the authorities are waiting to intervene. But it’s been going on for years it would seem!

t.co/5gyypqSRIs?amp=1

If someone could clicky... this is a council plan for a "better" govanhill

Crime rates. Youth anti social behaviour. Some youth sexual health co-ordinator will have fought tooth and nail to get this recorded, acknowledged, monitored and slipped in so that history will show these children someone tried.

Acknowledgement of trafficking

I don't have much more to say about this. I am from Glasgow all though I don't live near Govanhill. I have hear whispers about this. To my discredit I've ignored it because the people I've heard it from are people I would consider unreliable. Either racist ned's from the Gorbal's or immigrant's hating on other immigrant's. I don't know what the answer if is.
Whatever we do it will end up in class action cases and be all the fault of racist Britain.
Maybe we could we could buy the gypsy's unwanted children. £10,000 I think is a fair price for a child. Enough to buy a car for the father to set himself up as an Uber diver. Or possibly encourage the gypsy's to have more children so they can sell them for £10,000.

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'.

Phil I have no idea what well intentioned point you're trying to make, but if you take the Pall Mall Gazette scandal (HUGE in its day) as a reference point, it's very clear quite how shocked the country was to discover that a 13 year old could be purchased covertly and that was in 1885;

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Armstrong_case

I have no idea why we would want to play self-flagellating historical whatabouttery games though.

I'm really, really shocked by this.

"Something bad happened in the UK once before" is such an inappropriate response.

No surprise. Police aren’t interested, SS, newspapers, Government. Not interested.

How is it possible, though?

If the "pimping", (actually child abuse) is so widespread, even a low prosecution or hold protection success rate would mean a lot of cases in court.

I don’t know how prevalent it is. I understand that the community/ culture reject outside enquiries, so prosecution is difficult. There was a programme last year about Roma trafficking in govanhill. It also highlighted the practice of keeping fathers names off birth certificates so right to stay could be purchased (by becoming the named father) at later dates by non European men. It seems they make a real pound of flesh out of children and females especially. It is horrific. I wish I knew what we could do apart from write to our mp.

Again, the police, public and social services ARE trying to stop this. Hence it being documented in the above report.

It's like asking why can't the police just solve the overall issue of illegal sex work and abuse? It's not that easy unless you basically catch someone in the act - when this happens the local men use violence. Agree with a pp that child abuse isn't the generally accepted norm even in macho west of Scotland. Abusers are known as beasts.

These children, as stated above, are undocumented in alot of cases. In other instances one baby will be born via home birth (to a 13 year old mother) then presented to a registrar constantly by different families to create a claim for child benefit several times over. This is absurdly the perfect crime, these children are exploited to make it look like multiple families have a newborn and then as they get older they're invisible. Total commodification of human life. Sex makes babies, babies grow up to sell sex ad infinitum.

There are many, many people in Glasgow, teachers, nuns, Sally Army, football casuals, who have used whatever means they have at their disposal to help.