Failure of state to protect girls from abuse

[BovaryX]

The Times reports on the grooming scandal and how concerns about 'community cohesion' allowed the police to ignored organised abuse of vulnerable girls. There needs to be accountability because as so often happens in the lessons learned paradigm, those who failed are not punished, but promoted and the institutional culture which enabled this dereliction of duty continues unchanged

Priti Patel, the home secretary, said last night that the Rotherham and Manchester scandals represented “a failure of the state to fulfil one of its fundamental roles, protecting our children”. “Institutionalised, corrosive behaviour that disregards victims has to end,” she said. “Tackling this abuse is a priority for the Home Office, which is why I have accelerated the delivery of the Tackling Child Sex Abuse strategy that will put victims first. There will be no no-go areas"

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grooming-scandal-hollow-denials-exposed-by-the-watchdog-lfsdzdm32?shareToken

The sheer scale of this scandal is shocking.
People In authority called what happened to these children child prostitutes and said it was, 'a lifestyle choice.'

I hope Priti Patel is true to her word and heads roll.

the view of those in authority was / is that girls are an exploitable resource

and that being 'good' (where good is 'woke') is more important than protecting children

yes, I hope heads fucking well roll

I’m not normally a fan of Patel but she’s bang on the money with this.

Those girls were utterly betrayed by the police who turned a blind eye for political reasons. Some of those officers should be in prison.

This is where being 'nice' rather than doing what is 'difficult but the right thing' gets you. It's taking the easy route when in a position of trust and responsibility.

One of the things which is so shocking and that the latest reports make explicit is the authorities knew about it, but chose to do nothing because they were worried about the demographics. Some of these girls were in the care of the state and their abusers were picking them up from children's homes. What happened to Victoria Agoglia is utterly disgraceful. As Priti Patel says, this has been a profound failure of the state, of multiple state agencies. The perpetrators of these crimes must have had a sense of absolute immunity given the blatant patterns of abuse. If the craven institutional culture which is too frightened of accusations of racism to protect some of the most vulnerable girls in the UK doesn't change? This will continue

Despite detailing how she was “repeatedly threatened, assaulted, returned to her residential unit intoxicated and in distress, gave information that she was involved in sexual exploitation, alleged rape and sexual assault requiring medical attention, and had several pregnancy scares”, no measures were taken by the council or police to protect her. She died in hospital on September 29, 2003

The Times also highlights the admissionof a senior police officer that they knew they were doing this:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-chief-we-ignored-sex-abuse-of-children-hgrhc358v?shareToken=c1446f00e62107c3655ba21065730bdc

@BovaryX

sharetoken doesn't work for me...:(

1400 children 1400 children

An investigation by The Times into child grooming in towns across the north prompted an independent inquiry. Its 2014 report found that between 1997 and 2013 more than 1,400 Rotherham children were exposed to severe levels of sexual abuse and violence by groups of men who were “almost all” of Pakistani heritage. To date, 36 men have been convicted for crimes related to the scandal.

And I am guessing that 1400 is an estimate

skl sorry! Uncompromising how do you do the share tokens for The Times? Thanks!

I remember the clip of Grace Blakeney arguing about the reasons for Labour's defeat with Jacqui Smith on GMB. Smith looked like the adult in the room for that one but it was Smith who, as Home Secretary, said that the underaged girls had made a 'lifestyle choice' (as if such a 'choice' outweighed the charge of statutory rape).

Essentially, it's not just a matter of Momentum nutters, a whole bunch of politicians who were supposed to know better preferred to look the other way.

Naz Shah once caught heat for retweeting a parody a count that said such girls should 'keep their mouths shut for the sake of diversity', but, sadly, it's not just a matter of a few backbenchers who should know better, and those who, to their credit, have at least recognised the problem (Sarah Champion) have lost Shadow Cabinet jobs as a result.

The rot's spread pretty deep and, even under a new leader, I'm not sure there's much interest in sorting it out.

(Account, not a count. Stupid fat fingers).

I remember attending an extremely busy open meeting about this issue in a neighboring town. It was packed with professionals from all areas concerned about the issues.
After this initial meeting there were no more, the whole thing was shut down. Senior management in the council was concerned about racial tensions.
I was very unsurprised when the Rotherham scandal blew up.

How on earth this was allowed to go on for such a long time is beyond me. People should’ve been out protesting about this, the silence is deafening. This is an interesting article about how the state was more worried about PC than about those poor girls

www.spiked-online.com/2020/01/15/we-have-to-talk-about-these-pakistani-gangs/

It just shows how low down the line females are worth 😞 We should be making a petition about bringing these perpetrators to justice for our daughters sake.

There is a film about what happens when everybody knows about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. Spotlight. It is not as hard on the authorities as it ought to be. Still, it reveals the way the denial strategy works.

It was way more than 1400 children. How the police who purposely buried these crimes sleep at night, imagine if it had been their daughters.

Just seen an tweet by a UCL associate professor pushing her piece on the 'Muslim grooming gangs' narrative ('racialising child abuse'), then going on to @ a whole lot of people, some mainstream, others, well, less so.

It's a long paper and I'm a lazy man but the data's out there, can't see how it's possible to argue against it even if you wish it said something else.

Anyone familiar with the works of Dr Ella Cockbain?

twitter.com/DrEllaC/status/1214183318989791232?s=20

The whole scandal is one of the most disconcerting of modern times IMO. I don't understand how anyone in a position of authority, especially these days when they are given training specifically to safeguard young people can possibly reach the point where they arguing against bringing the perpetrators of such despicable acts to justice.

Simple human decency people. It isn't that hard.

We often find that the people we depend upon to enforce laws against the exploitation of children turn out to be some f the worst offenders.

These girls have had not one penny of compensation for being let down by the state. Why have they been treated so badly and nobody still seems to not want to make a big fuzz about it, why?

I don't believe all that crap they come out with about avoiding dealing with it because of "concerns about community cohesion" or being "worried about being thought racist". It's a convenient way to virtue-signal about "community cohesion" and at the same time present themselves as hamstrung victims of "political correctness".

Absolute shite! The "lifestyle choice" dismissal of underage girls in care being raped, pimped and shared by groups of men was (is still?) also trotted out by social workers and police when the perps were white.

It's a straightforward class issue: most of the social workers are institutionalised, middle class and, I am sorry to say, women.

It was boys who were abused in care homes in Wales with male police officers involved from the Chief Constable down. Significantly, no one ever suggested that the boys were "prostitutes" or were making a "lifestyle choice". There is a sex difference and a sexuality difference: no excuse can be conjured up for homosexual paedophiles preying on young boys but when it is heterosexual paedophiles preying on young girls there is always an excuse. Always the girls are to blame ("lifestyle choice") and sometimes there's a bonus excuse for turning a blind eye ("community cohesion").

What about the Asian girls being abused within that community? Have they even bothered to find out about them? Some spoke out but were quickly forgotten. They can't use the "lifestyle choice" excuse against them - so "community cohesion" again.

There was a white gang grooming and raping white girls in Oxfordshire: they only had the "lifestyle choice" that time.

Remember David Challenor (Green Party trans/furry child rapist and torturer put in an FOI request to Coventry Council asking for addresses where children were in care? Nobody seemed to have picked up on that at the time.

Are Councils clued-up enough to have safeguarding systems that flag up requests like that as suspicious? What are they actually doing to protect vulnerable children from predators and prevent abusers finding new victims? Banning them from grooming children in schools under the guise of "Sex and Relationships Education" would be a start.

Let's see if we can guess the next batch of excuses for failure to protect children: "we didn't want to be thought homophobic and transphobic"?

All they have to do is prioritise child protection and safeguarding over everything else, including identity politics.

The Times is reporting today that the grooming gang may still be operating. As many PP have said, the scale of this abuse and the total failure of multiple state agencies to protect girls, many of whom were in state care, is an indictment of the authorities. It is interesting that Burnham is being so vocal. Because he was DPP during this period. It suggests a paradigm shift as the tide turns against those who think silence and spurious accusations of racism are an appropriate response to this organised, appalling abuse.

Greater Manchester police has opened an inquiry called Operation Green Jacket into the original investigation. Burnham said: “The most terrifying thing is that these men may still be at large and offending to this day because most of them have never been brought to justice. “I’ve seen evidence [in the report] that some of these men went on to make further offences against children in later life, when they should have been jailed for what they did. I had a meeting with the police [last week] and was told the number of suspects is increasing as they speak to the victims. I saw stories of grooming and abuse going on in Rochdale and Rotherham, and now it is clear this was also going on in Manchester"

@MoleSmokes is right, it's an excuse. Girls are expendable for a lot of people. Girls who come from broken homes, who are working class, who don't come from 'nice' families, who are in care, even more so. They fall through the cracks. The fuzz are using racism as an excuse to cover up for their failures. I even wonder if some of the police were in on it themselves.

I wonder how many more scandals like this there are that we don't know about. There was one in Rochdale that happened in the '80s, I think? Most of the victims are grown men now. And then Barry Bennell was covered up for years.

Short of deporting all Pakistanis, which is not practical, what can we do? Advise girls to stay away from Asian men?