It never stops in West Yorkshire. 29 Men Charged in Connection with Child Sexual Exploitation in Calderdale

[nickymanchester]

This was a press release from West Yorkshire police yesterday:-

www.westyorkshire.police.uk/news-appeals/29-men-charged-connection-child-sexual-exploitation-calderdale

It's connected to historic offences committed against a single victim from 2003 to 2010.

On the plus side, WYP do now seem to be taking these things more seriously but on the down side this is still from more than ten years ago.

Also, what really got to me about this story was that there were 29 men charged for crimes against the same, single victim.

I can't imagine what her life must have been like as a teenager when the offending was taking place.

I’ve not read the whole thread yet - although I will.
I’m currently working on my MA dissertation which is grounded in the Rotherham grooming scandal but which explores large scale child sexual exploitation of girls and women in England.

There has been NUMEROUS studies on why we shouldn’t be vilifying a particular ethnic group of men, even on this thread there are women pointing out that white men rape.
Not to my knowledge in the UK are there large networks of white men who are grooming, drugging, raping, beating and in some cases murdering girls and women. Yet people still want to even the playing ground.

I myself will be focussing my research on the forgotten women and girls of feminism who have been abandoned by everyone who should’ve protected them.
The female victims biggest crime, apart from being girls....they are the wrong kind of girls .

RC church.
CofE church
Pop stars back in the day
Sports coaches

And even all the recent stuff about the scale of sex offences in schools. Not grooming. But still girls getting assaulted and raped. Children. While at school.

The mode and approach is different. For sure. And the underlying reasons need to be looked at.

But most of all women and girls need to be protected.

To focus on one group only is s fail. It removes attention from the fact that the majority of men here are white and commit a huge amount of child sex offences.

Focus on the victims.

The perpetrators are men.

The big question is after all the news and court cases about Rotherham etc it's still happening. The question is why.

Same reason nothing gets done much about sex offences against women and girls everywhere. No interest.

Hold on. You lay the blame for it all on feminists?

Not on the men who did it?
Not on the police who considered them child prostitutes?
Not on social services who turned a blind eye and sacked a whistleblower?

That's what you conclude?

That it's the fault of women.

Ok.

People are selfish. They also don't give a shit about animals, the environment, homelessness, male suicide, poverty, famine in other countries, old people. The list is endless.

What a strange comment.

Says more about how you think than anything else tbh.

Clearly there are plenty of people in the world now and in the past who have cared about one or more of those things, and others.

I think I must've not refreshed page or actually been on an earlier page thinking it was the last.

I was replying to a post saying 'people don't give a shit about women.'

@NiceGerbil

Absolutely not putting the blame on feminists!!!
My work will exactly be highlighting the polices attitudes to the victims, society as a whole who are still refusing to acknowledge the scale of the problem, media reporting and proffesional management.

I will be analysing if. the constant focus on the perpetrators and their race is actually providing a cover for them to continue abuse young women and girls.

It is absolutely about social exclusion and the fact that the girls involved are ‘othered’ by many because of their family circumstances.

My goal is to give the women and girls a voice.

Absolutely NOT blaming feminists...my ‘working title, is just that but I will be revising it now, if that’s the message you get from it.

I was involved in the care of some vulnerable girls in care back in 90s Leeds. All of the larger care homes, especially the ones that functioned as a respite from secure accommodation and were used for emergency placements had groomed girls. The biggest issue were white males with a long history of targeting vulnerable girls, disabled and homeless women etc. Police and SS were aware but saw the girls as consenting. It was a shocking time. The gang issue, for me, is a man issue. Gangs come from communities where men have strong ties to other men - there are men from all socio and economic and cultural groups that will behaved like this. I can only think of one man who functioned as an individual. Most were gatekeepers to more abusers. It is the same in schools then and now.

SS came out of this dreadfully from my contact.
The bulk of the social workers and care home staff were appalling, I found the police more helpful and willing to name what was happening and try to help to some degree.

NiceGerbil, that article which you linked to is one of the worst examples of victim blaming I have seen, the link to the newspaper which Falxmeadow posted was even worse.

"A statement by pathologist Alan Usher, said the girl had obviously been very well used sexually. In court the girl asked for a way to prove herself. She would get a job she said and that way she would not have enough spare time to get into trouble again. She knew she had done wrong and was very sorry"

So we have a situation where a child has been abused and the adults are making her feel responsible for it.

If anyone who’s reading this thread has a link or any information on any academic journal or piece of work that centres the female children and young women who are victims and survivors of CSE I would be very grateful if you could link it.

I have yet to find one piece of peer reviewed scholarly work that advocates for justice for these girls and women.

It’s a bloody disgrace.

IheartJKR

Here are some good articles about the reasons why the gangs were able to get away with it for so long.

theconversation.com/asian-grooming-gangs-how-ethnicity-made-authorities-wary-of-investigating-child-sexual-abuse-130099

It is also worth reading anything by Maggie Oliver, a former Detective Constable, who resigned from Manchester Police over the CSE scandal.

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/margaret-oliver-rochdale-police-grooming-13027067

Operation Augusta, the Manchester Police investigation into CSE and grooming gangs.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2020-0023/

This is the Hansard Parliamentary report from earlier this year, reacting to the Home Office report. This when the report came to the (unbelievable) opinion, that the grooming gangs were composed mainly of white males under the age of thirty.

hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-02-03/debates/65D3BAF4-00FF-42B3-8430-AAF2CCD8826E/GroomingGangs

However, one MP, Alexander Stafford (Conservative Rother Valley), didn't mince his words.

"So why was there a cover-up—for it was a cover-up? The Jay report stated that the agencies turned a blind eye to the localised grooming of young white girls by hundreds and hundreds of men of Pakistani heritage. A five-year investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct found that the Rotherham police ignored the sexual abuse of children for decades for fear of increasing “racial tensions”."
" Ethnicity concerns should not have made a jot of difference; a monster is a monster, regardless of their background or ethnicity. However, it was that excuse that allowed so many to get away with so much for so long. The authorities’ aversion to offending sensitivities enabled so much suffering. Let me repeat: the aversion to offending sensitivities allowed thousands of girls to be raped."

Also, Sir John Hayes (Conservative)

"Facts are often inconvenient. They are sometimes disturbing and occasionally alarming. The facts are that in Oxford, 373 children, including 50 boys, may have

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been targeted over a 16-year period, according to a serious case review. In Rotherham, as we have heard, 1,500 children—most of them white girls between the age of 11 and 15—were sexually abused, predominantly by British Pakistani men. In Rochdale, nine men who abused girls as young as 13 were convicted over a child sex grooming ring, and we know again that the Pakistani community was disproportionately represented among those convicted.
Those are the facts, but the fiction—well illustrated by the Home Office report published last December, which is a study in obfuscation, by the way—is that we cannot draw conclusions about whether certain ethnicities are over-represented in this type of offending."

Thank you @andyoldlabour
As a survivor of ACE myself and someone who lived in the north as a homeless teen, I can say that I definitely felt forgotten about by everyone. Invisible even. Unworthy.

In solidarity with all the survivors.

IheartJKR

So sorry to hear about your experiences. I think the survivors of these cases have been treated in a disgusting manner, let down at every level - social services, police, judiciary and politicians.
There have been lies and coverups and there are undoubtably people in still in positions of power, responsible for the failings and cowardice.

And it still goes on now.

That's the massive thing in all this.

Lessons fucking learned I expect. We all know what that phrase means.

"Lessons fucking learned I expect." = sweep under carpet, nothing to see here, move on, which is why nothing changes.

No one talks about the women and girls from within those communities. I do not believe for a moment that these men go home and are immediately transformed into good fathers and husbands.

I fear that, if anything, and this is absolutely not to minimise the awful and appalling experience of those brave women who have come forward, and those unable to come forward, Asian women and girls are more trapped and less likely to be heard. Which politician is willing to confront the misogynistic and worse treatment of women with immigrant communities. We have a few brave women highlighting genital mutilation, forced marriages and honour killings, but I fear plenty is hidden.

(Not least I know a couple of Asian men who grew up in circumstances of hideous domestic violence and who are open in rejecting the cultural norms that accepted this.)

I listened to talk by a worker from one of this Asian communities who made exactly that point @Needmoresleep

These men are abusive to vulnerable women and girls in their own communities as well. But due to entrenched community attitudes very little abuse is reported to authorities.

The behaviour is hideous, actually worse. It is not about race. It is about women and girls, regardless of race, being protected by both the authorities and society.

I live in a different city that has also had it's share of grooming gangs prosecuted in the past.

I just noticed a tweet from our local police force this afternoon saying:-

Concerns were raised recently about girls gathering at green spaces in the city and talking to older men.
We traced the teens and spoke to their parents/carers about child exploitation. Patrols increased too

So, at least in some parts of the country, it looks like the police do now take this a lot more seriously.

Why is cultural sensitivity and concerns about accusations of racism not an issue when engaging in counter-terrorism activity within these communities? Yet, when it comes to sex crimes against under-age girls, the police can't possibly be expected to do their job. A 13 year old going to a concert in will, rightfully, be protected against a terrorist hurting her, and if a terrorost does hurt her, the police will do everything they can to bring him to justice. A 13 year old girl living in her community, however, will not be protected against the same community of men hurting her, and even if she tells the police about them, they will not do anything to bring him to justice. Why? Why are terrorist offences (thankfully still rare) treated with gusto and the full might of the law? But sexual exploitation on an industrial scale is off limits for "cultural sensitivity"?

'Concerns were raised recently about girls gathering at green spaces in the city and talking to older men.
We traced the teens and spoke to their parents/carers about child exploitation. Patrols increased too

So, at least in some parts of the country, it looks like the police do now take this a lot more seriously.'

The fuck?

Why didn't they trace the adult MEN and have a word with them about approaching female children in parks?

And you see that as a result?!

@NiceGerbil

You're quite right.

I didn't stop to think more fully about the issue and just thought that they were doing something useful.

You are totally correct of course.

I can only hope that they are perhaps pursuing them but have not said anything for, presumably, some sort of operational reason.

Fair enough

Tbh the idea that women and even children should somehow 'keep themselves safe' from determined adult men. Some of whom are really very very good at winning their victims over. Is just so normal it can be hard to see.

I doubt there's operational reasons in all honesty. It's just easier to do what they did.

Remember the first reclaim the night was about this:

'Reclaim the Night came to the UK over 40 years ago. In 1977 women in Leeds took to the streets to protest the police requesting women to stay at home after dark in response to the murders of 13 women by (recently deceased) Peter Sutcliffe. Placards read “No curfew on women – curfew on men”.'

I had to look at this poster about 10 foot high every day on the way home from work.

I didn't stand elsewhere as I usually got a seat on that carriage at rush hour!

The message to both men and women from all this gets consumed by the subconscious. Women are at risk from men. It's up to women to mitigate that risk. They are the prey and you can't do anything about predatory men. >>> For so many when a woman or girl is attacked the question is, what did she do wrong? Victim blaming. Focus on the victim, away from the perpetrator. And the fact that if one woman or girl manages to avoid a dangerous man, he'll just find another victim. So across the population it does nothing to reduce attacks.