Suella Braverman vows to stamp out grooming gangs behind organised child sex abuse

[IwantToRetire]

The Home Secretary, writing in The Mail on Sunday, pledges to 'track down and punish the grooming gangs with the same sense of mission and determination' used to pursue the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, the black British teenager who was killed in a racially motivated attack at a bus stop in South London in 1993.

Ms Braverman, who was born in Harrow, in North-West London, to a Kenyan mother and Mauritian father, writes: 'The time has come to make right one of the greatest injustices seen in Britain in modern times. The systematic rape, exploitation and abuse of young girls by organised gangs of older men – and the disgraceful failure of the authorities to act despite ample evidence – is a stain on our country.'

A Buddhist, Ms Braverman describes the 'perpetrators' as 'groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11928629/SUELLA-BRAVERMAN-mission-ensure-really-no-hiding-place-gangs-grooming-young-girls.html

I am not sure if this is just the DM take on what she said, or if it accurately reflects what she said.

If she did say this and not talk about how men of all cultures, given the opportunity, have and will exploit young women, then she is letting down all the women who are exploited.

She was referring to the Channel boat crossings which are mostly young men and Albanians are white so not sure where you are going with this- I think it is more sexism in that men can’t be trafficked when we know for a fact they can be and are. Also half of the human trafficking in the U.K. is of British girls (all races), so modern slavery isn’t just a case of people being trafficked here from abroad.

The problem is that the data isn't brilliant and that is one thing thats got to improve.

But the best current data shows that white men are hugely statistically more likely to carry out single cases of abuse. And almost all of convicted paedophiles are white.

Grooming gangs are 75% Asian men. And there focus is on vulnerable girls and women not the fact they are children.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/what-do-we-know-about- the-ethnicity-of-sexual-abuse-gangs

The grooming gangs got away with it for so long for two reasons racism and classism. Fear of being accused of being racist meant they police and social services
Basically ignoring the women and girls affected because they were working class, often in care and otherwise vulnerable. Viewed basically as scum.

Grooming gangs do need dealing with. It's been way too long already. It doesn't mean all the other perpetrators of sexual abuse / rape / violence don't need dealing with either. They do. But let's not use this whataboutery to deny justice to these girls / women, who have waited a very long time.

Majid Nawaz was excellent on this when he was on LBC and he always called this dog whistle crap out very robustly.
As ever people label concerns as racist and far right or in your case a 'dog whistle'. Shocking. Girls - children - are being raped repeatedly and no one really gives a fuck. We cannot upset Muslim men as their hurt feelings seem to be worth far more than these poor abused children. Appalling.

Telford abuse survivor Samantha Smith:

https://mobile.twitter.com/TalkTV/status/1642796036270817280/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1642796036270817280&currentTweetUser=TalkTV

The grooming gangs got away with it for so long for two reasons racism and classism. Fear of being accused of being racist meant they police and social services
Basically ignoring the women and girls affected because they were working class, often in care and otherwise vulnerable. Viewed basically as scum

Absolutely this. I am very shocked by some of the posters on this thread avoiding the obvious, depressing facts of what is happening. Grim.

Every culture has a problem with male violence and sexual violence against women and girls. Pretending some cultures don’t have an even worse attitude towards women and girls than ours, is foolish.

I haven’t read it yet, but isn’t the Stephen Lawrence murder relevant, because it was the investigation into the handling of the case which proved the police were ‘institutionally racist’, and the police have been obsessed with optics ever since, which has been detrimental to their even-handedness? Even their reticence about tackling violent trans activists and their persecution of people for ‘non-crime hate ‘incidents’ relates to the Lawrence case.

Maybe people should have a read of what Sarah Champion (sacked by Corbyn of course) has to say instead of being outraged that Braverman has pointed out that fear of racism has left these poor working class girls high and dry.

Home Office Report was ordered by Javid. As a PP said with a link to the report, it did not find that most of the offenders were white men. Rather, that the data was poor. From 2020:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9070905/DAN-HODGES-reveals-inside-story-cover-abuse-young-girls.html

And going back to 2017 as regards Champion, Corbyn and Javid:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4801056/Now-Sajid-Javid-backs-MP-grooming-gangs-storm.html

From when Javid ordered the report in 2018:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5993379/Javid-orders-probe-ethnicity-sexual-grooming-gangs.html

Try reading it then. Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. The police still are institutionally racist.

The police have always been institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic. Nothing has changed in 50 years and judging by the shits in charge now nor will it. It seems to me they are still getting hung up on semantics.

Did anyone say they aren’t?

I've come to accept that the grooming gangs is an iffy problem because they appear to be sanctioned or even instigated by local authorities, and to be blunt, Labour-led authorities - Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford and I think Telford, also Greater Manchester. I'm not an authority on it, but reading between the lines of memoirs such as the one by Sammy Woodhouse but also a few others

I've probably read some of the same stuff as you and I think that's a wild overstatement.

My impression is that the problem was twofold:

1. Some in authority (police, LA, SS) seeing this a young women choosing to be sexually promiscuous rather than children being raped and exploited by calculating men.

1. Nobody wanting to deal with or even discuss the fact that (in some areas) the problem was specifically South Asian men targeting white girls in a very organised way; for fear of being called racist.

That's bad enough. It's an appalling failure of services. Over egging it just means it can be excused as bad actors- it was a structural failure at every level, until the CPS finally went after them.

Here’s the quote:

When Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993 and the state initially failed to deliver justice, the public perceived that the victims of racism were second-class victims. A similar perception exists today in respect to the young girls who are victims of grooming gangs.
I will not allow that perception to stand. It is therefore essential that we track down and punish the grooming gangs with the same sense of mission and determination

👆this makes a lot of sense to me

👇this does not (she has changed from speaking about perception of police handling to the mishandled investigation of the murder itself- bit weird )

that we rightly demonstrated in pursuing the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.

when the Home Office's own report clearly suggests that this is not just about Pakistani men, one has to wonder what motivates this particular focus. The words "dog whistle" definitely come to mind

Of course there are white grooming gangs too. This discussion is specifically about the problems that occured in specific regions and were allowed to continue far too long (in part) because people didn't want to be subject to accusations like the one you are making.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen it yet

I’ve seen that before @EndlessTea it’s hard to hear but it’s important to listen to survivors if you’re going to speak about this.

They've had 12 years to deal with this crap, let's not give them any longer.

This. I'd feel a lot more confident in this announcement of it wasn't from someone venal and useless.

Still I think the legal charges proposed are good.

Exactly. It's all about having the right data. About six percent of the population are Muslims, so, assuming they offend at the same rate as everyone else, you'd expect about six percent of grooming gangs to be made up of men from a Muslim background. Is that the case? Difficult to tell when we don't have the data.

Braverman has pointed out that fear of racism has left these poor working class girls high and dry.

Does anyone actually believe that Braverman gives a flying fuck about poor working class girls?

I fucking do

Yes I do and I don’t know why we would assume otherwise?

The thing that strikes me about the information in the OP though is that the Stephen Lawrence murder comparison is really telling - and illustrative of how racism can have all sorts of inconsistent effects and manifestations.

The failures of the authorities to act in the Stephen Lawrence case were driven by racism in dreadful ways. Gang activity around CSA is driven by misogyny and classism to achieve similar effects: the authorities don’t care, view the victims as the problem and generally fail to act.

The whole ‘fear of being called racist’ argument is actually pretty convenient because it distracts from the ways in which the girls and women are viewed as largely expendable. There is likely some
truth to it, but it’s a mightily convenient way of shifting the blame away from
people and avoiding addressing important things. Blaming anti-racism for not actually caring about the victims and even seeing them as the problem is a dubious tactic that lets the authorities play the victim rather than taking real responsibility for their failings.

So I can’t help but read claims that the police will 'track down and punish the grooming gangs with the same sense of mission and determination used to pursue the murderers of Stephen Lawrence’ as utterly depressing. The problem is that the crime has been treated with a similarly crap ‘sense of mission’ and determination to pursue the criminals feels to be a response to very negative media coverage rather than a sense that the victims matter and deserve justice.

Tbh, I tend to just ignore anything that uses the ridiculous phrase ‘dog whistle’. It tends to be hyperbolic and knee jerk IME. So I skim past it.

Of course we need better data about this stuff. Of course we (as a society) need to do far more about CSA grooming gang activity. Of course we need to explore where there may be problematic cultural issues involved. Let’s actually try to discover the truth and use that information to prevent these crimes and safeguard some very vulnerable young women.

What if the discovered “truth” is that the perpetrators are overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men and the victims white working-class girls - and the crimes were racially and religiously aggravated , would you support using that information to prevent these crimes and safeguard some very vulnerable young women, or would you think another investigation should be carried out, on repeat, until you get the answers you’d find more palatable?