Met Police set to reopen 9,000 cases in major London grooming gangs probe

[IwantToRetire]

In some incidences, children as young as 11 who reported being raped saw trials against their attackers collapse and were left to become victims of further abuse.

Suspected grooming gang and child exploitation cases from the last 15 years will be reviewed as part of the investigation, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said in letter to Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan on Friday evening.

A government-ordered audit into the grooming gangs scandal earlier this year found there is “mismatch” in the way the Met and London local authorities record child abuse.

Baroness Louise Casey’s report said the force logged 2.77 contact child sexual abuse cases per 1,000 children, while boroughs recorded just 1.3 child-in-need assessments for child sexual exploitation and 1.79 for child sexual abuse.

There also appears to be a significant overlap between child sexual abuse and county lines drug trafficking gangs.

Full article here https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/met-police-london-reopen-grooming-gangs-probe-b1254846.html

As I and others have said, you have zero clue about this issue, which you’ve demonstrated on a number of threads, so please give the pompous lecturing a rest.

The inquiry was always supposed to be about grooming gangs. You seem completely unaware of its purpose. Starmer didn’t want to have it, his hand was forced. This is because of public pressure. It was inevitable that the “scope would be widened” because that’s how the government (successive ones, both Tories and Labour) have deliberately and cynically framed it so the mostly Pakistani grooming gang phenomenon isn’t focused on.

The children home in Wrexham. Few ever found accountable.

"North Wales child abuse scandal - Wikipedia" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Wales_child_abuse_scandal

Exactly this.

You are correct but in the Rotherham and West Yorkshire cases the Casey report noted’ a higher proportion id the perpetrators from a Pakistani back ground’ she also stated that ‘two thirds of sexual abuse cases did NOT have the their ethnic back grounds recorded’ and this fundamentally needs to change if our institutions are to investigate and understand the cultural levers that drive these heinous acts regardless of race.
I suspect that the institutions at the time could see a pattern arising and their ‘omissions’ to collect data contributed to ‘muddying’ the water.
Time and again, those who should have been shielded from harm were left unprotected, victims of an institutional indifference that is both shocking and heartbreaking. Prosecutions can not come soon enough.

I completely agree with you on institutional failures and the purpose of discussing this is again to understand why the failure was so large. We do know that in the cases found Pakistani men are overrepresented. This is just true. Why that was case is a reasonable question.

The point is today, right now the focus is on grooming gangs and institutional failures in this specific type of offence. I think London is different because the Met have basically admitted they were too focused on the drug running aspect and thats why they didn’t bother. We also don’t know what the offender profiles look like.

The current mess around the enquiry has brought ethnicity around because Jess Phillips clearly tried to sabotage this enquiry from the beginning and theres a reasonable suspicion that it was to either soothe a particular community for votes or there are labour aligned people they don’t want to be looked at too closely.it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. Either way Labour have managed to shove the muslim community back into the spotlight.

The powers that are be are doing their damndest to make sure we don’t talk about race as far as I can see.

Someone said on the thread, sarcastically, that maybe they have taken all the police off investigating hate crime to work on this, to free up enough police -but this is the problem - the Gov made saying or tweeting something that could be deemed racist as hate crime - a CRIME, so which police person or social worker is going to say let’s concentrate on Pakistanis, or it’s mainly run by Pakistani men - NONE as it can be deemed a racist comment (as can be seen on here whenever anyone says anything about any minority group that isn’t flattering its ‘racist’) and they’d be sacked or sent on training courses -so one of the reason all this horrendous abuse is partly thanks to all you ‘kind’ inclusive types and MPs yelling racism at every suggestion of wrong doing by a minority and the hate speech law.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/grooming-inquiry-must-stay-true-to-victims-qlxrj3hbd

Timely.

I do have to admire the perfect circularity of using racism as an excuse to not properly investigate using racism as an excuse to not properly investigate.

Maybe the investigation is doing it's job, but not in the way intended - rather by reenacting the behaviour from all the same groups all over again to show exactly how it happened.

In your eagerness to berate us about talking about this specific issue at this particular time, you seem to have missed the million other conversations taking place about all the other sources and forms of sexual abuse and exploitation and the widespread public revulsion for all of them.

Talking about one specific sub topic which is very closely related to another sub topic (the rise in numbers of men from other countries who are proportionately even more likely than white men to commit crime) is just part of the overall conversation about sexual abuse.

It is telling that you are upset about us talking about the long term sexual abuse and torture of thousands of girls that has been deliberately enabled by the authorities. Don’t you think that’s an important thing to discuss?

You’re the only one saying that. Who has suggested that it’s only ‘Johnny foreigner’ (your term but weird) that abuses/ disrespects women snd girls.

You have clearly been asleep for years snd missed all the conversations and national revulsion for the current situation. Why have you only perked up when we’re discussing a particular group? It seems that your attitude is part of the problem that has caused serious harm to thousands. Why would you want to contribute to the harm?

Right? That'll definitely help de escalate and restore trust.

Exactly this

What I'd previously thought was that the powers that be were avoiding talking about the issues because they wanted to polish their anti racist credentials.

What hadn't quite occurred to me, and what now seems to be lurking in the wings, is that the powers that be were potentially directly involved - either in the abuse itself, or the subsequent failures to address, or the subsequent cover ups.

Which altogether sheds a different light on the subject.

If this is a possibility, then Labour have a problem on their hands that's so big I cant even see the edges.

That’s a good point. Add to that the expanding definitions of Islamophobia that in the Labour Party includes ‘targeting expressions of Muslimness’ . Given the behaviour of the Pakistani Muslim rapists and the support they had from their families and communities, we would be forgiven for assuming that an ‘expression of Muslimness’ may well be raping white girls. I think the Koran says that non believers are not fully human so that adds up.

The Labour Party has the text below on its website. Note that it lists ‘Islam’ as a protected characteristic.

Code of Conduct
Introduction

1. The NEC will view any acts of discrimination, prejudice or hostility based on religion or race as prejudicial and grossly detrimental to the Labour Party and its interests. Chapter 2, clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule book applies to all members of the Labour Party. It provides:
2. “No member of the Party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the Party. The NEC and NCC shall take account of any codes of conduct currently in force and shall regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on age; disability; gender reassignment or identity; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; or sexual orientation as conduct prejudicial to the Party: these shall include but not be limited to incidents involving racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia or otherwise racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions, sexual harassment, bullying or any form of intimidation towards another person on the basis of a protected characteristic as determined by the NEC, wherever it occurs, as conduct prejudicial to the Party. The disclosure of confidential information relating to the Party or to any other member, unless the disclosure is duly authorised or made pursuant to a legal obligation, shall also be considered conduct prejudicial to the Party.”
3. This Code of Conduct on Islamophobia supplements the “Code of Conduct: Antisemitism and other forms of racism,” reproduced in Appendix 9 to the Labour Party Rule Book. The NEC and NCC will take this Code of Conduct on Islamophobia into account when determining allegations of hostility or prejudice based on the protected characteristic of Islam or towards Muslims.
4. Complaints of Islamophobia will be investigated and processed in accordance with the Labour Party’s disciplinary policies, which can be found on the Labour Party’s website and in the Labour Party Complaint Handling Handbook.What is Islamophobia?
5. There is no single agreed definition of Islamophobia, albeit various civic, social, legal and political sources have attempted to define it. One definition is the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslim’s definition (APPG). The APPG defines Islamophobia as:

“… rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. The Labour Party adopted the APPG definition and its examples in March 2019 as an important statement of principle and solidarity. The NEC reaffirms that position in this Code of Conduct.

It does seem like there is something rather cyclical happening.

Quite. Why else would Alison Lowe, Deputy Mayor of West Yorkshire, say that she ‘did not want a review anywhere in West Yorkshire’ which includes Bradford, one of the worst affected areas?

The Muslim Council of Britain apparently would give qualified support to an enquiry with a huge emphasis on stopping ‘racism’ being a factor.

From their website:

Those who seek to weaponise this issue against Muslims have already got answers they didn’t want from previous inquiries. Despite persistent racist narratives, recent data from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse for 2022/23 show that perpetrators come from all backgrounds and that most group-based offenders are white.”

https://mcb.org.uk/mcb-we-need-truth-and-action-against-child-sexual-abuse-gangs-not-a-racist-witch-hunt/

I cannot see how it benefits the victims of these horrific crimes to widen the scope and lose focus. While there are similarities in the situations, losing focus from the original remit will weaken the investigation into specifically how these particular grooming gangs were allowed to happen and continue.

I can certainly see the attraction for many reasons to broaden the focus though.

I think thats the problem, Jess Phillips looked fucking desperate tbh. I think there is a risk that a focused investigation will expose more than we already know and it’ll be bad.

I assumed it was about votes, now I think it’s about genuinely trying to hide criminality.

Exactly. It seems there is so much as yet uncovered depth and complexity to this specific situation (not to mention the allegations that it is still ongoing in some areas and the vast number of victims), that anything other than a laser focus would make the inquiry unwieldy, impossible to manage and take decades.

I guess some would see that as a benefit.

The more you look the more it stinks. I genuinely think Labour are actively involved in a cover up now. I would have thought it paranoid before to believe, but it really feels like it.

Ultimately we have thousands of victims and given the sheer scale of cases in London I think it’s probably safe to say that we are looking at tens of thousands of victims. As Trevor Phillios points out many victims will never come forward and many perpetrators will never be caught.

There is no way I’m going to shut up about this.

You know that 99% of sexual violence in London is committed by white British men?

I’m going to need you to provide the proof for this absolutely fucking delusional statement.

I think there are probably 3 things going on here

1. It's well accepted that where men hold misogynistic views they are more dangerous to women ( It identified a strong association between toxic masculinity and sexual violence, with those who reported committing offences also admitting to misogynistic views, such as believing that women who get drunk are to blame if they get raped https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/29/research-reveals-rapes-and-assaults-admitted-to-by-male-uk-students )

2. I have seen studies (although can't find them now, obvs), implying that a hefty minority of men will rape if they feel they can get away with it

3. what essentially boils down to local corruption meaning a blind eye was turned

So men who hold regressive and misogynistic views found they could get away with harming and exploiting women and girls with no consequences

and I'm going to guess item 3 is what is sending Labour Grandees into a cold sweat in the middle of the night

Me too.

Exactly.