School governors told to ‘dismiss’ grooming gangs concerns

[NoNever]

Article in the Telegraph.

Quote “ School governors have been encouraged to dismiss concerns about grooming gangs as “disinformation”, The Telegraph can disclose.
Thousands of governors undergoing safeguarding training this year were presented with a scenario involving rumours of “men belonging to a particular religion” committing “violent crimes against women”.
They were asked to identify the scenario as an “online safety risk” because children were spreading “disinformation”.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/11/04/school-governors-told-to-dismiss-grooming-gangs-concerns/

This is infuriating. For decades girls were told to shut up about grooming gangs and this is the training school governors are being provided in 2025.

Edited to fix formatting

Absolutely fucking disgusting.

Because facts matter in education.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65174096

And here's two of the more famous British born 'Romeo Pimps'/'Lover boys":
https://www.jezebel.com/romeo-pimping-2-romanian-women-claim-andrew-tate-dm-1850012665

You think that I'm going to trust the BBC.after the revelations in the Michael Prescott leak?

Pretending that Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs don’t exist because other men also rape is ridiculous.

The hypothetical scenario was “At a board meeting, your staff governor reports overhearing pupils in her class talking about a video they were sent, falsely claiming that men belonging to a particular religion are using new tactics to commit violent crimes against women in your local area.”

It was part of a quiz to test governors' ability to identify risky online content. While the choice of question was ill-conceived in the context, the described video would be 'disinformation'. It would give children the impression that only Muslims were grooming perpetrators, potentially leaving them open to danger from white/non-Muslim men. It's also quite likely to feed racism.

Archive copy of the article: https://archive.ph/ZOFWj#selection-4151.9-4151.270

The people who made the training tool said "We have recognised that the scenario included in this question was inappropriate because it made the question unclear and we are revising it this week."

They don't bother to explain why it "made the question unclear". I'll explain why.

The question probably referred to what @GarlicHound (quoted) said about how a focus on Pakistani Muslim men erases white perps. But it could also be interpreted by governors exactly as the Telegraph interpreted it: that Pakistani Muslim men are to be treated as a sacred caste who can do no wrong.

Any training material that can be interpreted as setting up a sacred caste is inherently wrong. No person or group of people should be above suspicion when it comes to safeguarding children.

I worry this kind of thing is an utter safeguarding risk. It’s an extension of “if you see a man in the toilets, don’t be a bigot and call him a pervert of he wants to start talking about tampons”. It constantly feels like we are trying to condition our kids into having zero boundaries and zero risk awareness because being a bigot is worse than getting raped.

I get the sensitivity, I’m not white. Children who could be sharing information about grooming tactics shouldn’t be put through a struggle session. There is a line between awareness, safeguarding and being a racist.

The rot goes deep, the denial is still there.

You don't have to trust the messenger, the research speaks for itself.
But yeah, by all means, maintain the same energy for media outlets who pander to fear mongering...

The point you are spectacularly missing is grooming gangs aren't inherent to race or ethnicity that's a very useful piece of information if protecting minors is really the purpose…

I don't trust the BBC to give an accurate summary of the research. The BBC have lied about Queen Liz, they provably lied about Trump by doctoring that speech on Panorama. If the BBC told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check it myself.

As the State broadcaster, funded through taxes, I have every right to hold them to a higher standard of honesty and impartiality than other news outlets.

You can look up the research & examine it yourself you know. Not that the fact that pimps are also white isn't self evident.

I'm going to direct your wilful misunderstanding to my earlier post in which I said "a focus on Pakistani Muslim men erases white perps". No one is claiming that white men don't rape or groom. I mean, Epstein FFS.

At the same time, the BBC is not a reliable source any more.

'Sacred caste' Oh please. Kids aren't that stupid.
All that needs to be said is criminality knows no limits on race/ethnicity/sex & comes from all walks of life. See Rose West.

It seems badly worded, of course. But there has to be a way of distinguishing between a real potential threat and the latest version of the “foreign looking men in a white van tried to grab a girl just outside school” scare story. Not least because kids (and adults too) need to be made aware of the real, present risks of abuse and not wholly distracted by the foreign grooming gangs story.

The authorities don’t try to hide white rapists. For decades on decade the police, social workers, councils, and politicians have insisted Pakistani Muslim gangs were just a racist conspiracy theory while ignoring the thousands of white working class girls who were raped. This is just one more example of that trend still continuing in 2025.

And the insistence of bringing up “white men rape too” every time grooming gangs are brought up just adds to that.

I appreciate that there was an element of racial/ethnic 'coverup' in Rotherham. But that doesn't justify racial/ethnic scapegoating. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Th whole point tho is to exploit the 'distraction'. These bad actors don't care about abuse of women rather how they can use it for their own political agenda.

What Trump speech and Queen story did they lie about?

Let's be clear about what is being minimised here:

The Rotherham Grooming (child rape & torture) Gangs scandal involved an estimated 1,400 children between 1997 and 2013. The rape victims were mostly vulnerable white girls aged between 10-14 at the start of the abuse. The child gang rapists were predominantly British-Pakistani men. This is one town in England. Just one town.

Official reports, including those by Prof Alexis Jay and Baroness Casey, found systemic failures, cover-ups, and a total dereliction of duty by the police and social workers. Very young, vulnerable girls who were the victims of gang rape, were disbelieved, or ignored, or casually dismissed as 'child prostitutes' making poor life choices by the people whose job was to protect them.

It was so very shocking, to so many people, because we expected paedophile rapists to need to hide their evil behaviour from all their family, colleagues and friends. Here we saw so many examples of brothers, cousins & uncles, people working at the same taxi firm or fast food outlet, all forming groups to gang rape children.

Something was, and is, very wrong.

Listen here, stating the facts that pimping is racially& ethnically universal isn't minimising anything other than lies by racists.

What is being minimised here is the utter incompetence by the government services that facilitated the abuse. It's the British system that allowed criminals to escape accountability & perpetuate their crimes. So if you want to lay the blame at ethnicity of criminals don't forget to include the ethnicity of the criminals who looked the other way.

I grew up in Rotherham. I worked in various roles with very vulnerable cohorts in Rotherham for a number of years.

I had to leave because, even after the news became international common knowledge, we still all had to pretend we didn’t know about the clear risk that protecting some men’s feelings has.

We were STILL being called racist for trying to be proactive instead of reactive. In around the early 2000’s, these men started targeting girls from the Roma community which made it easier for some professionals to ignore.

And here we are, still arguing about whether we can talk about an issue that is endemic in some pockets of a culture because the public would rather allow poor girls to be raped than to upset the feelings of some men.

It literally states the research is lacking in the article. It doesn’t disprove anything being stated here.

No one thinks only Pakistani men rape girls.

The issue is the pressure on professionals to ignore it or cover it up.

The issue is the police being complicit in it. Social services facilitating it. Councillors vouching for their perpetrating family members.

The issue is anyone daring to speak about it being put a risk of facing criminal changes. Including the victims themselves.

That is what makes it so endemic. Useful idiots wanting to widen the scope to all grooming and rapes instead of allowing the victims to get justice for their very specific experience.