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Is Rotherham A Dysfunctional Family?
Until last week, I’d never heard of Rotherham, either. Sorry to say, it wasn’t a good first impression. A recent report in from the English city, however, has exposed the sexual abuse of more than 1,400 children over the last two decades by sex-abuse gangs.
For years, I’ve volunteered with a charity organization in a developing country in Southeast Asia that cares for girls who have been rescued from sex-trafficking — or as it’s called these days, commercial sexual exploitation. I’m often asked why this systematic abuse persists to such a scale in some corners of the world. Police officers bribed to look the other way, corrupt politicians who don’t want to upset the powerful gangs, local authorities who like money the sex-tourists from abroad bring in, and child welfare services in poor countries with too little resources to deal with such an enormous problem? Those reasons I’m familiar with. But what happened in Rotherham has thrown me for a loop.
The Rotherham report details how authorities dismissed, ignored, and possibly covered-up allegations of abuse. The local police and child protection services had the authority, and had (or could have gotten) the resources and information needed to tackle the problem; they had everything they needed but the will to do so. So what on Earth makes people — whose very job it is to protect children — collectively shrug when faced with blatant evidence of sexual abuse of hundreds of young girls?
Maybe I’ve been looking at this through the wrong lens. What if the authorities were behaving less like an overwhelmed and corrupt social system in a poor country, and more like a dysfunctional family, a family that reacts in the worst way possible when a child tells about what another family member did to her?
There are always some family members who would simply rather live in denial. It’s too much of a paradigm shift to accept that the abuse really happened. Uncle Bob would never do a thing like that! That sort of thing doesn’t happen in our family. Little Sally must be making it up.
The Rotherham report states that most of the perpetrators were Pakistani gangs and most of the victims were white girls, and some social services staff said they received “clear direction” from their managers not to reveal the ethnic identity of the perpetrators. In one instance, a social worker dismissed the concerns of the mother of a fourteen-year-old victim — who had repeatedly gone missing only to be found intoxicated by substances given to her by older men — saying that the mother was unwilling to accept the fact that her daughter was growing up. It’s not really rape. These are accusations by whites against minorities. They’re like something out of racist, fear-mongering propaganda. They must be false. After all, isn’t that what we were taught in our multicultural training classes?
Then there are those in a dysfunctional family who know full well that the abuse happened, but conclude that it’s best to sweep it under the rug for the sake of family harmony. If this gets out, it’ll tear the family apart. Sally will get over it in time. There’s no reason to make things worse for everyone else.
The report also indicates that several staff members believed that — if they went public — they’d be “giving oxygen” to racist stereotypes and attract extremist groups that threaten “community cohesion.” Best to leave it alone. Why make community relations worse with a bunch of irate protestors and racists? What will people think of us? We’ve got enough problems already.
Then there’s the inexplicable — but predictable — blaming of the victim. Everyone knows about Uncle Bob’s proclivities. Sally shouldn’t have been dumb enough to be alone with him.
One of the victims in Rotherham explained that when she went told police about the rapes, the officer replied, “What did you expect?” Her case was dismissed. After all, everyone knows what happens when young girls hang around with these older Pakistani men. The girls made their choice. That’s just the way it is around here.
Maybe it helps to look at this horror like a dysfunctional family. Or maybe not, and I’m just trying to make sense of the senseless here.
Better training to identify child abuse, more resources to deal with aftercare for the children, and more communication with community members: all well and good. But I suspect there’s something deeper that’s been going on in Rotherham.
One incident in the report details how a twelve-year-old girl was found drunk in the backseat of a car with a grown man who had sexual photos of her on his phone. Though the girl’s father had said that she had been raped, the social care manager determined—three months later—that the girl was at “no risk” for sexual exploitation. Case closed. A month later the same girl was again found intoxicated, this time with several adult men in a house. The police arrested her for being disorderly. None of the men were arrested.
That sort of response doesn’t happen because the authorities need another training class or a larger departmental budget or better interagency communication. It happens because individuals choose to deny what’s right before their eyes, to disregard the obvious, and make themselves believe that something else is more important than the lives of these little girls.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user wavebreakmedia.
Published in General
Just for the moment, set aside the question of whether the sex was consensual or rape. Is it legal in England for grown men to have sex with 12-year-old girls?
“A boy or girl under the age of 16 cannot consent in law, (Archbold 2004, 20-152).”
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/consent/
more here:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/5
Two reasons:
The perpetrators were ethnic minorities (racism issue).
The perpetrators were Muslim, and you know what happens when Muslims are threatened (people get brutally murdered).
I’ve been cocooned in work and Ricochet for awhile, so I haven’t heard about this. I’m confused about this bit: were these girls abducted (multiple times, apparently) and then raped? Or were they lured back to the same people? Or…what? The last girl Suzanne mentioned was raped twice; her father seems to have known about the first rape. How is it that situation was allowed to have been repeated? Was the father in on it or indifferent? Is there any reporting on that aspect?
I have not read on this extensively, but here’s what I get out of it. It sounds like the thugs forced the girls into prostitution and threatened to kill them or their families if they talked. Which evidently was unnecessary since the local police didn’t care anyway.
Is it or is it not illegal for a child to have sex in the UK? I just don’t get it. There would be so many lawsuits against any police department that found sexual activity with a 12 year old if they did not arrest the adults present in this country. Is it time to be glad we are a litigious nation?
But on a larger context – I am a first generation immigrant. One of the things that many of my friends (from Europe / India / Pakistan and other places in the world) claim of the US are that they can be naive – they expect happy endings and rainbows and puppies….
I think this is exactly what makes Americans (at least the ones in my circle) great. How can a nation expect to be moral and just if they do not expect justice and propriety?
For all the claims to English mannerisms, what I see in the UK is a hollow facade. My Brit friends (and perhaps not an excellent representation of the country as a whole) seem to say the right things, but don’t always do the right thing.
Have their been reports where police officials have admitted that?
Really, Randy? Really?
I am glad for the right to litigate. I think the problem here is that the Brits have an “unwritten” constitution that relies on “tradition” to maintain its way. Since the Brits have also added the “tradition” that multiculturalism is the norm and anything less is “racism” not only is this possible, it is required. (Particulary when one realizes that “multiculturalism” has, as a necessary pre-condition, the soft bigotry of low expectations.)
Throw in the moral relativism of the BBC Savile scandal and you realize that of course this was going to happen. (And nothing will be done about it.)
Margaret Thatcher had it right when she confronted the socialists with a simple truth, that they were willing to allow the poor be poorer as long as the rich were less rich.
So today in the UK you have a government that is satisfied with a crime rate 4X the US, as long civilians are not allowed to own guns for self protection. Public protestations to the contrary, they have a death penalty, they just don’t impose it for criminal offenses.
Any government that is willing to kill people for money is also willing to have masses of children raped by minorities or celebrities.
Yeah, really. This has been going on for over a decade. Surely someone must be coming forward and offering an excuse. I’m curious if anyone has heard of people involved in these cases offering this as their reasoning.
Here is the Rotherham Report, read it.
http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham
I’m with RushBabe on this one. It smacks of fear — fear of violent Muslims and fear of the persecuting state which protects those thugs.
You know a society has run its course when blatant evil is not merely tolerated but guarded, promoted, and presented as justice.
By the way, Suzanne, what are some organizations for combating sex slavery and abuse that you would recommend?
I could agree, except they also enabled/ covered up the Savile scandal for 5 decades. Pre and Post immigration boom.
Any time a scandal like this is exposed, there is someone or many someones who could have done something and chose not to. Moral cowardice is a choice and should not be excused lightly.
Briefly, Ed, there were fourteen hundred cases over about twenty years covered in this report. Basically you had a clique or gang of Pakistani cab drivers who would groom early teen girls from lower class backgrounds with gifts and booze, rape them (statutory rape) and pimp them out.
I would also be curious, Suzanne, to see what techniques you have seen to combat this effectively.
Some details from a conversation with a vice officer here about fifteen years ago: A fair number of the prostitutes here in Salt Lake City are 13 years old or so, and being dragged around the country and pimped out by the Russian Mafia. The technique that was developed here was cooperation between the police, prosecutors and judges to keep the people arrested for prostitution (underage, adult, and trannies) in jail without bail until they were ready to testify against the guys exploiting them. This took, IIRC, the use of RICO laws, or something similar, and a willingness to not let the jail become a revolving door.
One other point I would make is that yes, the Islamic aspect of this story is a huge factor, but it takes a real effort to take on crimes like this, and runaway or unsupervised teenage drunks and drug addicts aren’t a powerful constituency–here or over there. This sort of thing goes on here all the time.
I like Ross Douthat’s take. He sees it as multiculturalism run amok, but points out that we all have to beware of our sacred cows. Just as the Catholic priest scandal went on for a long time because people refused to believe it could happen, when we set some group apart as legally and, in some ways, morally untouchable, this is what you get. So I don’t think the dysfunctional family illustration is quite what was going on, though I suppose it does track a bit with the part about not wanting to cause trouble and disrupt the surface peace. It’s horrific, but the upside is that multiculti is taking a big, big, long overdue hit.
International Justice Mission would top my list! http://www.ijm.org
On one hand
If senior managers truly encouraged their juniors to hold off in the name of political correctness, they took the path of least resistance and should be brought to book. But that would have been such a mass dereliction of duty that I’m loth to believe it happened on such a scale. I know that if called to account, I’d much prefer to say, “I wanted to intervene but was terrified by political correctness”, than “I messed up”, “I didn’t think it was that serious” or “I couldn’t be bothered”.
In no other sphere does PC and its terrors prevent the authorities taking action against minorities. We’re over-represented in courts and prisons at one end of the social scale, overdisciplined and marginalised in the professions at the other. If it is true that political correctness prevented the authorities from using their powers against minorities for fear of giving offence, that’s a scandal. It would also be a first.
On the other
The Children’s Commissioner’s report “I thought I was the only one” on child sexual exploitation mentions perpetrators’ ethnicities, but without saying whether the numbers were more or less as predicted from the Census. In fact, the Commission’s own figures show that only half the predicted number of White perpetrators were actually found (43% versus 88%), twice the number of “mixed” ethnicity (3.8% versus 1.8%), almost 5 times the number of Asians (33% versus 6.7%) and almost 7 times the numbers of Blacks (19% versus 2.8%).
Further from the report:
14% of victims ethnicity was undisclosed,
60% of victims were described as white (42% White British)
5%of victims were recorded as Asian,
6% of “Mixed’ ethnicity,
13% as Black
2% as other.
Iow if you’re an Asian child in Britain you are (statistically) less likely to be sexually abused than children from any other ethnic group – although Asian men (presumably) are at least five times more likely than most other British men to abuse children.
There’s more going on here than incompetent authorities.
Except that when they talk about “Asian” in the report, they don’t mean people form China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, etc.
When the Brits say “Asian” they mean “persons of Pakistani origin.”
Yes, I know that in Britain Asian means South Asian. The point was the contrast between likelihood of Asian men to offend (higher than average) and likelihood of Asian children to be victimised (lower).
So Pakistani men who are child abusers (for eg) are less likely to abuse Pakistani girls than white girls, even though they presumably have much greater access to children in their ‘own’ community.
My working hypothesis:I don’t buy the ‘they think white girls are okay to abuse but Pakistani girls are not’ thing – I think they’d abuse anybody they think they can get away with abusing. What stops them is fear. Not of the police, but of the girls’ relatives. For good and for ill, the Pakistani community has not ceded a monopoly of force to the State to the extent that perhaps the rest of society has. This can be very bad (see: honour killings) but it also means that someone who sexually abuses a Pakistani girl child faces physical danger.
Which is why I doubt this would happen in the States – where more people are armed (I am starting to see the charm) and ready to respond.
Thoughts? British people, amirite?
Zafar, it could be as simple as being coddled and given a livelihood without any required labor engendered a mindset that everything was free, including white girls.
This is probably true to a great extent, but there’s got to be something else going on. One of the atrocities about the Catholic scandal is that the supposed “untouchability” of the priest is what persuaded the victim not to reveal the abuse. The victims thought they would be sinful if they reported the abuse.
But no one thinks that Pakistani cab drivers are untouchable. And in fact, the abuses were reported, but the local authorities did nothing about it.
This strikes me as being much less about untouchability than old fashioned gang bullying and police cowardice … or payoffs.
I’ll wait to see if anything more comes out of this story. Something tells me we’ve only watched Act One of this tragedy.
KC, I do think there was some multiculti untouchability going on. That came from the public employees steeped in it who were unwilling to risk crossing that stupid boundary, not from the poor, desperate people who were reporting the abuse. But you are no doubt correct that there was corruption too.
This story really turns my stomach and breaks my heart. The more I learn of Islam the more I am repulsed of the culture (I’m separating it from the religion here, though they are integrated). Is it a surprise when you let a significant part of the third world enter your country that part of your country becomes third world? It shouldn’t have been. But I suspect that a large number of white British are also responsible here. Talk about a lack of virtue. What has happened to Britain? The talking point seems to blame multiculturalism. But I suspect it’s more than that. My impression is that Britain has totally bought into the “sex-is-good” subculture and that played a part in excusing the crimes.
Zafar–great line (I’m starting to see the charm.) I agree that the prospect of being beaten up would be a deterrent, but I can also imagine them regarding western culture as inherently loose sexually, which it is, and then using that along with the “othering” process to horribly come to regard these victims as, in their minds, fair game, especially since it went on for so long under the noses of the police. It’s dreadful to see how these things happen, but there it is. I hope the case has served as a wake-up call for both the Pakistani community, the Brits and all of us.
“Othering” is a bit of a lefty concept, but there is a grain of truth in it.
Yes, I think that’s true wrt perceptions – but it’s an opportunistic self serving excuse – otherwise there would be no rapes of traditionally dressed (ie covered) women in Pakistan or Afghanistan and the fact is there are. I honestly think it’s a matter of what people think they can get away with – and also a symptom of a more profound problem with how they see women and sexuality in general.