The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146055   Message #3409918
Posted By: Jim Carroll
25-Sep-12 - 10:25 AM
Thread Name: BS: Racism in the UK media
Subject: RE: BS: Racism in the UK media
Much more of what The Times had to say about what is happening can be seen from the leader in yesterday's edition.
Please note the bits in red - no "all male Pakistanis@, no "Cultural implants, no attempts to make this a race issue.
Jim Carroll

CRIMES OF SILENCE
A scandal of sexual exploitation of children exposes official failings and neglect

Protecting children from adults who intend them harm is as fundamental an obligation as any society can have. The Times reveals today a longstanding and systematic failure on the part of police and social services in South Yorkshire. Organised gangs of men preyed for years on young, teenage girls, grooming them and trafficking them for sex in cities across England.
An inescapable feature of these crimes concerns the national origins of the perpetrators and the ethnicity of the victims. Most of the abusers are men from a sub-section of British Pakistani society. Their victims are, predominantly, white girls; almost none is of Asian origin. Handled insensitively, this pattern might have inflamed ten¬sion and given sustenance to political extremists. Handled unseriously, it has had the same effect.
Andrew Norfolk, our correspondent, has seen more than 200 files covering more than a decade. They comprise correspondence from the police and social services, intelligence reports and case files. They detail a pattern of exploitation that has gone largely unpublicised and unpunished.
The authorities have evidence of the extent of sexual exploitation, including the names of hun¬dreds of victims and perpetrators. More than 50 children in Rotherham were allegedly abused by three men from a single family; many of the victims had been made pregnant. A confidential report from the South Yorkshire Police reveals that, as of late 2010, as many as 300 children in the county may still have been suffering sustained grooming and abuse.
The nature but nothing like the scale of this social evil was exposed by a case that led to the conviction of nine men in May. They had run a sex-grooming network in Rochdale. Among the victims were children in care. All but one of the criminals were of Pakistani origin. The case ex¬posed failings of organisation and imagination by the police. But it was an unusual case. The offenders were mainly older men and first-generation immigrants. The initial groomers and abusers in South Yorkshire are in the main British-born and with longer family ties to this country.
It is highly misleading to categorise these sexual abusers as "Asians" or "Muslims". Not only are the men wholly unrepresentative both of British Asians and of British Muslims, but they include not a single group case involving, for example, Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims of Indian origin. There is, however, a problem rightly identified after the Rochdale case by Baroness Warsi, the former Conservative Party chairman and a child of Pakistani immigrants. There is a minority of Pakistani men who regard white girls as "fair game" for sexual abuse.
These offences need to be countered with vigorous law enforcement and stiff exemplary sen¬tences for the guilty, in contrast to the prevailing culture of official paralysis. The reasons for such failings doubtless include a well-intentioned but in this case misguided concern not to inflame tensions. But the fundamental issue here is not about communal relations: it is about justice.
Children have been failed by the authorities. Police and Rotherham Council preferred to make implicit judgments of young girls, as if they had invited their own abuse, rather than question the perpetrators. Terrible crimes have gone unpunished; and the victims bear wounds of neglect as well as of mistreatment.