Rotherham’s - and England’s Shame
This was first published in the National Review ca. 2014 or 2015.
I am always skeptical that these sort of texts will remain available on the Internet. I have it seen too often and with too many good things that they suddenly "evaporate" without a trace.
When I find an IMHO "good" text I always pull it off the Internet to be able to keep it. The following is a good example.
Begin quote:
The
Muslim men who tortured more than 1,400 girls are criminals.
So are the authorities who covered it up.
So are the authorities who covered it up.
We
often read or hear from the media that a nation is “shocked” or
“horrified” by the revelation of some crime or government
scandal. It is almost never true. At best, most people are
disapproving or mildly interested in the shocking news. Since Tuesday
afternoon, however, Britain has felt real shock and horror over the
report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of
Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and
brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for
the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this
case are the local government authority, the police, and the
child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these
crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and
taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them.
Some
of the examples of this depraved official indifference are barely
believable. In one case, a girl was found drunk in the company of her
exploiters and was arrested while the men were let free. In another,
a father found his daughter, tried to rescue her, complained to the
police, and was himself arrested while the authorities took no action
on his complaint.
It
is not as if this series of crimes was hidden or unknown. No fewer
than three official investigations (prior to this one) looked into
these crimes. They reported the broad truth that we now know and
called for further investigations and arrests. The police and
child-protection services did nothing whatever about them. Indeed,
they quietly pigeonholed the findings with dismissive comments. The
local councilors looked the other way or, on some occasions,
intervened to discourage investigations by the police. Only the
general public was innocently ignorant.
If
these events were occurring in a film noir or a paperback novel set
in a mid-century American city, the Philip Marlowe character would
eventually unravel a complicated plot in which a corrupt
administration and police force were helping a criminal gang run
child brothels for fun and profit. That is in fact the most rational
interpretation of what took place. But it is not the true
explanation.
What
happened is explained by two additional facts: The 1,400 girls were
all white and of Christian background and English ethnicity while all
but one of their exploiters were Muslims of Pakistani heritage. (The
report describes the men delicately as “Asians,” but so far no
Hindus, Sikhs, or Hong Kong Chinese are among their number.) As in
other recent cases, the men targeted the girls in large part because
they were white Christians, culturally speaking, and thus
“worthless.” They actually told the girls that this was so. Still
worse, the police also treated the girls as worthless when they
bravely ignored the physical threats against them (one man poured
petrol over a girl and threatened to light it) and sought police
help. As a result, some of the girls came to believe they were in
fact worthless, which, of course, made them more tractable to the
gang. Others committed suicide. Many of the survivors will
experience, perhaps for the rest of their lives, prolonged bouts of
depression, self-contempt, shame, and other psychological disorders.
This
scale of criminality and victimhood is vast for a country that has
traditionally regarded itself as law-abiding. Worse, the report
concedes that the estimate of 1,400 victims is a conservative one.
(It is the equivalent of about three girls’ schools.) Some of the
girls were as young as eleven. And since other (more or less
identical) cases of criminal exploitation of young Christian girls by
Pakistani Muslim men have been uncovered in cities such as Oldham,
Birmingham, and Oxford in the last decade, the total number of
victims must be staggering.
The
motives of the exploiters, though vile, are not hard to understand.
They plainly include both racism and sexism alongside the lust and
cruelty enabled by their misogynistic culture. But what explains the
silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities?
Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive
absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The
first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the
police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding
to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they
were “racist.” Most people in the Muslim community were unaware
of this criminal conspiracy (and, shocked and horrified like everyone
else, they now condemn it). But when it was brought to the attention
of “community leaders,” they too played the race card to
suppress further investigation. To uncover such scandal would be not
only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of
multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy.
The
Labour member of Parliament for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, Dennis
MacShane, admitted yesterday that as a Guardian-reading
left liberal, he had shied away from looking into such topics as the
oppression of women in “bits of the Muslim community.” He ought
to have done something about it, but, well, you understand . . . “I
think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural
community boat, if I may put it like that.”
That
kind of official response is worse than outright bigotry, but it has
unfortunately been not uncommon in recent years. Anxious to avoid the
“racist” taint, the police frequently ignore the appeals of young
Muslim
women fleeing from forced marriages or genital mutilation; instead,
they work with community leaders to persuade the women to return to
their families. This shameful collaboration is gradually being
brought to an end. But it still shapes many official attitudes.
Official
attitudes to the young white girls in Rotherham were different —
but, if anything, worse. They combined sexism with a contempt for the
white working class that is now common in both the progressive
intelligentsia and the lumpen-intelligentsia whose members
respectively lay down and enforce social policy under uncomprehending
or cowardly political leaders. Thus the police shared the opinion of
the criminals that their victims were little better than “sluts.”
They were powerless, without influential parents or friends, lacking
an ethnic support group that would rally to their defense. If racism
is a weapon that can be used only by the powerful, as the progressive
mantra holds, then the girls were victims of racism. But they were
the wrong victims just as the criminals were the wrong pedophiles.
Their plight had never been a topic in lectures on diversity. In
short, they certainly weren’t worth risking a reprimand for
disrupting good community relations or undermining diversity.
The
authorities’ contempt was ill deserved by any standard. Many of the
young women victims have proven to be brave, decent, and articulate.
All of them were bullied, deceived, and beaten into submission by
their tormentors and betrayed by those legally obliged to protect
them.
But the moral character of the victims is irrelevant in any
case. So-called sluts deserve the same police protections as the rest
of us — arguably they deserve more since they are at greater risk.
Instead, these girls were seen by officials not as children in need
of protection but as powerless pieces of meat who scarcely deserved
the rights of British citizens and who could be safely ignored to
avoid embarrassment.
Another
element in official attitudes is hostility to the family and a hatred
of the notion that families might instill traditional moral values in
their children. Such hostility proved very convenient for the
criminal gangs, who probably had to overcome a weaker moral
resistance on the part of their grooming victims. To be sure,
this hostility arises from a very different source than sexism or
contempt for the white working class: a sense among progressives in
the public sector that intact families undermine equality and that
even etiolated Christian beliefs obstruct multiculturalism. If that
sounds a trifle paranoid, recall that it was the same Rotherham
social-work department that wanted to remove children from foster
parents whose support for UKIP indicated an impermissible hostility
to multiculturalism. You couldn’t make it up.
No
one can deny that many families in Britain’s new underclass neglect
their children and, in the worst cases, abuse them almost as much as
the criminals did. But exactly the same is true of social workers.
They too have been guilty of the worst possible scandals (leading at
times to murder), some of which are rooted in quasi-sophisticated
“anti-racist” nonsense about the proper ethnic culture that young
children should enjoy. They increasingly show a contempt for natural
families and their rights that is plainly contrary to almost any
theory of human rights and that allows them to break up families
on slight pretexts. Late last year, the British courts forced a
young Italian tourist to have a caesarean operation and hand over her
newborn to foster parents on the grounds that she was bipolar and
might not always take her medication. And to put the top hat on it,
these social-work interventions have a very poor record of success.
As Colin Brewer, a distinguished psychiatrist, points
out
in the current London
Spectator,
it is increasingly plain that social work simply doesn’t work. And
that makes intact families with religious commitments even more of a
threat — because they do work.
A
final factor is that Rotherham and South Yorkshire have been Labour
“pocket boroughs” for 80 years or more. Until the last local
elections — when UKIP broke through to win ten seats — there has
been no effective opposition to hold Labour to account. The threat
from UKIP in recent years has made Labour still more determined to
hold the Muslim vote and even more reliant on those Muslim Labour
councilors who were its missionaries to Muslim voters. So Labour kept
the lid on the scandal as long as it could and discouraged interest
in it. (You may hear certain American echoes there.)
What
can we do? Given the scale of horror in this story, governments and
politicians will propose to do a great deal between now and the
election. But will their proposals pass the tests of serious
effectiveness? There are two:
First,
will anybody apart from the “Asian” criminals themselves go to
prison for what has happened? What penalty, for instance, will be
imposed on the current police and crime commissioner for South
Yorkshire who, in his previous position as a Labour councilor, shared
responsibility for the council’s treatment of the young victims? At
the moment, he is offering weak apologies and refusing to resign. But
he and his official colleagues are guilty of something like
conspiracy to facilitate and conceal crimes such as rape, sexual
assault, grievous bodily harm, etc., etc. A competent lawyer could
probably run up a dozen formal charges on such lines overnight. Mere
resignations and dismissals will not fit this bill. Nothing short of
prison sentences for senior officials in the police and local
government will meet the needs of both justice and public opinion.
People are tired of official scandals for which no one ever pays a
price.
The
second test is whether the British government will reform the
broad-brush multiculturalism and “anti-racism” that have
grievously distorted government policy nationally and locally. One
way of advertising such a change would be to repudiate the official
definition of “institutionalized racism” that the Macpherson
report introduced a decade ago. The Commission on Racial Equality, a
quasi-official body, defines it as follows:
If
racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs, or
practices, that institution is racist whether
or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racial
intentions.
And
the Macpherson Report itself gave a further explanation as to how it
works:
[Institutionalized
racism] can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes, and
behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting
prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which
disadvantage minority ethnic people.
These
arguments are fatuous and cannot withstand serious intellectual
criticism — though there is a huge inverted pyramid of
intellectualized nonsense resting on them. Once intentionality is
removed from the concept of racism, it becomes the accidental result
of policies or structures adopted for legitimate reasons, and almost
anyone anywhere can be shown to be guilty of it. But in Britain and
(under the term “disparate impact”) in America, these arguments
have carried the day in law and politics. That explains why the
police and local authorities in Rotherham and elsewhere have been
willing to conceal or ignore crimes that involve race, ethnicity, or
religion.
If
racism is a mysterious airborne virus that shapes people’s behavior
without their realizing it, then why should an ordinary copper take
the risk of even noticing a case with racial overtones? If he cannot
avoid involvement, why not take the side of the “disadvantaged
ethnic minority” — especially when it has such advantages as
powerful friends and helpful pressure groups? And if the powerful
friends sense that police intervention might threaten their ethnic
electoral support, then a quiet word in the right place will ensure
that the problem “goes away.” In reality, however, the problem
metastasizes — until, as in Rotherham, it becomes so massive,
toxic, and embarrassing that the authorities join the criminals in
concealing it, to the continued detriment of its victims.
Ultimately,
this mess is the result of progressive official policies. It will
recur endlessly until the policies are changed. Ordinary citizens —
especially working-class “Old Labour” voters — realize this.
The only good aspect of this scandal is that this time they seem
enraged enough to insist on real change.
— John
O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National
Review.
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