how the unthinkable is normal

POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Thursday, November 13, 2025 17:12
VIEWED: 2330
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1KIKI

Thursday, September 4, 2014 11:04 AM

When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.

But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost. “All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges.

Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way.

... the report also outlined how those victims and parents who did ask for help were mostly let down by the police and social services, despite a great deal of detail known to them for more than a decade, including, in some cases, the names of possible offenders and their license plate numbers.

“Nobody can pretend they didn’t know,” Ms. Jay said in an interview.

Increasingly, the girls were shared not just among groups of men locally, but sold, or bartered for drugs or guns. They were driven to cities like Sheffield, Manchester and London, where groups of men raped them, sometimes overnight.

When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up, Ms. Jay said. Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time.

... Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.” In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12. “These girls were often treated with utter contempt,” Ms. Jay said.

Life in an English Town Where Abuse of Young Girls Flourished

By KATRIN BENNHOLDSEPT. 1, 2014

ROTHERHAM, England — It started on the bumper cars in the children’s arcade of the local shopping mall. Lucy was 12, and a group of teenage boys, handsome and flirtatious, treated her and her friends to free rides and ice cream after school.

Over time, older men were introduced to the girls, while the boys faded away. Soon they were getting rides in real cars, and were offered vodka and marijuana. One man in particular, a Pakistani twice her age and the leader of the group, flattered her and bought her drinks and even a mobile phone. Lucy liked him.

The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.

She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.

At night, she would come home and hide her soiled clothes at the back of her closet. When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.

But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.

“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed.

Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way. One girl told investigators that gang rape was part of growing up in her neighborhood.

Between 1997 and 2013,

GEEZER

Thursday, September 4, 2014 6:54 PM

The police in England are not ignoring just this type of crime.

Quote:
Victims of crime are being "encouraged" to investigate offences themselves, an inspection of police forces in England and Wales has found.

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said criminal damage and car crime were "on the verge of being decriminalised" because forces had "almost given up".

In some cases victims were asked to check for CCTV or fingerprints.

The Association of Chief Police Officers said austerity meant forces had to set priorities.

'Material concern'

The review also found that police community support officers were being used as "detectives" in some forces.

The inspector who led the review, Roger Baker, said: "It's more a mindset, that we no longer deal with these things. And effectively what's happened is a number of crimes are on the verge of being decriminalised."

He added: "So it's not the fault of the individual staff; it's a mindset thing that's crept in to policing to say 'We've almost given up'."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29053978

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

AURAPTOR

Thursday, September 4, 2014 7:10 PM

As long as they're doing it to each other, why get involved ?

Seems to be the over all mindset of cops, everywhere.

1KIKI

Thursday, September 4, 2014 7:17 PM

Who's the 'they'?

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Friday, September 5, 2014 4:52 AM

This is such a shocking story.

Awful.

1KIKI

Friday, September 5, 2014 7:26 AM

It is, isn't it?

It seem to me the question to ask is 'how did this happen'? How could so many children of a community be preyed upon by a group that didn't even bother to hide, for so long, while the police looked the other way?

I think it comes down to political powerlessness, like the people of Ferguson.

Assuming each group has at heart the motivation of the greatest reward for the least cost, the police would most likely be looking for less work at the same amount of pay. Who has the power to decide if they keep the doing their job? Not the community. The people with structural control over the levers of effort and reward are the politicians.

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

AURAPTOR

Friday, September 5, 2014 6:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Who's the 'they'?

Pakistani immigrants , inner city blacks in Chicago , etc...

SECOND

Friday, September 5, 2014 6:52 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Who's the 'they'?

Pakistani immigrants , inner city blacks in Chicago , etc...

www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/old-contempt-rotherham
. . . because most of the perpetrators were Pakistani and most of the victims were white, local officials were reluctant to proceed, worried about inflaming ethnic tensions. Last week, the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, denounced what she called “an institutionalized political correctness” at work in this case. Though this might sound like a rhetorical flourish, there seems to be some truth to this claim. Rotherham is an economically stressed city of two hundred and fifty-eight thousand people, with an ethnic minority population of about eight per cent. The Labour Party has long controlled the town council, but, in recent years, the Party has been joined by a few members of the populist right-wing faction U.K.I.P. When investigating individual cases, the Rotherham report found no evidence that ethnic consideration had determined outcomes for children. But, when it came to setting policy, a certain skittishness seems to have played a role. According to the report, “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.” Perhaps that, too, is a concern that deserves some sympathy—though because its immediate result was a failure to rescue children from brutal circumstances, the sympathy only goes so far.

What appears to have been at work is a problematic multiculturalism to which European countries have subscribed too easily. It’s the kind of multiculturalism that is really a form of separatism: you stay in your enclave and we’ll stay in ours; it’s the kind that David Cameron has faulted for failing to offer a vision of a more inclusive British society for young Muslims, and for creating a niche in which extremist ideology can grow.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

1KIKI

Saturday, September 6, 2014 8:53 AM

The reason I asked rappy is because you specifically said As long as they're doing it TO EACH OTHER, why get involved ?. And you further elaborated Pakistani immigrants , inner city blacks in Chicago , etc....

But in this case the perpetrators were Pakistani, older and male, the victims WHITE, younger and female. And the police force primarily WHITE, older and male. You got a major chunk of the story wrong. It doesn't break down by 'race'.

http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cs
e_in_rotherham

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/old-contempt-rotherham

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/world/europe/reckoning-starts-in-bri
tain-on-abuse-of-girls.html

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Saturday, September 6, 2014 9:24 AM

Rap seems to be saying that so longer as girls of ethnicity other than anglo are being abused by men of ethnicity other than anglo, then there should be no action taken.

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