Rotherham - moving from denial to anger
When the news first broke about Professor Alexis Jay's report into the massive scale of child abuse in Rotherham, I had great difficulty believing that such a monstrous breakdown in enforcement of the law and protection of children could possibility have been allowed to happen.
I am now moving slowly but steadily from denial to carefully controlled anger, and the letters of reaction which can be read here are just some of many straws in the wind suggesting that this is not an isolated response.
How else can we respond to the news, that, as The Economist put it here,
"Children as young as 11 were plied with drink and drugs, raped, beaten and trafficked to be abused by men in other cities. One was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. Another told the investigation that gang rape was a usual part of growing up in her district."
"... the local council knew at least ten years ago of widespread abuse and yet appears to have downplayed the problem. Nor did the police pay much attention to it. On one occasion, officers attended a derelict house and found an intoxicated girl with several adult men. They arrested the girl for being drunk and disorderly but detained none of the men. Some fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves."
Professor Jay herself was quoted in the Telegraph here as saying that
"The utter brutality of it was what shocked me most."
“It is really hard to describe it – the horrible nature of the sexual acts and the brutality of the controls these girls were subjected to. There was a vast amount of truly horrific material.
"I was taken aback at how callous, how violent, the operations were. These were girls of 11 and 12. They were children. The violence was worst. Petrol dousing was used as a form of intimidation.
"Oral and anal sex were so often a means of control and punishment. It was truly frightening that people in our country could be doing that.”
As the same article says,
"Something unimaginably evil was unfolding and on a scale that defied belief."
It is essential that society as a whole and particularly those with responsibility for policing, security, and child protection, pay attention to what is being said about the problem by those people within the Muslim faith and the Pakistani community who have stood up against it - not least because it is essential that the blame is directed squarely where it belongs, on the child abusers and those in authority who looked the other way and failed to stop them, not on every Muslim and everyone of Pakistani origin, nor on those who genuinely tried to do their jobs.
One piece of required reading should be this article in the Telegraph about the concerns expressed by Dr Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, following the conviction of a gang in Oxford last year for the same sort of crimes which have been going on in Rotherham.
Another is this article by Shaheen Hasmat, a woman of Pakistani origin born and raised in Scotland,
I don't think I have ever previously in this blog quoted with approval anything said by a UKIP politician but I will make an exception for the acticle by Amjad Bashir MEP, himself a Muslim of Pakistani origin, who wrote that Pakistanis must condemn the Rotherham abuses.
It is essential that the perpetrators of these terrible crimes are put in front of a court, given a fair trial and, if convicted, severely punished for what they have done.
Anyone convicted of raping or pouring petrol over children who was not born in Britain should be taken straight from prison to the airport when they have served their sentence and put on the next plane to their country of birth - if they have been given British citizenship they should lose it.
We cannot afford to assume that those towns and cities where scandals like this have already come to light are the only places where such crimes are taking place. Even if, as I very much hope but do not think we can take for granted, there is nowhere else where child abuse is happening on the industrial scale seen in Rotherham, there have also been similar cases and convictions in Oxford, Derby, and Rochdale. We have to check if anything similar is happening anywhere else.
And above all, Professor Jay is surely right that a huge effort must be made to help and rehabilitate the victims. These vulnerable young people have been failed by society, and they should be helped to rebuild their lives.
I am now moving slowly but steadily from denial to carefully controlled anger, and the letters of reaction which can be read here are just some of many straws in the wind suggesting that this is not an isolated response.
How else can we respond to the news, that, as The Economist put it here,
"Children as young as 11 were plied with drink and drugs, raped, beaten and trafficked to be abused by men in other cities. One was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. Another told the investigation that gang rape was a usual part of growing up in her district."
"... the local council knew at least ten years ago of widespread abuse and yet appears to have downplayed the problem. Nor did the police pay much attention to it. On one occasion, officers attended a derelict house and found an intoxicated girl with several adult men. They arrested the girl for being drunk and disorderly but detained none of the men. Some fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves."
Professor Jay herself was quoted in the Telegraph here as saying that
"The utter brutality of it was what shocked me most."
“It is really hard to describe it – the horrible nature of the sexual acts and the brutality of the controls these girls were subjected to. There was a vast amount of truly horrific material.
"I was taken aback at how callous, how violent, the operations were. These were girls of 11 and 12. They were children. The violence was worst. Petrol dousing was used as a form of intimidation.
"Oral and anal sex were so often a means of control and punishment. It was truly frightening that people in our country could be doing that.”
As the same article says,
"Something unimaginably evil was unfolding and on a scale that defied belief."
It is essential that society as a whole and particularly those with responsibility for policing, security, and child protection, pay attention to what is being said about the problem by those people within the Muslim faith and the Pakistani community who have stood up against it - not least because it is essential that the blame is directed squarely where it belongs, on the child abusers and those in authority who looked the other way and failed to stop them, not on every Muslim and everyone of Pakistani origin, nor on those who genuinely tried to do their jobs.
One piece of required reading should be this article in the Telegraph about the concerns expressed by Dr Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, following the conviction of a gang in Oxford last year for the same sort of crimes which have been going on in Rotherham.
Another is this article by Shaheen Hasmat, a woman of Pakistani origin born and raised in Scotland,
I don't think I have ever previously in this blog quoted with approval anything said by a UKIP politician but I will make an exception for the acticle by Amjad Bashir MEP, himself a Muslim of Pakistani origin, who wrote that Pakistanis must condemn the Rotherham abuses.
It is essential that the perpetrators of these terrible crimes are put in front of a court, given a fair trial and, if convicted, severely punished for what they have done.
Anyone convicted of raping or pouring petrol over children who was not born in Britain should be taken straight from prison to the airport when they have served their sentence and put on the next plane to their country of birth - if they have been given British citizenship they should lose it.
We cannot afford to assume that those towns and cities where scandals like this have already come to light are the only places where such crimes are taking place. Even if, as I very much hope but do not think we can take for granted, there is nowhere else where child abuse is happening on the industrial scale seen in Rotherham, there have also been similar cases and convictions in Oxford, Derby, and Rochdale. We have to check if anything similar is happening anywhere else.
And above all, Professor Jay is surely right that a huge effort must be made to help and rehabilitate the victims. These vulnerable young people have been failed by society, and they should be helped to rebuild their lives.
Comments
If you're saying stop ignoring the race aspect of these crimes, I don't see how anyone who has read the posts I have written and the articles I have linked to could imagine for an instant that I am ignoring it.
If you are saying we need to reduce the level of net migration to a sustainable level, I support a government which is trying to exactly that, and has succeeded in reducing net migration from non-EU countries significantly.
But if you are calling for a response to Rotherham which uses the kind of alarmist and inflammatory language which Powell deployed in 1968 then my answer is "Over my dead body."