Quotes of the day

A former Rotherham care home worker has told the BBC how girls as young as 11 were “brazenly” groomed and abused in the South Yorkshire town.

The man, who worked at children’s homes for four years, said girls would be picked up by taxis and abusers made “no attempts to disguise” their actions.

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At least 1,400 children were sexually exploited, mainly by men of Pakistani heritage, between 1997 and 2013…

A care worker, who worked at children’s homes from 2003-2007, told the BBC men would arrive almost “every night” to collect girls, who escaped using a range of methods and were then usually driven off in taxis.

The carer, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed staff were reluctant to intervene in some cases for fear of being classed as “racist”.

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“I was collecting data on who the perpetrators were, what cars they were using, their grooming methods, their offending methods, and what I was also collecting, was information on professional responses.”

When the researcher began to share her findings with the council, she told them most of the perpetrators being named were from the British Pakistani community.

She said she was taken aback by the response from one official.

“They said you must never refer to that again, you must never refer to Asian men,” she said.

“And [the] other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues.”

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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.

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Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But 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.

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Twelve more victims have come forward with allegations of child sexual abuse in Rotherham, police have said…

An independent inquiry by an external police force will look into the force’s handling of sex abuse complaints.

Meanwhile, Home Secretary Theresa May has said Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police were guilty of a “complete dereliction of duty” over the scandal.

Addressing MPs in the House of Commons, she said the Jay Report made “shocking reading,” adding there was no excuse for victims’ appeals for help being ignored.

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South Yorkshire police have announced a “fully independent investigation” into the force’s handling of the Rotherham child exploitation scandal as the Labour party suspended four Labour councillors in the town.

Roger Stone, who had already resigned as council leader, Gwendoline Ann Russell, Jahangir Akhtar and Shaukat Ali were suspended pending investigation after Ed Miliband said last week that large numbers of young people in Rotherham were systematically abused and let down by those who should have protected them.

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Akhtar stepped down from his role as deputy leader of Rotherham council and vice-chair of the police and crime panel when it was reported that he knew about a relationship between an underage girl and man who had abused her. In November he said he had always maintained his “absolute innocence of the scurrilous allegations”.

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An unhealthy brand of politics “imported” from Pakistan is partly to blame for the cover-up of mass child abuse in Rotherham and other British cities, a campaigning MP has claimed.

Simon Danczuk, who helped expose a pattern of grooming of white teenage girls by men from a Pakistani background in Rochdale, where he is the Labour MP, said a culture of intimidation and closing of ranks within parts of the Asian community had mired politics in towns and cities across northern England for years…

He described it as “a looking after your own” within the Asian community which other politicians had accepted.

“Pressure was applied, that’s what will have happened to Denis MacShane and he went along with it,” he said, referring to comments last week from the disgraced former MP for Rotherham who said he had shied away from the issue because he was a “Guardian reading liberal leftie”.

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This isn’t just a problem with political correctness or multiculturalism. It’s a failure of every component of the modern bureaucratic state, and every element of modern liberalism, from an education system that fails many poor youngsters and a welfare state that traps its dependents in poverty (both of which systems the current Conservative-led government are slowly reforming), to inertia and unaccountability of public sector bureaucracies, and the dynastic and often corrupt culture of the “Old Labour” political machines that dominate the UK’s northern cities…

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As in the U.S., Britain’s police are increasingly being transformed from protectors of the public to the enforcement division of the state (albeit without the military hardware), and in recent years UK police forces have been more preoccupied with prosecuting the vaguest suggestion of racism or homophobia on the part of white men than with tackling far worse crimes within sections of the Muslim community…

The “grooming” scandals are a direct and inevitable consequence of the left’s failed experiment with multiculturalism and mass immigration, and its obsession with political correctness and “diversity.” I make no apologies for trotting out this quote again, but a former advisor to Tony Blair, whose New Labour government imposed multiculturalism and political correctness on Britain with religious zeal starting in 1997, has admitted that Labour championed mass immigration, including from Pakistan, in order to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

Liberals have tolerated and excused segregation, forced marriage and veiling in Britain’s Muslim communities in the name of “community cohesion.” They’ve fetishized diversity, and they’ve got more diversity than they could ever have imagined – after all, you won’t find a more diverse community than one in which a sizable minority of one ethnic group think it’s perfectly acceptable to rape and torture teenage girls, and everyone else thinks it isn’t.

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Meantime, the fear of being perceived as “racist” prevails even in the news stories about how terrible it is that nobody did anything. As James Delingpole explains, if you have to get specific about the perpetrators, the preferred euphemism is “Asian”, a word that in Fleet Street doesn’t mean Chinese or oriental but persons deriving from the Indian sub-continent. This is, apart from anything else, grossly unfair to Hindus. The men who raped and tortured these girls were, in Rotherham as elsewhere, mostly Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. And their victims were not.

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And the queasy reluctance among the fearless knights of the media to state the truth anywhere north of the 20th paragraph helps explain why this happened, and why it will happen again…

So now, in the new multiculti Britain, the child sex trade is back, as part of the rich, vibrant tapestry of diversity – along with Jew-hate, and honor killings, and decapitation porn. The solutions to the internal contradictions of multiculturalism are (a) David Cameron’s expanded security state; (b) Afsun Qureshi’s universal prostration before Islam; or (c) an end to mass Muslim immigration. The last is too obvious for any viable western politician ever to propose it.

That leaves Wilberforce’s “reformation of manners” – on a scale he never contemplated, and with a self-segregating community extremely resistant to outside influence. Meanwhile, leaders such as David Cameron keep hoping that somehow all these excitable young men with their surplus energies will embrace “British values”, without ever being able to say what these “British values” are, other than the stuff Yorkshire schools teach as the source of all the evils in the world – imperialism, racism, colonialism, etc. And even as we dither, in Rotherham and elsewhere, Islam is already reforming our manners. As I wrote the other day, slowly, remorselessly, we are becoming them.

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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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