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It's also kind of insane that the Rotherham crimes were able to occur because there is a lot of red-tape you have to deal with if you have contact with children in the UK. Apparently, some of the men involved had criminal convictions which should have automatically barred them from having regular contact with children who are not their own. So not only were the police ignoring accusations of sexual assault but they were also ignoring crimes where the prosecution should be very straight forward. Also, people in positions of authority who deal with children are meant to be trained to notice signs of abuse and I believe there also mandatory reporting requirements. So the people who covered this up or ignored it not only fucked up their jobs but it is likely they committed some kind of criminal act as well.
I always had a sneaking suspicion that if the ideas of oppression mean affirmative action then why would you not see the outcomes of lower standards in terms of policing and crimes, lo and behold, you had academics writing about how the part that affected the parents most was the act of the girls being involved with men from the subcontinent, pakistani muslims in particular
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While many of the victims were in social care, the men weren’t involved in it, so they would never have undergone a background check. Some places have more recently instituted background checks for taxi drivers (which many perpetrators were), but this mostly didn’t happen or was little enforced during the period of most of the crime from the early 1990s through to the late 2000s / early 2010s.
The view of the police was that these were teenaged prostitutes from broken homes who were underclass ‘chavs’. That’s not to say there was no political correctness involved (there certainly was from the more middle class social workers, left wing press, council officials, and national government/Home Office) or no more banal corruption (eg local officials with close business and personal ties to some perpetrators), but it’s not the whole story without the class angle.
That's true of many 'racial' issues.
"The black pawns and the white pawns have more in common with each other than with their kings; if they organised together, the whole board could be a republic in a dozen moves." (GNU Terry Pratchett)
In the UK the white pawns are monarchist, and so are the knights. It’s the castles and bishops who are in favour of a republic.
You can play down the class angle too much, but you can also play it up too much. Terry Pratchett understood this perfectly well, which is why all the viewpoint characters except Vimes have a much more nuanced view of royalty and social organisation generally.
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