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I appreciate the effort, but none of this explains anything.
For starters, I don't know what kind of sexism they've been teaching you in the UK, but the kind of sexism I know would have me slap that girl in the face, and drag her back home kicking and screaming, even if the parents are abusive alcoholics. As for classism, it's supposed to come with some amount of noblesse oblige. I get that they're underclass, 2rafa tried this argument with me as well thinking it's some sort of a gotcha, and I'll tell you what I told her - it doesn't matter if they're literal goblins, there are lines you do not cross, and actively helping organized crime to prostitute children would be one of them. You're telling these stories of 13 year olds going to night clubs and thinking they'll shock me? Sir, the British underclass has nothing on what was going on in Eastern Europe when I was growing up, and even though we had the same kind of organized child prostitution, at least our police force had the excuse of being so under-resourced they'd probably lose a gunfight with whatever Russian gang was running any particular brothel.
This is the thing - there's a whole range of excuses ranging from the neglect of a soulless bureaucracy, through the incompetence of any particular public worker, or of all of them as a class, all the way to sexist and classist attitudes or whatever fanciful "systemic" woes are fashionable to blame at the time, but somehow the Rotheram public workers managed successfully exhaust all of them. If they just did not believe the victims, this would be nowhere near as egregious. If they never picked up the phone when people were calling 911 or whatever the Brit equivalent is, it would be nowhere near as egregious. If the (step/)father / boyfriend showed up at the brothel to bust out his (/girlfriends) daughter, and was shot dead by the gang, and the police went "ho hum, it looks like natural causes to me, nothing to see here!", that would be nowhere near as egregious. But the case where the guy tries to rescue a girl from a brothel, the brothel calls the police, the police show up and intervene siding with the brothel is so beyond the pale I do not have the vocabulary for it.
This is not sexism or classism, this is not neglect, and it is not incompetence. It's treason.
Both of these are pretty high-rent versions of sexism and classism. It seems to me you hold to very principled beliefs that your outgroup often describes as sexism and classism, such that when the real deal, the big salami, the whole enchilada, the motte-of-mottes, appears, your instinct is to insist that it's not real. Are you sure that UK beat cops have such principled views?
In particular, noblesse oblige strikes me as similar to "I treat my slaves very well, thank you" -- a rhetorical cope, a play pretend, an attempt at justifying power by arguing it's wielded appropriately. Whenever someone makes reference to noblesse oblige with one side of their mouth, they typically talk about "miserable wastes of human garbage" with the other. I'm not sure there's ever been a society where the elite holistically believed it had obligations to the lower classes while retaining basic human respect and compassion for them.
I don't have a strong opinion on the Rotherham issue, though I do abhor all the crimes that happened as any feeling person would. But it appears like you're intent on pinning blame squarely on the outgroup and attributing it to outgroup beliefs, without considering whether parts of the ingroup or ingroup beliefs could have contributed to the neglect that happened. Is it really out of the question that police beliefs in underclass girls being incorrigible sluts contributed to their actions?
Just from what I've skimmed of this discussion, it seems to me you can believe the findings of the report while also opposing the ways in which left-wingers contributed to it. In fact, there's a possible right-wing interpretation in there: the police were so jaded because they were dealing with an underclass community incredibly neglectful of their children and unconcerned for their basic welfare, such that even "drag[ging] her back home kicking and screaming" wouldn't have even done anything. This speaks to the need for strong family values, no?
And then, there were men from a cultural background that influenced them to see these neglected girls as prey for the taking. The system wasn't set up, nor were police prepared, to deal with criminals so depraved that this would even occur to them as a good choice of action. This speaks to the cultural incompatibility of this culture with Western values, no?
My partner makes this case regarding how criminal justice in the US deals with psychopaths and serial rapists: our justice system is designed for a far more culturally and morally homogenous society than what we have, and so even our tough-on-crime advocates often pursue shorter and less effective penalties than what someone designing a new system from the ground up for our society as it stands might choose. Our policing is built for peaceful towns where a murder is a once-in-a-decade event, but our societies are far more violent than that. Perhaps it isn't possible to police the Anglosphere in a first-world way. And once we start considering non-first-world methods... we go down the deep, dark rabbit hole of classism and sexism pretty quickly.
In a sense, that's what's happened with the UK police: the utter depravity and cultural incompatibility of these rapists and the hopelessness of these girls' cases in the face of their parents' total indifference was so shocking, so incomprehensible, so outside of what the UK's "policing by consent" system was intended to deal with, that all their instincts towards a rigorous pursuit of justice shut down, and they had to find some way in which it was the girl's fault. Perhaps this happened for the same reasons that feminists are often driven to find some way in which the suffering of struggling men is their own fault: the need for a just world where the ingroup is nothing but good and the outgroup is nothing but bad. If nothing can be done, then it's psychologically much easier to say that nothing wrong is happening. After all, I treat my slaves well.
It seems to me that the left and the right often agree on what the problem is, but differ profoundly in their understanding of the causes of that problem, and moreover the solutions that would fix it. The Rotherham scandal strikes me as a situation where both the left and the right accurately perceive different areas of the problem, but stubbornly refuse to acknowledge their opponents' points because that might involve serious reconsideration of one's own worldview.
Even if their analysis is dead wrong, my opponents very often have different experiences from me, and thus perceive different things in the world, even if "seeing, they do not see" and "hearing, they do not hear" -- nor do they understand. It's because of this belief that I value discussion spaces like this.
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Then you're just wrong I am afraid. Just to point out, I am not endorsing these things as good, but I am telling you as someone who was there that this IS part of the explanation.
I worked closely with the police in adjacent areas in this time frame. This IS what they were like and why.
If you want to say they still should have done better, and that there should have been much better oversight, I agree!
But this is how a combination of systemic and personal biases and experience enable terrible acts. Moloch in action. Because the people doing them don't see them as evil. They see the 30th underclass drug addict they dealt with this month and their reserves of caring in the slightest are gone. They are jaded and developed emotional callousness to protect themselves. If some underage skank wants to trade drugs for sex, why bother stopping her when she'll just have another "boyfriend" or go back to this one tomorrow? Just stop whatever nonsense is going on right now the easiest way possible.
Read the case studies about 14yo girls who ran away from home to be with their older Pakistani "boyfriends", every time they were brought home, they ran back to them again even though they were abusing her, and pimping her. They reflect from an older age that they thought they were desperately in love, and would do anything to be with him. Thats what the grooming part gets you, you see.
So after you drag back the same girl 5 times, you start to wonder, is it worth it? She just goes back again. If she wants it why are you bothering wasting your time. You're already underfunded, you've got real crimes to deal with, not stupid sluts who run back everytime. If she wants to sell herself for drugs, why then why the fuck should you care? Why should anyone?
Its so easy to slide though that thinking. Hell we see it here where people call immigrants or Indian lower classes or whatever vermin or animals. Kulak talking about they aren't even people really. Its so insidious once you start thinking that way. They're scum, they don't matter, in fact you'd be better off, no, they'd be better off if they didn't exist. And most people here are not even dealing with those underclasses day in day out!
Let me put it this way 2rafa lives in England now and has for a number of years. I not only lived in England for decades I lived in the Midlands through the 80s and 90s, and worked for the local government, alongside with the police, not very far from Rochdale, Telford, and Rotherham. if we are both telling you, who doesn't live in England, that this is part of why this happened, then shouldn't that be some level of evidence?
The Jay report also makes the exact same points. How the police referred to these girls as undesirables and up until 2007 seemed to be not really bothered if girls were underage as long as they claimed it to be consensual. Have a look at page 75 where it gives a list of excuses the police would give for not taking action including, how the victim dressed, that they used alcohol or drugs and were therefore sexually available, that it was a relationship therefore a willing partner, that children can consent. Indeed she covers examples where detectives AT child safeguarding meetings argued that the 12yo girl did and could consent. You can read the case studies starting on page 38 for more examples.
Notably it was Kier Starmer who listed all these excuses that had actually historically been used in order to debunk them as part of his revamp of tackling CSE as Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013. You can also find more criticisms of the police on page 84 and beyond, again reiterating what I am telling you. ""Seen by the police as being deviant or promiscuous. The adult men with whom they were found were not questioned." "Some, especially the Police made personal judgements about the young women involved"
This combination of factors, alongside the racial factors that most of the perpetrators were Pakistani IS why these gangs got away with it for so long.
There are also other reasons, interagency squabbling, higher ranking police officers siding with their beat officers rather than detailed reports about the abuse and so on, then people trying to cover their own asses and the like, but attitudes towards the victims and attitudes towards the perpetrators are the two biggest.
The Jay report is very thorough and covers many of the contributing factors. But at 153 pages with some harrowing examples it is not exactly light reading I concede.
Again I want to point out i am not saying that these factors are good, or that officers and workers acted well or in the best interests of these children. Just that being aware of how this malpractice comes to pass is important in stopping it happening.
What am I "wrong" about, if all I'm doing showing how even if you're 100% right about the mentality of the police / socials workers / etc., there are still specific points that move this from "ho hum, it's just Moloch moloching around, what can you do" to it being a deliberate action against the people of Britain in violation of the trust put in the public officials? None of what you said addresses my points. It doesn't matter if the girl will return to the brothel the next day, it doesn't matter whether she's a druggie habitual liar undesirable literal goblin, you don't answer the call of the brothel owners to arrest the father that's breaking her daughter out. It doesn't matter that the public workers did not see their own actions as wrong, if that was a valid argument, we need to throw the entire legal code and stop arresting criminals. It doesn't matter whether or not your lived experience counts as evidence, because nothing you said addresses my points.
What is your point? What does a deliberate action against the people of Britain mean beyond what i have said?.
It's deliberate certainly, the people involved are making decisions. They weren't accidently not doing their jobs. They were making awful callous choices.
The people affected are definitely primarily British ( though at least 15% of the victims were British Pakistanis, and some small number were Eastern European immigrants).
I guess i'm confused as to what you actually mean beyond that. I'm not arguing this was accident. I'm explaining why they did what they did. None of that suggests people should not be held responsible.
Well, it's pretty simple. I'm more interested in what they did. For example, even now you insist on calling it "not doing their jobs", when it is clear they were actively and deliberately aiding rapists and harming victims, which they continue to do even now, as they try to intimidate them into silence.
The question of why might be interesting in it's own way, but it feels rather academic at the moment.
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