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I came to this thread today hoping to find a steelman somewhere, so thank you.
Is there any additional steelman for the cases themselves? The screenshots on twitter from official reports that show 13 year olds being gang raped multiple times by multiple groups in single days, being pulled out of police stations to be raped in cars, are all just.... insane.
What's the median rape case here? A troubled girl exchanging sex for alcohol and drugs? (I don't ask this to diminish that as a crime). I can't possibly believe examples like the above are anywhere close to average across 3,000 kids.
The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?
Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing. Activists continue to beat the drums about Rape Culture, and accuse campuses of providing impunity to rapists, promoting disrespect of and aggression against women. But, inconveniently, the numbers show that girls in college are much less likely to be sexually assaulted than girls in the same age group not in college. Whatever bad things colleges and fraternities were accused of doing, they weren't delivering much VORR! It's tough to make the argument that colleges were particularly bad on sexual assault (at least not without making the kind of racist/classist arguments on demographics that campus feminists would sooner be raped than make out loud).
Similarly, as an American Catholic I've endured a thousand lazy pedo-priest jokes, and probably made quite a few myself though I think mine are clever and cutting rather than lazy. And while the abuses of the Catholic church are horrible, they've turned out not to be nearly unique. Rather, Catholics suffer for being the largest and most organized denomination in America, and as such the abuses are larger in scale, and are easily attributable to The Catholic Church, where stripmall startup Evangelicals and Megachurches only represent themselves. The Southern Babtist Convention, the second largest denomination, and Jehovah's Witnesses have turned up similar piles of cases. And the independent evangelical megachurches haven't done much better. This clown got caught in a sting operation soliciting a minor for sex and showing up to meet her at a motel, plead it out in some corrupt bullshit where he went to counseling, and now he's back in the pulpit every Sunday in Virginia Beach for a huge congregation. So, has the Catholic Church done wrong? Sure. But do they have much VORR over other denominations? That's a tougher question.
Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.
Or it might be a case that genuinely delivers a great deal of VORR, I haven't actually read much about it in years and years as this case is so old at this point, and I have no idea where one would find an unbiased source.
I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners - I would be just as outraged if they were native Britons, Americans, Australians, Dutch or Israelis. What is actually responsible for my outrage is the total dereliction of duty on the part of the police, legal system and media... but that wouldn't happen, because the explicit reason for their dereliction of duty was to avoid inflaming racial tensions.
It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.
There were numerous paedo scandals involving white perps which broke around the same time as Rotherham. Jimmy Savile was the most media-friendly, but in terms of numbers of victims the various scandals in children's homes were the biggest. But the number of different sex abuse scandals that broke after Savile died was so large that it two years just to define the remit of the enquiry into them.
Arguing about cold cases of child sex abuse was the current thing in the UK for most of the 2010's, and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser. (And this isn't UK-specific - this was going on during the height of the Epstein era).
And fathers trying to rescue their kids from the abusers were also getting arrested, and social workers were arguing that "well ackshully that 14 year old gave consent"?
The system arresting non-custodial fathers who try to protect a child from abusers - SOP. Admittedly the abuser is normally the custodial mother's new boyfriend, not a rape gang. The case where the stories about fathers being arrested first went viral in the UK was the Oxford gang, who targetted girls who were in foster care or children's homes, who had been taken away from their parents for a (not necessarily good or sufficient) reason. Noncustodial fathers are the one group of potential abusers that the system does protect kids from.
"Well Ackshully that 14 year old gave consent?" - institutionalised by Gillick. See Winston Smith for what the culture was like in UK children's homes at the time - back in those days left-idiotarian social workers profoundly and genuinely believed that adult authority figures should not have enough control over teenage girls to stop them engaging in ill-advised and illegal sex.
Ok, if you want to say that there was nothing particularly partial about how Rotherham and Muslim rape gangs were handled, I'll try to keep an open mind.
What doesn't sit right with me here is the amount if denial around this particular episode. There were a handful of people making your argument (I was giving Julie Bindel some shit the other day, but I think she was essentially making your argument at the time these stories were coming out), but other than that essentially no one was saying "oh yeah, this is just like the Oxford gang". They either stayed really really quiet hoping it will all go away, or outright dismissed it as a conspiracy theory.
The other thing that doesn't fit, is that even if police were trained to arrest fathers / stepfathers / mothers' boyfriends attempting retrieve underage girls, that still does not explain the police returning the girls into the custody of a known brothel.
Finally, assuming you're right about all this, and the British system was really just this fucked up, and it had nothing to do with Muslims or immigrants, all that changes is the amount of bodies that need to be hanging from lampposts, and I'm not even referring to rapists here.
I heard about it re: trans issues, but I thought this is restricted to medical decisions? The wiki seems to confirm this, and mentions several exceptions even in that context. How does it relate to prostituting underage girls?
Because they saw these girls as criminals not victims. Prostitutes, drug addicts, habitual liars. The police has a vast exposure to the underclass and most of that exposure is to put it mildly not positive. Add in sexism, classism and police simply did not have any empathy for these girls. In essence they were blaming the victim. It's just what girls like this do. Exchange money and drugs for sex. Terms used by cops about the victims included "undesirables", "druggies", "habitual liars" and that's in official notes! That they were sluts and whores was taken to be axiomatic. While solicitation, pimping and operating a brothel are technically illegal and prostitutions itself was not, the attitude of police to sex workers was, well not great. As an example this is them publicly talking about a serial killer(!) of prostitutes in the 80's in Yorkshire, the same county as Rotherham.
"has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies."
"Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women."
Some of his attacks were on victims as young as 14. Yet the only ones they cared about were "innocent girls" (i.e. not prostitutes).
Cops long exposure to underclass behavior (whether white, black or otherwise), makes them develop certain attitudes, and social workers are often no different. They may have 30 kids on their books, half of them run away, another half are sneaking out to go to night clubs at 13, some are addicts, some are thieves, some are having sex for drugs or money, and the idea this is all just normal behavior for these people is insidious. Social workers becoming jaded and burning out is ubiquitous. However it was also left wing social workers who were responsible for blowing the whistle. And many did in fact make reports to the police which were ignored.
Half of the issue was the race of the perps, but the other half is a combination of classism and sexism and the fact that for many of these girls were seen more as troublemakers and criminals than victims.
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