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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.
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.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I was putting off responding to you because I wanted to put effort that was proportional to yours.
Regarding sexism, I think you misread where I'm coming from. These aren't the views I hold, while I don't believe in "equality", in the sense that men and women are the same, I don't believe in superiority either. What I wrote down was more of an exercise in what I would believe, if I thought men are superior to women, and to some extent a rough description of how I parsed the worldview of sexists I ran into IRL. This also ties to the "noblesse oblige". While you might very well be right a sense of obligations for the lower classes seldom comes without a corresponding disdain, I'm arguing the same from the other side - disdain implies obligation.
As for Rotheram itself - if you're not too familiar with it, then you might want to look into some of the details. It's not that I'm obsessed on pinning it on my outgroup, it's that anyone responsible for something like this will be in my outrgroup tautologically. It's so egregious all the typical chin stroking about Moloch, incompetent bureaucracies, systemic isms, or lack of values in the society, simply no longer applies. The police quite literally preferred, and still prefers as the silencing of the victims is ongoing, to cover for rapists than to actually do something about them. You cannot explain this by the shock of the parents' indifference, when you are literally arresting parents trying to rescue their daughters.
I don't particularly care about making this about left vs. right, and I don't particularly care about the causes. I think this is about whether or not people are responsible for their deliberate actions. There seems to be a lot of people in the "no" camp, and even outside of this specific case, particularly the Rat-sphere seems to have devoted a lot of effort into promoting the idea that basic accountability is haram, and all you can do is impotently muse about "Moloch".
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