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Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000. So Rotherham is say 5x worse on scale, or 20x if you treat "Rotherham" as a synecdoche for the whole scandal. I can imagine it being 10x worse on severity, but not 100x worse, so I think 1000x is exaggerated. "It was just men paying underage chavettes for sex, nothing serious" is a pathetic excuse that would cover most (but clearly not all) of the UK grooming gang victims in the same way it does Epstein's.
The fact that nobody who mattered cold-shouldered Epstein before his first conviction, and almost nobody did so even after it, indicates that either Epstein was concealing the more egregious behaviour (i.e. he only pimped out the 17-year-olds) or that elites don't consider sexual exploitation of underage chavettes a big deal (which is worryingly plausible - unlike the sports coach cases, there is no way your daughter could have ended up a Rotherham or Epstein victim if you are a functional normie, let alone an actual elite).
People in general are OK with lower class girls from the same tribe becoming courtesans(which is basically what Epstein's victims were) as a form of social mobility as long as it's quiet. Very few people are OK with ingroup women of any description working as brothel prostitutes/streetwalkers(which is what the Rotherham victims were). It's reasonable to see these as different kinds of sex work and I'm not sure 100x worse is that far off.
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Pearson’s extrapolation method estimated based on the rates in Rotherham more than 350,000 victims nationwide. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who blew the whistle on the scandal said there were hundreds of thousands, up to a million victims nationwide (over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan).
Most of the other gangs that have been busted were an order of magnitude smaller than Rotherham. The coverup ended a decade ago - we have a pretty good handle on the size of the problem, and we now know that Rotherham and Telford were unusually bad. This wasn't known at the time Sarah Champion took up the issue - so she was making a reasonable guess at the time.
Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage. Apart from a few places with powerful local ethnic-Pakistani political machines (Bradford/Halifax is the only one of the local grooming gangs where this is a plausible factor) the police would not have gone soft on Pakistani sex offenders until well into the 1990's.
Do you read j’accuse on substack? While I find him histrionic and extremist much of the time (and wouldn’t endorse his politics), he tracked down an extensive list of old newspaper articles about criminal cases that made very clear this was going on in a major way since the mid-1950s, single-digit years or even months after any non-negligible immigration from Pakistan began. Even I was quite surprised at that. There are quotes in many of them from police and others that suggest this was already a widely-known about issue among local police and councils by the mid-1960s at the latest, when pressure began on the left to take action to reduce the chance of race riots in the wake of Powell’s peak popularity.
I don't think anything in that article is inconsistent with my claim that things got an order of magnitude worse after 1997. J'accuse identifies a lot of cases with single-figure numbers of victims going back to the 1950's, but nothing on the scale of Rotherham or Telford.
I don’t see why 1997 would be the turning point. Mass immigration from Pakistan was relatively unrelated to the Blairwave (which actually began in the last year or two of Major’s premiership), the Mirpuri community was already large, well-settled and very fecund (much moreso than now) at that time and many of the perpetrators were second generation (this is sometimes hard to tell because the press today uses their current ages when discussing historic cases, but many if not most were 18-30 year old, born in Britain at the time of their offenses).
I don’t think so. I suppose the prevailing narrative is that the British police may have been ‘institutionally racist’ until at least Stephen Lawrence (which if anything would make 1993 the turning point). I have my doubts about that, but in any case widespread overall racial prejudice among some white cops doesn’t mean that they would have been deliberately tough on Pakistani grooming gangs, whose victims were predominantly the (native) underclass for which most police officers would have had some degree of contempt given that they are the population they most frequently interact with (or would have interacted with, at least at that time).
Some of the articles he links to also feature local police in court saying or implying the issue was already widespread and a well known feature of local life.
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This is Sarah Champion's method to arrive at 1 million victims: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up,”
I really don't want to lessen a large number of very serious crimes, but to say that method is seriously flawed would be an understatement.
Pearson’s method extrapolated from both Rotherham’s population and the rate there and the relatively population and distribution of the Mirpuri/Pakistani community in England.
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