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Notes -
It's-a mea culpa.
Last week there was some discussion of Rupert Lowe's report on Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK. I accepted the already infamous estimate of 250k victims uncritically, assuming that this number included all victims in the period 1970-2018. But according to this article, the report actually claims that the figure of 250k victims only includes those in the period 2000-18. The linked article tries to come up with a more accurate estimate of the total number of victims.
I was wrong to accept that specific claim at face value, and wrong to disagree with people who were suspicious of it. I think the real figure might be an order of magnitude lower – still a national outrage, mind you, and a far greater scandal than the clerical abuse scandals of the 2000s.
Alongside what everyone else has said about how you can reasonably arrive at this figure, I also want to point out that there's nothing unusual about this figure in the historiography of atrocities. Extrapolating from Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale etc is crude, but it's the same starting point that similar studies of covered-up atrocities had to work with. Demanding perfect precision at the outset, in a context where authorities are suppressing data, would mean never recognizing most historical atrocities.
To the extent the report makes a mistake, it's mistake is not showing it's calculations in greater detail and not giving a range. But most historians aren't statisticians and many quoted ranges are taken from taking the credible lower-bound figure given by one historian against the credible higher-bound figure given by another, not some statistical analysis of uncertainty.
There are to my knowledge only two serious pieces of scholarly work on the subject of Grooming Gangs. Peter McLoughlin's Easy Meat, and Rupert Lowe's report. To get anywhere into the ballpark at this early a stage is more than you could expect. To contrast with a work that was at a similarly early stage of Scholarship, consider Mark Twain's far more bombastic claim about the Congo Free State's atrocities from King Leopold's Soliloquy:
More recent scholarship leans towards 1.5 million, though given the poor record keeping a higher figure closer to Twain's claim cannot be ruled out.
As for the argument that Lowe is biased. Yes. He is. As was Mark Twain. You can contrast his bias against the bias of British Institutions, which until recently would have put the number of victims of "Pakistani Grooming Gangs" as 0 by denying the very concept.
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On the contrary, from what I can gather the 250k figure seems like a perfectly reasonable estimate, and is probably actually lower than the real number as the Rape Gang Inquiry Report suggests.
Firstly, the report clearly says this figure is an estimate only and the countersignallers only trying to "debunk" this figure are by disingenuously portaying as a hard statistic with bad methodology.
Secondly, while the estimate is extrapolating from data from the Rotherham inquiry (and a couple of other smaller inquiries) and you can criticise how accurate such and extrapolation can be:
You can quibble about how specifically representative Rotherham is, but basically the argument comes down to whether you this Rotherham (and some of the other local inquiries) are broadly, if imprecisely, representative of Muslims in the UK, or you think Rotherham was just some weird fluke or exception.
I have no reason to believe it isn't or wouldn't be representative, and on balance the evidence that does exist seems to suggest the opposite.
It seems grossly unjust for the entire British state apparatus to cover up, refuse to record or report statistics on this matter, and then at the same time supportors of this apparatus turn around and reject any estimate based on the infomation that is available. We all know why there isn't more information and stats being reported. The criticism is all being made in bad faith. I am yet to see a single person make a reasonable counter-estimate. I have not seen someone say, "actually 250k is maybe too high, actually 200k/100k is more reasonable for these reasons."
The approach is basically to assume that 250k is an absurd number to begin with, and then work backwards to "prove" it's false with no real counter-estimate or one that's ironically absurdly low. It's apparently not absurd to believe the official British Government estimate that 3.1 million people in the UK have experienced some kind of child sexual abuse, but it is absurd to believe that 250k is a generally reasonable estimate of those raped and abused by Muslims specifically.
The Rape Gang Inquiry Report is sloppy in some respects, I don't deny but its general thesis and reporting is correct.
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I find the substack article to be not very good either. It makes a claim that rape gangs are unlikely because of the very few number of defendants. But that was part of the whole scandal (ie authorities kept looking the other way).
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I don’t think the 250,000 figure is far-fetched at all.
I think most people’s math is wrong. Many victims describe being raped by hundreds of men in relatively small geographic areas. There are communities where a very large proportion of Mirpuri men of all ages, from their mid teens to their sixties and seventies, first and second generation, may have been involved. There is documented evidence of this happening as far back as the 1950s, when there were just a few thousand (at most) Mirpuris in the entire UK. There are communities where documented evidence across enquiries suggests that the majority of girls in some poor estates or especially in care homes were abused. There are countless anecdotal pieces of evidence from hundreds of small towns, cities, villages across the UK - even some where the Pakistani population was less than 2-3% for much of the period, like Telford - where men and women will say “everybody knew” that there were teenage girls involved in this kind of purported prostitution work, people gossiped at schools, the kids all knew some girls who were involved, who recruited others.
Lastly, very very few women have come forward about being victims. Many are now adults, mothers, grandmothers in some cases, with husbands and families who may have no idea about the abuse they’ve suffered. What mother would want to subject her own children to bullying at school calling their mother a [slur] whore or whatever because she spoke publicly about her abuse. Many survivors just want to forget it. I don’t know many northerners closely but I’ve spoken to some - not from any of the infamous places for this - who say everybody knew it was happening when they were kids. And there’s almost no compensation for victims - if you were assaulted by a Weinstein or Al Fayed type, you can come forward and take legal action for millions (of course you can remain anonymous in some cases, but publicity can help there). If you were repeatedly raped by poor immigrant taxi drivers and kebab store owners, you’re not getting anything.
The math, when you consider this happened in pretty much every town and city in England for 40-60 years (in large volumes until 10 years ago, and in some cases still to this day), a country of 70 million people, easily supports a total victim count of 250,000 or indeed much much more.
I still think this kind of extrapolation is unreasonable. It stands to reason that the gang we heard of was especially large-scale to have made it public.Or had especially bad OpSec. Similar organizations are likely to be much smaller, to have escaped notice so far. Just assuming that gangs like that of Rotherham, in type and scale, exist country-wide even in the absence of evidence strikes me as epistemiologically shoddy.
And I also still think anyone involved should have been lynched or swiftly executed. Doesn't need to be 250k; the Britons should have been drawing and quartering people from 1 upwards.
It was semi-public, and dozens of gangs were publicly tried and are still being tried. There were people (and not just the far right) low key talking about this for many decades. It was a perennial discussion on reactionary forums but also in a lot of social care and police circles; it was brought up in the mainstream conservative press occasionally and sheepishly by opinion columnists, heavily edited. It made the news a few times, just devoid of critical context and scale. It wasn’t a complete secret, it just wasn’t a scandal until in 2014 there was a lot of reporting and a Labour MP around Rotherham started talking about it publicly with parliamentary privilege after a report was published, which was itself because one guy at The Times had doggedly pursued it for several years in a corner of the mainstream press.
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Right, but as I said in the OP, according to the report itself, the 250k figure is not the estimate of the total number of victims since the beginning of mass immigration to the UK, but rather the number of victims just in the period 2000-18. I could buy a quarter of a million victims over the course of seven decades. A quarter million over the course of less than two decades is significantly harder to swallow.
250,000/18 = 13,888 victims a year.
Why is 14,000 new victims per year unbelievable? There are say 8 million people aged 10-18, 4 million of them girls, at any given time. Through the period a much higher total number of girls passed through that age bracket. Through the period 2000-2018 probably 80% on average were indigenous.
The grooming gangs are best described as a cultural practice rather than a traditional form of organized crime, like the mob (which while an ethnic gang or group of gangs operated at least in some cases under a classic hierarchical structure). Obviously they engaged in other criminality in many cases, were tied to drug and human trafficking etc, but this wasn’t a ‘cartel’ or a ‘pimp’ with thousands of trafficked ‘employees’. These were local phenomena, just spread across the country. There was limited top down organization.
The UK is a pretty populous country. 15,000 girls a year out of 4+ million being involved in group based child sexual abuse like this is a tragedy and an outrage, but the numbers are not unbelievable.
As I pointed out in another comment, I don't think anyone's claiming that Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting newborns or toddlers for exploitation, and everyone has been keen to highlight that one reason the police looked the other way is because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. If we limit our population to white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds, it shrinks to about 1 million as of the year 2000. 1.4% of those getting sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs strikes me as staggeringly high.
I don’t know, I disagree that it seems staggeringly high. These are largely poor people who the ruling class basically never sees or cares about living in largely forgotten towns and cities outside of the wealthy southeast (where almost anyone with any influence, power or wealth in this country lives). Promiscuity is very common among the underclass including underclass girls, which is part of why so many were dismissed as prostitutes. I also think the nightlife dynamics are relevant here, even in many of these places where Mirpuris were only 2-4% of the population, they controlled and control large aspects of the nightlife economy including running convenience stores that sold alcohol, almost all taxis and later Ubers (before the Boriswave at least) late night food places etc. It’s not like they were equally represented across professions which also affects access to eg drunk girls.
1.4%? Yeah, a much larger proportion of women have been sexually victimized than that, especially among the poor,, and while a lot of that is domestic, 1.4% for organized or group based grooming abuse seems….possible? Police stats aren’t relevant here - even most middle class women who trust the police don’t report sexual violence. These girls definitely wouldn’t have. Instead you need to look at surveys of sexual victimization that suggest a large number of women are victims of sexual violence during their lifetimes, much of which will happen at a younger age, and which will happen disproportionately to the poor and underclass.
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Ignoring the report and just asking about the number at face value: why do your priors tell you that ~14,000 victims of organized sexual crime a year in a population of 70mil is so unbelievable?
According to Wikipedia, in the year 2000 the UK's population was 59 million and 92% white. 20% of the population was 15 or younger, of which 49% was female. That gives us a population of 5.3 million girls. If 14,000 of them were sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs every year, that would mean a rate of 261/100k.
How does that compare with other common things people experience as children? This study (table 2) provides estimates of the rates of hospital admission for children aged 0-15 in the UK, and the reason for the admission. If we assume that the rates of hospital admission are roughly equal across every sub-group within that cohort (i.e. if the rate at which teenage girls are hospitalised is roughly equal to the rate at which children in general are hospitalised), then the 250k figure implies that a white British girl was more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than she was to be:
But even this is too generous, because I very much doubt the Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting one-year-old baby girls, and as so much coverage of the scandal has gone to great lengths to point out, one reason the police turned a blind eye for so long was because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. ChatGPT estimates that, in the year 2000, the population of white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds was probably about a million, which implies that the rate of sexual exploitation was 1,383/100k. This implies that a white working-class teenage girl was
Of course, we're all well aware that extremely long appointment waiting lists are the norm rather than the exception in the UK, so maybe using hospital admissions as a sense-check is really just a big indictment of the NHS. So let's come at it from a different angle.
The big problem with using crime statistics as an intuition pump is that this is a scandal about police officers sitting on their hands, meaning statistics collected during the period are inherently unreliable. So rather than using British crime stats, I'll use crime stats from Ireland, which is similar to the UK in many respects aside from (until recently) having a much higher percentage of native-born people, making it a natural control. At the beginning of the period under discussion, it had a very similar intentional homicide rate to the UK (~1/100k for Ireland vs. 1.5/100k for the UK), and intentional homicide rate is generally considered a useful proxy for the crime rate in general.
In 2005, Ireland reported 119 "defilements of a boy or girl less than 17 years old"; in 2008, 348; in 2009, 377. Per capita, that means 10 defilements/100k in 2005, 29/100k in 2008 and 31/100k in 2009.
I can imagine that the UK's large Pakistani population might mean that a working-class teenaged girl faces an elevated risk of sexual assault or exploitation compared to Ireland. But the 250k figure requires me to believe that, in 2005, a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK was 138 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish child was to be sexually exploited by anyone. I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.
1383/100k vs 10/100k isn't based on comparing like-for-like, though. AFAICT, that report doesn't list it based on working-class grouping. And if we were to take an average of the 3 numbers you calculated instead of picking the lowest one (as the 1383 count is an average over multiple years, it's quite possible that it varied from 600/100k to 1800/100k in any given year, if the range was anything similar to Ireland), then it'd be about 60x.
Is 60x believable? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course) and would barely blink even if it were 1000x, because humanity is truly diverse. But if you find 100x unbelievable, perhaps 60x is unbelievable as well.
This is a valid point. For the sake of argument, let's say that for each year in Ireland, 82.5% of the victims of defilement were girls under the age of 17. That would imply that the per capita rates for Irish girls <17 was 18/100k in 2005, 48/100k in 2008 and 51/100k in 2009, for an average of 39/100k across the entire period. That would shorten the odds substantially, implying that a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK is 35 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish girl under the age of 18 is to be defiled by anyone.
But I have to admit: I still have a hard time believing that the UK's rate of sex crimes is >=30 times higher than Ireland's. If you told me it was double, I'd have no trouble believing that. 5 times? No question. 10 times? Well within the realm of possibility. But 30 times or more? That strains credibility.
And bear in mind: 1,383/100k isn't the rate at which white working-class teenaged girls get sexually exploited by anyone, but by Pakistani grooming gangs specifically. If we assume that most defilements in Ireland in the period were committed by co-ethnics (e.g. (extended) family members, teachers, Catholic priests etc.), then if the intra-ethnic rate of sexual exploitation of children is broadly similar across Ireland and the UK, white working-class teenaged girls in Briton would have had to contend with this risk in addition to their risk of sexual exploitation by Pakistani grooming gangs. So if the 250k figure is correct, that implies that the difference between the two countries is significantly higher than 35x.
I don't think you should assume that the two victim sets aren't at least partially coinciding, though that's kind of irrelevant here.
Fair point.
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How does it compare to Pakistan? Is there any reason to think we have reliable statistics?
Well, I certainly wouldn't trust any statistics published by public bodies in Pakistan. I'm honestly not even sure how I'd begin answering the question of how common child sexual abuse is in Pakistan, only that I'm sure it must be an order of magnitude higher than just about any country in western Europe.
Also part of the issue with using Pakistan statistics is that there's a different culture of punishment and protection of women. UK women were likely in a bit of a quokka situation when exposed to essentially tribal attitudes directly
You can believe that. I don't.
The moral hazard [at least, from the viewpoint of the relevant actors, that being the middle-class English woman] arises from those girls being sexual competition, and it's good for the sociopolitical power of the median English woman if their ability to perform that function is compromised. The fact that it allows them to be turbo-Xist is just icing on the cake.
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Yeah, pretty much. If the higher numbers are accurate, I would expect it's similar to the mass social services fraud happening in the US. Import culture with massively higher predilection for anti-social behavior -> actively hamper normal enforcement methods for culture war reasons -> imported culture realizes and spreads how easy it is to get away with it -> massively higher predilection evolves into staggeringly higher offense rate.
Yes, I imagine this is what happened. For the sake of clarity, I'm not denying that grooming gangs were a big problem and that they were almost exclusively Pakistani men almost exclusively targeting white girls. I can believe that the rate at which these gangs targeted girls was comparable to the equivalent rate in Pakistan, or even higher (I've heard a theory that Pakistani men don't even see raping an infidel as a crime compared to raping one of their co-religionists, especially if the infidel girl is a "whore" i.e. doesn't wear a hijab). But I have to admit, I have a hard time believing that, in every year between 2000-18, 1 out of every 71 white working-class girls was sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang. That figure strikes me as impossibly high.
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One issue here for me is that there's likely a lot of repeat victims. I could easily believe that there were 14K victimizations of underage girls by organized Muslim rape gangs in the UK each year. But for there to be, on average, an additional 14K new such victims each year, given that many of these girls seem to have been raped dozens or even hundreds of times, it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs. Which is possible, but also, it's sufficiently high that I'd want to see the evidence and the math. Which are lacking. So the number is believable, but not credible.
Again, why? Consider an abused spouse who is forced into sex by her husband many times a week - she might be raped 500 times in a year. That’s one person.
Girls trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery / prostitution are often raped thousands of times per year. But some may only have been raped a handful of times before their parents physically stopped them from going out, they moved away, or they avoided their abusers themselves directly. It wasn’t like they were being chained up most of the time, they were plied with drugs and alcohol.
So the 250,000 would include women who, aged 13 or 14, were invited to a room about a kebab place or a bodega, essentially, given vodka / weed / coke, and then raped while high/drunk/unconscious and who then never went back, as well as cases where girls were trafficked to hundreds of men.
I'm sure there's a range between 1x and 100,000x for any given victim, and the distribution of how many in each bucket in between is the real question. I honestly don't know if anyone has good data on what that distribution would be, since the people who have the tools and purportedly the societal responsibility to get the data required to model this sort of stuff accurately have pretty clearly intentionally avoided collecting the data. I'm just guessing, given how brazen these gangs seemed to have been, and the rather enormous numbers coming out in a number of anecdotal cases, roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude per victim as a mean seems reasonable. Maybe I'm wrong.
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The number is probably overblown but the thing that annoys me is that people trying to erode the number are being enthusiastically platformed whilst completely absurdities like Ro Khanna claiming that DOGE has killed 4.5 million children (up from 500k a few months ago) get essentially no critical pushback despite being even more insane and frivolous. I've had enough random stuff that could be debunked (or atleast determined to be hugely exaggerated) with about 30 seconds of thinking shoved down my throat in recent years that it's kinda funny to see all these people suddenly own calculators and rational thinking hats.
Sore wa sore, kore wa kore. More cynically, it's because arguments are soldiers. It supports a political point they want to use to hurt their outgroup. When the numbers look bad, they wave it off because they want to disempower the soldiers.
This is no different from the ref being totally unfair when he rules against the sports team you support, and being totally unbiased and objective when he rules against the opposing sports team. Same animus.
Yep.
Also the fact that people are horrible at judging scope, which the rationalists also point out.
25,000 vs. 250,000 are literally a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the 'scale' of an atrocity. You would desperately HOPE that the scale is closer to the former than the latter!
But I bet the average person isn't envisioning the 225,000 person difference that entails, both just register as "a huge number of young girls." But the 250,000 number is clearly 'bigger' and thus a more useful bludgeon, so from a pure rhetorical standpoint OF COURSE you're grabbing onto that if you can justify it at all.
For my part, the reason that number triggered skepticism is it implies truly prolific activity by the gangs in question. Going with what seems like to me an absurd estimate, if there were 1,000 distinct 'grooming gangs' over the period examined, each one would need to rack up 250 victims to reach that figure. That's a high enough number to involve actual logistical challenges. Even if you invert it, call it 2,500 grooming gangs, that's 100 victims each.
The ratios just don't make sense to me.
It's slightly easier to accept that maybe there were 250,000 individual victims of sexual assault by migrants, mostly in a decentralized "I was accosted by a random guy on the street" sort of way, rather than all of them experiencing sustained abuse by legible groups.
Nevertheless, there's sufficient, indeed ample evidence that organized rings exist so the scale can surely be in the low 1000's to mid 10,000's if we're looking at a period of almost 20 years.
If one guy (Epstein) with a little help could 'traffic' dozens of girls over the same period, definitely feasible that multiple gangs could pull it off too.
Anyway, at this point I'm less upset over whether the 250,000 number is true and accurate or not... and more by the fact the UK government cannot actually confirm or refute it because they've been asleep at the wheel for so long the necessary data just wasn't collected???
Yeah if you gave maximal credence to incidences of sexual assault and dropped the thresholds to leering and verbal harassment it might be plausible. Especially when that kind of statistical inflation tends to be the norm in sexual abuse data advanced by those on the Left
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The Rotherham and Telford gangs both had well over 1,000 victims. If every grooming gang was that prolific, you get to 250,000 easily. But they weren't. The third largest gang was Oxford, with about 300 victims. Rochdale and Oldham were in the 100-300 range, and none of the other individual town-level gangs that got busted was over 100.
Like most criminal activity, this looks like a power-law type problem, not a Gaussian-type problem.
Yeah, almost certainly had a few that got away with war-crime levels of it, and most that got a few girls total.
So the gut-wrenching calculation is how many girls did these gangs tend to cycle through over how long a time period.
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I think this article makes a big mistake by trying to make a distinction between victims who were "actually raped" versus just other victims of exploitation. We have a bit of hyperbole and motte and bailey, but i think it's totally reasonable to read the claims of the original report as claiming that there were approx 250k victims of rape gangs overall, and not specifically that they all met the legal definition of rape. To me this seems like a massive nitpick.
Exactly. Debooonkers of this number are also likely ones who didn't have any issue with the '1/3 males in college will rape somebody' study that has been cited for a decade+ now or other insane flourishes of the #metoo era.
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The relevant issue is that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape your daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion". There is no way back from here.
This is false. Fundamental to how and why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to operate was that the girls were chavettes at a time when statutory rape of chavettes was effectively decriminalised. About half the girls whose accounts form the first half of Rupert Lowe's report had already been sexually assaulted by male relatives, "stepfathers" or children's home staff before the Pakistani rape gangs got to them, with the perps being significantly less likely to face justice than the Pakistani gangs were.
If you are a middle-class married father in an intact family, your daughter was mostly safe.
I don't understand how this add-on makes the statement you're replying to false. Rape gangs chose vulnerable targets who didn't have much parental oversight - kinda obvious that those targets would be mainly working class and from dysfunctional households.
Why does the fact that many of these girls had previously been abused conflict with or deny the claim that much of the scale, perseverance and overall modus operandi these rape gangs were operating under very obviously were tied to the tribalism and ethno-religious chauvinism of the Pakistani, specifically Miripuri, diaspora?
The fact is that countless WOMEN within these communities were fully aware of what their male kinsmen were up to, but condoned it due to - in their own words - the victimized girls being outside of their community and faith. The mental tradeoff these diasporas operate under is very simple - "would sending a member of my family/clan to prison be better than a faithless outsider experiencing suffering at their hand? It would not, therefore I won't take action against it." This is how these rape gangs are allowed to operate with impunity - since quasi-everyone in the diaspora has some knowledge or involvement in it, combatting it by means of law enforcement would effectively engender taking legal action against the vast majority of the entire localized diaspora, which police nor politics won't do for obvious reasons. It's the exact same issue Europe has been having with gypsies for decades - trying to combat their criminality essentially means criminalising the entire community since the vast majority of them are criminals, accessories to the crime, or at the very least highly aware, yet unbothered by it.
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That's right. While it is true that that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape someone's daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion", your daughter would be safe. Mostly.
Agreed. Morally and legally, there is no difference between "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls and one of them might have been your daughter" and "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls who were the kind of girls everyone considered rapebait anyway". The guilty parties should be drummed out of public life (they mostly have been) and, if they committed crimes, prosecuted. (They mostly didn't, although the Lowe report implies that some individual cops accepted bribes). But if you are asking the question "why is the average Brit not outraged by this?", which most Motteposters posting about this issue are, that is a question about politics.
Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news, the Pakistani grooming gang scandal has had less political legs than the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association, the Afghan rapefugee scandals in various Continental European countries, or even a mostly-fake scandal like the US campus rape crisis. And the reason for that is precisely that your daughter is safe if you are someone who matters.
But the UK elite love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household. This is a key part of the identity of the progressive elite in the Anglosphere. The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community. The math (maths?) on this was that their reputation would be more harmed by representing White poor than by representing the minority community, because its higher status to be worldly and pro-diversity than pro-White. But it’s the same group of people who promote welfare benefits and spots for the poor at Oxford who were unwilling to go against the minority block, no?
I agree that this is true, but (to my knowledge, I’m not British) there’s an additional element of class at play in Britain. It’s obviously true that western elites writ large “love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household” but in the UK this attitude is standing on the back of a long history of especially stark class differences which persist to this day, such that the poor are not merely “the poor” but fully other, a separate and inferior culture. Today they deserve pity and perhaps charity but are still broadly contemptible. This differentiates the native lower-class from poor immigrants, who are now seen as Diverse and Enriching to the culture, where the native poor are seen as the same drag on the culture they’ve been seen as for centuries.
I suspect this cultural history is the secret sauce for how this problem became so much more pronounced in Britain than anywhere else: other countries have problems with migrant crime, including sexual violence, but not with mass-scale organized rape gangs.
My intuition is that if it were the White poor who were raping the Pakistanis, it would be an instant cause célèbre among the upper classes who would demand the most severe punishments against those responsible, just as they do for racial incidents. It’s hard for me to imagine the British covering up the crimes of Whites against minorities, and it actually seems they try to do the opposite. So it’s not actually a class issue at all, because the Pakistanis are not in their class, yet would be a sympathetic victim group. It’s more like the intricate social class dynamic of the UK has been applied onto ranking a hierarchy of sympathy, where minorities are simply higher on the ranking of Innate Value. Just as in America, for many decades you couldn’t criticize Blacks for being violent, they had to be a sympathetic and you needed to make excuses.
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Everyone has heard of "damning with faint praise". I'm not sure what to call this. "Defense by appeal to damnation?"
If the defense of the British establishment is just "Who cares, they were poor?" then said establishment can kindly shut the fuck up forever on all other moral matters. They have no right to opine about anyone or anything else. Their every utterance will be dismissed with a Soviet-style "And have you stopped raping the poor girls?"
Forget "drummed out of public life", such an establishment would deserve to be violently purged. Genuinely worse than the history of racism in the US, and casually, without a shred of decency, grace, or remorse. More deserving of anti-Apartheid levels of hostility and scorn from the decent peoples of the West than Rhodesia and South Africa.
It isn't a defence of the British establishment, it's an explanation for the passivity of the average middle-class Brit. Compare the public and political response to the grooming gangs to the equivalent response to the much lower number of second-generation Pakistani immigrants who blew themselves up on public transport around 2005 - that was a case where it could be you or your child.
The only possible defence of the British establishment is that it may have learned the lessons since the scandal first broke around 2010, one retirement at a time. Starmer, in particular, was one of the people involved in breaking the scandal (as Director of Public Prosecutions when the first batch of gang members were prosecuted) rather than in covering it up. Andy Burnham as metro mayor commissioned a metro-wide inquiry into grooming gangs on his turf (Rochdale and Oldham were the medium-sized ones, there were also some small ones) and was responsible for Greater Manchester being one of the only three police forces to consistently report ethnicity of criminal suspects, according to the 2025 audit carried out by Louise Casey.
Kier Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, let 13,000 suspected rape gang members and pedophiles off with warning letters.
Andy Burnham appears to believe that the problem has already been fixed because they produced a report from an inquiry.
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I don't think it's a moral/ethical defense, but rather a sort of realpolitik analysis of why things are happening the way they are. Of course, once you enter that realm, then it follows that if enough anti-rape-gang Brits decide to implement what you say is deserved, there's no grounds by which to condemn them other than by gaining enough power to stop them. Which usually leads to bad results for everyone all around.
Sure ,but there are implications that follow from that, such as the total loss of moral standing from the people being so analyzed.
Maybe it's my latent American Millennial Progressive bleeding through, but imagine this. Imagine that Latino gangs were doing this to black girls. Imagine that over the last 25 years, they had kidnapped, drugged, gang raped, and sex trafficked somewhere between 125,000 and 1.25 million underage black girls. Imagine if the defacto policy of the US government was to suppress any reporting, prosecute members of the community who spoke out, and literally gave escaped sex slaves back to the cartels responsible. Imagine if they blithely dismissed any calls for action, while reacting with utter fury and the full force of the state against any black parent who tried to protect his daughter. Imagine if, when pressed, the retreated to "Well, they're just ni**gers. You know how those girls are. Sluts were probably asking for it. What do you want us to do about it? What about the taco trucks and MLB players?"
I've lived through two generations of guilt and shame and atonement for vastly lesser offenses. The British establishment and middle classes come out of this looking like inhuman monsters.
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You are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The reason this news is still relevant / milkable is that precisely zip has been done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Where are the new migration guidelines? Where is the MacPherson report? Where is the anti-anti-racist training for the police?
The closest I’ve heard of it is some white paper that Mahmood is supposedly shopping about.
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Ah, so only about 6 times worse than the total number of victims in the entire history of the KKK. I guess that means it should just be ignored, and the UK government should keep right on covering it up, using the criminal justice system to suppress discussion and objection, arresting parents who complain, feeding escaped girls right back into the hands of their abusers, and smiling benignly while police officers participate in the gang rapes.
Even if that number is overshot by an order of magnitude, there is no curse in Elvish, Entish or the tongues of Men for this treachery. The last lynching style murder in the US we executed 2/3s of the perpetrators and gave the only one who showed remorse a mere life sentence. The British should extrapolate that number out.
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It doesn’t matter. Maybe I am a cynic or narcissistic but we have to be honest that most people are NOT as smart as people here. There are areas where you need to be intellectually honest - I guess with high IQ elites etc trying to honestly debate things and then report them to the masses.
To me mass migration is the biggest risks to Human Civilization. Dark ages likely occur if we get this wrong. The point of 250k is it emphasizes the magnitude of the issue to the masses which is true.
I like that fact that India has extremely high IQ people but IQ testing seems to indicate low IQ averages. My instincts tells me that science just doesn’t happen in those type of societies. There are probably as money Vivek types in India as the western world has but some kind of agglomeration effect can’t occur in this society. If that happens to America then science dies is my guess.
And then maybe in 1000 years so very smart group develops somewhere. They have a lot of bloodlust and tribe by tribe they expand and kill the natives until they start to rebuild industrial society again. That’s my downside case for mass migration.
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The fixation on the 250,000 is a distraction tactic. The conclusion of the article says that there were "only" 13,500 rapes of underage girls over a nearly 20 year period by foreigners who were apparently often motivated by religious and ethnic hatred; even so, that is still absolutely disgusting and horrifying. The article also says that grooming gangs are "extremely rare" because um ackchually lot of abuse doesn't actually involve "human trafficking" or
<insert NGOspeak terminology here>which are apparently necessary prerequisites to taking these massive crimes seriously. The left wants to engage in dishonest nitpicking about terminology and numbers so that attention is diverted towards the credibility of the report writers and pedantic arguments over technical definitions, while the right wants to point at the child rapes and shout about how the exact facts don't matter, look how awful all of this is! It's inverse holocaust revisionism: "Actually it was only 1 million Jews killed and technically they weren't gassed and why were there swimming pools and hospitals in the camps and and and..." while the other side is pointing and screaming at the large piles of corpses.I don't think there's really any dialogue to be had about this, it's just another cobblestone on the road towards civil conflict.
EDIT: Fixed typos and terrible writing
13,000 victims over the course of several decades is a national outrage, and revolutions have started over less. But it's important to get our facts straight. If there was no good reason to believe the 250k figure was accurate, Lowe should not have included it in his report.
As a fellow Mottizen, I agree with you, but the way this correction will be used by most normies is "the number is fake and can be dismissed (and by association, so can everything else in the report)." We are all high decoupling autists here but most people can't hold "it was not nearly as bad as they say, but also it's an absolute outrage and something must be done" in their head at the same time.
Yeah. I wish Lowe had gotten it right the first time, but the cat's out of the bag now. Strategically, I think anti-immigration activists would be better off emphasising that there were thousands of victims and that the police knew about it but sat on their hands, but avoid mentioning the specific number of victims the report claims if they can help it.
My charitable interpretation is that the 250,000 might have been a Trumpian overstatement designed to get the establishment media to issue a still-damning correction (actually it was "only" 25,000!) which would fail to deflate the anger and makes the media look out-of-touch. But that depends on the media fumbling the ball.
The methodology of the Lowe inquiry was to believe victims the way Democrats believed Christine Blasely Ford or the UN believes Hamas atrocity propaganda. I don't think part of that process includes thinking about whether numbers are accurate or not. Most of the things said are consistent with what we know was going on from other sources, but at least one of the allegations is obviously false (there is a trained rape dog on page 97 - and in fact "Kate"'s entire account is implausible - she also claims that the first time she was raped, the rapists jumped her in the street and gang-raped her on the spot, in public - which as well as its inherent implausibility is not the MO of a grooming gang).
The 250,000 has been the standard estimate on the British right, but it comes from a Reform peer making a guess in order to ask a Parliamentary question - basically "I think there were 250,000 - if you have a lower estimate please share it". I would be very surprised if there is any complexity beyond that.
It goes without saying that my attention was drawn to this alleged rape dog and the one in an Israeli prison by very different social media posters, and that the number of non-Motteposters who called out the obvious falsity of both allegations is likely to be zero. Most people are sane enough not to give a sh*t about politics, but the vast majority of the ones who do will believe in the rape dog when it is politically convenient for their side.
A rape dog in the context of a rape gang seems less absurd compared to a rape dog in the context of a military agency.
My gut feeling would be the obvious - that a rape dog in an organisation with a tradition of dog training is less absurd than a rape dog in an organisation which eschews dogs ownership for religious reasons.
That said, the point is that both are about as likely as the Motte endorsing AOC in the 2028 Presidential election.
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Weren't there more thorough reports from Rotheram, Telford, and Oxford, with actual numbers, that got extrapolated nationally to reach 250K? It's still flawed methodology, but it's not "basically I think there were 250,000".
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I'm not sufficiently familiar with Rupert Lowe to know if this kind of 4-D chess would occur to him.
I assume the research, compilation, and release of the report was handled by party strategists rather than Lowe personally, but I'm also not sure how much he was involved. It was release right before the Makerfield by-election so that suggests at least some strategic thinking.
I think the other poster was taking the piss about the misspelling of Lowe’s name.
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Well, good on you, I guess. The Lowe report (and Lord Pearson’s initial bluster) come out looking miserably untrustworthy.
I can’t say I expected much from a substack titled “heretical insights,” but I was pleasantly surprised.
As an aside: I don’t think the specific numbers matter. The Catholic scandals took off because they involved positions of trust. The numbers were smaller but closer to home. A failure of utilitarianism, to be sure.
See, I think it's more to do with 1. hypocrisy ("these people claim to be arbiters of morality but look at how they actually behave") and 2. popular anti-Christian sentiment.
People who love to complain about the clerical abuse scandal never seem interested in talking about, e.g., the higher prevalence of such abuse in public schools, despite it being another example of abuse of positions of trust. That's just not what's interesting.
With the Church, the main thing horrifying people was not the crimes (though there was likely a higher rate of sex offenses than for the general population), but the cover-up.
If the RCC had dealt with sex offenders by sending them to some monastery on some desolate island with no kids around for 200 nautical miles, then that would have pissed off people a lot less.
Instead, the main goal was generally to keep the reputation of the church intact. If people complained, perps were given new parishes where they could continue to victimize minors.
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The Catholic scandals took off in places that did not have popular anti-Christian sentiment. It was actually the proximal cause of anti-Christian sentiment in Ireland, starting when Ireland was still religious(I would argue that Irish collapse in religiosity was overdetermined, but it was still the proximal cause).
The visceral horror of it was that it was happening to kids from good families, who were doing nothing wrong. The public doesn't care very much about homeless prostitutes, never has, never will. Trying to draw attention to their plight(and it is a plight, this is not a fun life), just makes people want to get rid of them. On the other hand the abuse victims came from families that did everything right and were betrayed.
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And also because clerical abuse was so homosexual. Of course for Catholicism this goes way back; some monasteries wouldn't accept young, bare-chinned men as their twinkiness was too irresistible for some of the older monks. Laypeople unfortunately were never taught just how gay their spiritual forebears were.
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I'd also add that there's an element of identity. There's a big difference in street pimps taking advantage of lost poor juvenile delinquents, often with absent or bad parents, vs "Good Kids" whose parents are pious enough to get them to church and make them altar boys. The horror of the latter is significantly larger publicly, even if people won't acknowledge it.
Similar to how school shootings are significantly more horrifying than gang related shootings, even if the gang related shootings kill more kids.
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Why untrustworthy? I thought the entire reason the figure was controversial, was that they were open about arriving at the number through a naive extrapolation.
Unless I’m misreading this, the substack author had to reconstruct a method, since Pearson never explained his numbers publicly.
He was quoted in the report, which again didn’t lay out its calculation.
What do you mean?
This is the verbatim quote of the report quoting Pearson. How do you make it clearer that they took the Rotheram, Telford, and Oxford numbers and extrapolated them nationwide?
EDIT: I can concede they shouldn't use such a strong / high-certainty language in the executive summary:
But I'm not seeing where the detective work to reconstruct the method, and therefore the untrustworthiness, is supposed to come in.
Okay, we’ve been looking at the same quote. I agree that there was no ambiguity about him doing an extrapolation. I think the article was clear that Pearson took the most extreme assumption whenever possible. Not including any of those assumptions means that his original statement was pretty untrustworthy.
Nitpick: I don't think extrapolating from 3 known points is the most extreme assumption possible - that should be reserved for assuming that some / most other places had an even higher rate of abuse than Rotheram.
Well, as long as we're talking about the report, I'd say it criticizeable, but not untrustworthy. They didn't hide the method 5 links deep from an obscure note in the references. The quote is in the second hit when you CTRL+F for "250".
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And the literal police facilitating rape isn’t a failure of trust?
Oh, it totally is. But one that’s less personal.
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