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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.
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.
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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