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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.
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.
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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