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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.
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 by foreigners apparently often motivated by religious and ethnic hatred over a nearly 20 year period, which 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 which are apparently 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 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 this all 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 pool and hospitals in the camps and and and..." Anything to avoid looking at or discussing the piles of bodies.
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.
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, Howe 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 Howe 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.
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