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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 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, 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.
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.
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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