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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 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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