This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
I don’t think the 250,000 figure is far-fetched at all.
I think most people’s math is wrong. Many victims describe being raped by hundreds of men in relatively small geographic areas. There are communities where a very large proportion of Mirpuri men of all ages, from their mid teens to their sixties and seventies, first and second generation, may have been involved. There is documented evidence of this happening as far back as the 1950s, when there were just a few thousand (at most) Mirpuris in the entire UK. There are communities where documented evidence across enquiries suggests that the majority of girls in some poor estates or especially in care homes were abused. There are countless anecdotal pieces of evidence from hundreds of small towns, cities, villages across the UK - even some where the Pakistani population was less than 2-3% for much of the period, like Telford - where men and women will say “everybody knew” that there were teenage girls involved in this kind of purported prostitution work, people gossiped at schools, the kids all knew some girls who were involved, who recruited others.
Lastly, very very few women have come forward about being victims. Many are now adults, mothers, grandmothers in some cases, with husbands and families who may have no idea about the abuse they’ve suffered. What mother would want to subject her own children to bullying at school calling their mother a [slur] whore or whatever because she spoke publicly about her abuse. Many survivors just want to forget it. I don’t know many northerners closely but I’ve spoken to some - not from any of the infamous places for this - who say everybody knew it was happening when they were kids. And there’s almost no compensation for victims - if you were assaulted by a Weinstein or Al Fayed type, you can come forward and take legal action for millions (of course you can remain anonymous in some cases, but publicity can help there). If you were repeatedly raped by poor immigrant taxi drivers and kebab store owners, you’re not getting anything.
The math, when you consider this happened in pretty much every town and city in England for 40-60 years (in large volumes until 10 years ago, and in some cases still to this day), a country of 70 million people, easily supports a total victim count of 250,000 or indeed much much more.
Right, but as I said in the OP, according to the report itself, the 250k figure is not the estimate of the total number of victims since the beginning of mass immigration to the UK, but rather the number of victims just in the period 2000-18. I could buy a quarter of a million victims over the course of seven decades. A quarter million over the course of less than two decades is significantly harder to swallow.
250,000/18 = 13,888 victims a year.
Why is 14,000 new victims per year unbelievable? There are say 8 million people aged 10-18, 4 million of them girls, at any given time. Through the period a much higher total number of girls passed through that age bracket. Through the period 2000-2018 probably 80% on average were indigenous.
The grooming gangs are best described as a cultural practice rather than a traditional form of organized crime, like the mob (which while an ethnic gang or group of gangs operated at least in some cases under a classic hierarchical structure). Obviously they engaged in other criminality in many cases, were tied to drug and human trafficking etc, but this wasn’t a ‘cartel’ or a ‘pimp’ with thousands of trafficked ‘employees’. These were local phenomena, just spread across the country. There was limited top down organization.
The UK is a pretty populous country. 15,000 girls a year out of 4+ million being involved in group based child sexual abuse like this is a tragedy and an outrage, but the numbers are not unbelievable.
As I pointed out in another comment, I don't think anyone's claiming that Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting newborns or toddlers for exploitation, and everyone has been keen to highlight that one reason the police looked the other way is because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. If we limit our population to white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds, it shrinks to about 1 million as of the year 2000. 1.4% of those getting sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs strikes me as staggeringly high.
I don’t know, I disagree that it seems staggeringly high. These are largely poor people who the ruling class basically never sees or cares about living in largely forgotten towns and cities outside of the wealthy southeast (where almost anyone with any influence, power or wealth in this country lives). Promiscuity is very common among the underclass including underclass girls, which is part of why so many were dismissed as prostitutes. I also think the nightlife dynamics are relevant here, even in many of these places where Mirpuris were only 2-4% of the population, they controlled and control large aspects of the nightlife economy including running convenience stores that sold alcohol, almost all taxis and later Ubers (before the Boriswave at least) late night food places etc. It’s not like they were equally represented across professions which also affects access to eg drunk girls.
1.4%? Yeah, a much larger proportion of women have been sexually victimized than that, especially among the poor,, and while a lot of that is domestic, 1.4% for organized or group based grooming abuse seems….possible? Police stats aren’t relevant here - even most middle class women who trust the police don’t report sexual violence. These girls definitely wouldn’t have. Instead you need to look at surveys of sexual victimization that suggest a large number of women are victims of sexual violence during their lifetimes, much of which will happen at a younger age, and which will happen disproportionately to the poor and underclass.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ignoring the report and just asking about the number at face value: why do your priors tell you that ~14,000 victims of organized sexual crime a year in a population of 70mil is so unbelievable?
According to Wikipedia, in the year 2000 the UK's population was 59 million and 92% white. 20% of the population was 15 or younger, of which 49% was female. That gives us a population of 5.3 million girls. If 14,000 of them were sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs every year, that would mean a rate of 261/100k.
How does that compare with other common things people experience as children? This study (table 2) provides estimates of the rates of hospital admission for children aged 0-15 in the UK, and the reason for the admission. If we assume that the rates of hospital admission are roughly equal across every sub-group within that cohort (i.e. if the rate at which teenage girls are hospitalised is roughly equal to the rate at which children in general are hospitalised), then the 250k figure implies that a white British girl was more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than she was to be:
But even this is too generous, because I very much doubt the Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting one-year-old baby girls, and as so much coverage of the scandal has gone to great lengths to point out, one reason the police turned a blind eye for so long was because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. ChatGPT estimates that, in the year 2000, the population of white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds was probably about a million, which implies that the rate of sexual exploitation was 1,383/100k. This implies that a white working-class teenage girl was
Of course, we're all well aware that extremely long appointment waiting lists are the norm rather than the exception in the UK, so maybe using hospital admissions as a sense-check is really just a big indictment of the NHS. So let's come at it from a different angle.
The big problem with using crime statistics as an intuition pump is that this is a scandal about police officers sitting on their hands, meaning statistics collected during the period are inherently unreliable. So rather than using British crime stats, I'll use crime stats from Ireland, which is similar to the UK in many respects aside from (until recently) having a much higher percentage of native-born people, making it a natural control. At the beginning of the period under discussion, it had a very similar intentional homicide rate to the UK (~1/100k for Ireland vs. 1.5/100k for the UK), and intentional homicide rate is generally considered a useful proxy for the crime rate in general.
In 2005, Ireland reported 119 "defilements of a boy or girl less than 17 years old"; in 2008, 348; in 2009, 377. Per capita, that means 10 defilements/100k in 2005, 29/100k in 2008 and 31/100k in 2009.
I can imagine that the UK's large Pakistani population might mean that a working-class teenaged girl faces an elevated risk of sexual assault or exploitation compared to Ireland. But the 250k figure requires me to believe that, in 2005, a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK was 138 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish child was to be sexually exploited by anyone. I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.
1383/100k vs 10/100k isn't based on comparing like-for-like, though. AFAICT, that report doesn't list it based on working-class grouping. And if we were to take an average of the 3 numbers you calculated instead of picking the lowest one (as the 1383 count is an average over multiple years, it's quite possible that it varied from 600/100k to 1800/100k in any given year, if the range was anything similar to Ireland), then it'd be about 60x.
Is 60x believable? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course) and would barely blink even if it were 1000x, because humanity is truly diverse. But if you find 100x unbelievable, perhaps 60x is unbelievable as well.
This is a valid point. For the sake of argument, let's say that for each year in Ireland, 82.5% of the victims of defilement were girls under the age of 18. That would imply that the per capita rates for Irish girls <18 was 18/100k in 2005, 48/100k in 2008 and 51/100k in 2009, for an average of 39/100k across the entire period. That would shorten the odds substantially, implying that a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK is 35 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish girl under the age of 18 is to be defiled by anyone.
But I have to admit: I still have a hard time believing that the UK's rate of sex crimes is >=30 times higher than Ireland's. If you told me it was double, I'd have no trouble believing that. 5 times? No question. 10 times? Well within the realm of possibility. But 30 times or more? That strains credibility.
And bear in mind: 1,383/100k isn't the rate at which white working-class teenaged girls get sexually exploited by anyone, but by Pakistani grooming gangs specifically. If we assume that most defilements in Ireland in the period were committed by co-ethnics (e.g. (extended) family members, teachers, Catholic priests etc.), then if the intra-ethnic rate of sexual exploitation of children is broadly similar across Ireland and the UK, white working-class teenaged girls in Briton would have had to contend with this risk in addition to their risk of sexual exploitation by Pakistani grooming gangs. So if the 250k figure is correct, that implies that the difference between the two countries is significantly higher than 35x.
I don't think you should assume that the two victim sets aren't at least partially coinciding, though that's kind of irrelevant here.
Fair point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How does it compare to Pakistan? Is there any reason to think we have reliable statistics?
Well, I certainly wouldn't trust any statistics published by public bodies in Pakistan. I'm honestly not even sure how I'd begin answering the question of how common child sexual abuse is in Pakistan, only that I'm sure it must be an order of magnitude higher than just about any country in western Europe.
Also part of the issue with using Pakistan statistics is that there's a different culture of punishment and protection of women. UK women were likely in a bit of a quokka situation when exposed to essentially tribal attitudes directly
You can believe that. I don't.
The moral hazard [at least, from the viewpoint of the relevant actors, that being the middle-class English woman] arises from those girls being sexual competition, and it's good for the sociopolitical power of the median English woman if their ability to perform that function is compromised. The fact that it allows them to be turbo-Xist is just icing on the cake.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, pretty much. If the higher numbers are accurate, I would expect it's similar to the mass social services fraud happening in the US. Import culture with massively higher predilection for anti-social behavior -> actively hamper normal enforcement methods for culture war reasons -> imported culture realizes and spreads how easy it is to get away with it -> massively higher predilection evolves into staggeringly higher offense rate.
Yes, I imagine this is what happened. For the sake of clarity, I'm not denying that grooming gangs were a big problem and that they were almost exclusively Pakistani men almost exclusively targeting white girls. I can believe that the rate at which these gangs targeted girls was comparable to the equivalent rate in Pakistan, or even higher (I've heard a theory that Pakistani men don't even see raping an infidel as a crime compared to raping one of their co-religionists, especially if the infidel girl is a "whore" i.e. doesn't wear a hijab). But I have to admit, I have a hard time believing that, in every year between 2000-18, 1 out of every 71 white working-class girls was sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang. That figure strikes me as impossibly high.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One issue here for me is that there's likely a lot of repeat victims. I could easily believe that there were 14K victimizations of underage girls by organized Muslim rape gangs in the UK each year. But for there to be, on average, an additional 14K new such victims each year, given that many of these girls seem to have been raped dozens or even hundreds of times, it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs. Which is possible, but also, it's sufficiently high that I'd want to see the evidence and the math. Which are lacking. So the number is believable, but not credible.
Again, why? Consider an abused spouse who is forced into sex by her husband many times a week - she might be raped 500 times in a year. That’s one person.
Girls trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery / prostitution are often raped thousands of times per year. But some may only have been raped a handful of times before their parents physically stopped them from going out, they moved away, or they avoided their abusers themselves directly. It wasn’t like they were being chained up most of the time, they were plied with drugs and alcohol.
So the 250,000 would include women who, aged 13 or 14, were invited to a room about a kebab place or a bodega, essentially, given vodka / weed / coke, and then raped while high/drunk/unconscious and who then never went back, as well as cases where girls were trafficked to hundreds of men.
I'm sure there's a range between 1x and 100,000x for any given victim, and the distribution of how many in each bucket in between is the real question. I honestly don't know if anyone has good data on what that distribution would be, since the people who have the tools and purportedly the societal responsibility to get the data required to model this sort of stuff accurately have pretty clearly intentionally avoided collecting the data. I'm just guessing, given how brazen these gangs seemed to have been, and the rather enormous numbers coming out in a number of anecdotal cases, roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude per victim as a mean seems reasonable. Maybe I'm wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link