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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.
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.
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?
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.
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