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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?
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.
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.
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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.
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