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The relevant issue is that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape your daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion". There is no way back from here.
This is false. Fundamental to how and why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to operate was that the girls were chavettes at a time when statutory rape of chavettes was effectively decriminalised. About half the girls whose accounts form the first half of Rupert Lowe's report had already been sexually assaulted by male relatives, "stepfathers" or children's home staff before the Pakistani rape gangs got to them, with the perps being significantly less likely to face justice than the Pakistani gangs were.
If you are a middle-class married father in an intact family, your daughter was mostly safe.
That's right. While it is true that that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape someone's daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion", your daughter would be safe. Mostly.
Agreed. Morally and legally, there is no difference between "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls and one of them might have been your daughter" and "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls who were the kind of girls everyone considered rapebait anyway". The guilty parties should be drummed out of public life (they mostly have been) and, if they committed crimes, prosecuted. (They mostly didn't, although the Lowe report implies that some individual cops accepted bribes). But if you are asking the question "why is the average Brit not outraged by this?", which most Motteposters posting about this issue are, that is a question about politics.
Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news, the Pakistani grooming gang scandal has had less political legs than the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association, the Afghan rapefugee scandals in various Continental European countries, or even a mostly-fake scandal like the US campus rape crisis. And the reason for that is precisely that your daughter is safe if you are someone who matters.
Everyone has heard of "damning with faint praise". I'm not sure what to call this. "Defense by appeal to damnation?"
If the defense of the British establishment is just "Who cares, they were poor?" then said establishment can kindly shut the fuck up forever on all other moral matters. They have no right to opine about anyone or anything else. Their every utterance will be dismissed with a Soviet-style "And have you stopped raping the poor girls?"
Forget "drummed out of public life", such an establishment would deserve to be violently purged. Genuinely worse than the history of racism in the US, and casually, without a shred of decency, grace, or remorse. More deserving of anti-Apartheid levels of hostility and scorn from the decent peoples of the West than Rhodesia and South Africa.
It isn't a defence of the British establishment, it's an explanation for the passivity of the average middle-class Brit. Compare the public and political response to the grooming gangs to the equivalent response to the much lower number of second-generation Pakistani immigrants who blew themselves up on public transport around 2005 - that was a case where it could be you or your child.
The only possible defence of the British establishment is that it may have learned the lessons since the scandal first broke around 2010, one retirement at a time. Starmer, in particular, was one of the people involved in breaking the scandal (as Director of Public Prosecutions when the first batch of gang members were prosecuted) rather than in covering it up. Andy Burnham as metro mayor commissioned a metro-wide inquiry into grooming gangs on his turf (Rochdale and Oldham were the medium-sized ones, there were also some small ones) and was responsible for Greater Manchester being one of the only three police forces to consistently report ethnicity of criminal suspects, according to the 2025 audit carried out by Louise Casey.
Kier Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, let 13,000 suspected rape gang members and pedophiles off with warning letters.
Andy Burnham appears to believe that the problem has already been fixed because they produced a report from an inquiry.
Now if the press reported something that said "While Kier Starmer was..it has been reported that ...were let off with warning letters" theMotte correctly would ask questions about how the use of weaselly words like "while" and "it has been reported", don't actually say who reported it based on what information or in fact that Kier Starmer was involved at all in these letters. Just that they happened while he was DPP. See how they carefully don't say he actually was responsible? Just that it happened WHILE he was in post?
While Donald Trump was President it has been reported millions of people across the world died in car accidents! See the issue?
What they are talking about are Child Abduction Warning Notices but these are drafted by the police and the parents/guardians of a child and nothing to do with the DPP at all. They're kind of like ASBOs but for suspected child abuse/abduction. Usually issued through Multi Agency Safeguarding Hubs (MASH). To frame them as warning letters and being let off is disingenuous in the extreme and so is linking it to Starmer. He has no ability to decide when these are used or not as DPP.
Indeed the whole point of them is to try and move faster to protect children so that you don't need to wait for something bad to happen that you can evidence. It doesn't in any way substitute for a prosecution and indeed breaching one can be used in evidence. The Children's Society (see below) argued that Parliament should extend CAWN's as they were very useful in protecting vulnerable children.
CAWNS were designed specifically to be used in grooming or relative cases where the vulnerable child may not be willing/able to testify or go to the police and so getting evidence can be tricky. It allows the breach of the CAWN to itself be used as evidence. More use of CAWN's could have protected some of these girls. Unfortunately it wasn't until the advent of MASH's in the 2010's they started being used in numbers. Nothing to do with Starmer being DPP.
In fact it's very sneaky because the increase in the use of CAWNs as well as MASH's themselves were in part a reaction to the grooming scandals that were breaking. So they cite the evidence of the police making attempts to deal with grooming as evidence that Starmer (who has no control over police forces remember) was soft on grooming gangs! That is deliberate obfuscation. And as that tweet and yourself show, people will fall for it.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/68063/html/
"Child Abduction Warning Notices
The Policing and Crime Bill reforms police powers and specifically looks at Child Sexual Exploitation, making it the perfect opportunity to review the current lack of police powers to intervene and disrupt inappropriate contact between a vulnerable 16 and 17 year old and a person who may be grooming them for sexual or criminal purposes.
Child Abduction Warning Notices (CAWNs) are an early intervention and disruption tool used by the police as an effective way of disrupting contact between a vulnerable child and a predatory adult where there are concerns that the child may be at risk of harm, sexual exploitation, involvement in crime or there are other risks posed by an adult.
Issuing a CAWN is often part of on-going police investigations; they make it impossible for a potentially abusive adult to claim that they did not know that the person they were in contact with was a vulnerable child. This can be used as evidence in court if any later abuse or other crime takes place. This is particularly helpful in cases when a child does not recognise that they are at risk or is not prepared to disclose abuse so are unlikely to go to the police themselves.
Extending Child Abduction Warning Notices to Vulnerable 16 and 17 Year Olds Currently, a Child Abduction Warning Notice (CAWN) can be used to protect all children under 16. They can also be used to protect certain vulnerable groups of 16 and 17 year olds: those formally taken into care under section 31 of the Children Act 1989; those subject to an emergency protection order; or those in police protection. It is a common misconception, this is often a surprise to social workers and services when they first encounter it, that all children in care can be protected by a CAWN. This is not the case.
We believe that the group of 16 and 17 year olds in relation to whom CAWN can currently be used is not wide enough. This makes it very difficult for police and social services to protect vulnerable 16 and 17 year olds. Last annual statistics available shows that only 190 children aged 16-17 were taken into care by their local authorities under Section 31 (and can be protected by a CAWN). However, a further 4,320 young people of that age became looked after by their local authorities[vii] and won’t be able to receive this form of protection.
This means that, with the way CAWNs are currently implemented, only a very small minority of children in care – an exceptionally vulnerable group – can be properly protected and thus creates a two-tier system of protection within the care system. The provision as it currently stands protects only a tiny minority of vulnerable 16 and 17 year olds."
Thank you. I appreciate the added context. These sorts of posts are a big part of the value I find in this site.
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