Police investigate child abuse in northern town
By Nigel Bunyon
Last Updated: 2:03am GMT 21/12/2006
A major investigation into the alleged sexual abuse of young white girls by predominantly Asian men has been launched by police and childcare agencies.
So far detectives in Oldham, Greater Manchester, have arrested 20 men, five of whom have been charged with offences that include abduction and rape. However, police expect other suspects to be held in the coming weeks.
Both Oldham Council and Greater Manchester Police have emphasised that they have discovered no evidence of an organised paedophile ring.
The phenomenon appears to be largely cultural, with mainly young Asian men allegedly preying on vulnerable girls they meet in and around the town centre.
Police suspect the victims – some of them as young as 12, the rest up to the age of 17 – are being groomed over a period of months and sometimes years.
In some cases the men allegedly give them such presents as mobile phones, money and clothes .
The girls often regard the men as their boyfriends. However, as the relationship develops some of the abusers allegedly coerce them into having sex .
Police sources say that although both the abusers and their victims come from a variety of ethnic groups, the phenomenon is founded within Oldham’s Pakistani community.
With Pakistani girls generally determined to remain virgins until they are married, young men in the community have tended to seek out white girls for sex.
"We often find that these men are smartly dressed and running around in expensive cars,” said a police source. “It tends to be a lot easier them to impress the girls they’re looking for than unemployed white lads with no money.”
Ruth Baldwin, director of the local council’s directorate for children, young people and families, refused to give details of the ethnic mix, claiming that to do so might prejudice future trials. But she insisted that both abusers and their victims were from a variety of backgrounds.
The common thread among the girls was that they had low self-esteem and felt in need of love and affection.
Some have been abused at a time they were in local authority care.
Mrs Baldwin said the abusers were in their twenties, thirties, forties and, in one case, “beyond”. Police insist that the majority are at the younger end of the spectrum.
The catalyst for the investigation was the claims by four girls earlier this year that they had been abused.
As many as 20 girls - some as young as 12 - are thought to have been abused by older men who buy them gifts and pose as their "boyfriends", before turning the relationship sexual.
More than 20 people have already been arrested, and five people have been charged with offences including abduction and rape.
Greater Manchester Police have described the abuse as a major problem but say they have no evidence that it is the work of an organised paedophile ring.
The abusers typically prey on girls they do not know, approaching them in public places. They offer gifts of mobile phones and electronic gadgets to gain their victims' trust, before plying them with drink and drugs.
It is alleged that the girls - a small number of whom are in local authority care - end up being physically harmed or forced into sex.
The joint inquiry is being carried out by police, Oldham council, Oldham Primary Care Trust and the charity Barnardos.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/20/uoldham120.xml
CHAVEZ GOES JIM JONES
When I went to Venezuela late last year, I came back with the impression that it was heading well into Jim Jones territory. There was too much cult of personality there, starting with the gigantic Hugo Chavez billboard that greets you from Caracas airport before you take the highway into the shantytowns, and within the city, all the ‘Chavez IS the people’ posters, with him looking soulful and thoughtful, if not nauseastingly adored by small children gathered around his side. This imagery went well beyond the political and deep into the cultural realm, and beyond even cultural, to the religious realm.
Well, it turns out this may be more than an impression. Hugo Chavez is proposing to name himself the archbishop of his new quasi-Christian evangelical nationalist cult, with all of his ministers named archbishops. It’s like Jim Jones - the leftwing San Francisco Democratic-party machine cultie leader who took his own brand of far leftism deep into Guyana and tried to set up a whole new society there, remaking mankind from mud in 1978, until he ordered them all to commit suicide. It happened right next door to Venezuela. Now, like Jones, Chavez wants to be everything, renouncing history and remaking mankind from scratch. The guy is a nut.
In one way, his move seems to echo the clerisy power the Church once held over all Latin American society, but I think it’s more than that - it’s an effort to remake society in his own image, for his own glorification and it’s so Jim Jones I can’t believe it.
Given what he is doing to Venezuela’s economy, Chavez’s third term won’t just be a passive administration, but now with his bishop thing, a la Jim Jones, have the full Flavr-Aid ending, too.
http://www.publiuspundit.com/index.php
Thanks for the link.
on the subject of rape, I have long thought that there was something wrong about the rapes in America, something like 63% are said to be done by Mexican men.
At last I was able to talk to someone, by phone, my sister, who does not really see all the angles that I seem to find, and I talked about them.
We were raised in Mexican communities and have lived and worked around them all our lives.
Until the last couple years, or even less, it was rare to hear of a Mexican man raping a child or young woman, sure it happened, but not so that most of them were by Mexicans.
I suspect that when they arrest these so - called "Mexicans", they have a jihadi, who came across the border, passing as a Mexican, with fake ID.
I do not think that I could tell them apart, and those that get into Mexico with the Venezuela visa, have been taught to speak Mexican, before they get to Mexico, according to reports.
I simply do not buy what the paper says and suspect that if I was an illegal jihadi, I would use my Mexico papers, so I would be sent back to Mexico, shorter trip, than Pakistan or Iran.
My 2 cents on rape.