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Britain’s Long-Overdue Reckoning With ‘Grooming Gangs’
The American Conservative ^ | 4 Jan, 2025 | Ben Sixsmith

Posted on 01/04/2025 6:14:15 AM PST by MtnClimber

What do you do when the police, the politicians, and the press conspire to cover up atrocities?

A challenge of describing Britain’s grooming gang scandal for an international audience is convincing the reader that it really happened and is not simply the product of a morbid fantasy.

This is not just because the crimes at its heart—those crimes being the rape and torture of young girls—are so appalling. They are, of course, but appalling crimes happen everywhere, becoming no less evil for their pervasiveness. Nor is it not just because the crimes took place on such a vast scale. In Rotherham alone, in South Yorkshire, there might have been 1,500 victims. It is also because the authorities—police officers, social workers and politicians—failed so miserably and wickedly to prevent them.

In Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and many, many other places, evil men raped vulnerable girls with impunity while the officials looked the other way (and, in some cases, actively helped). How could this have happened?

It is partly because the perpetrators were disproportionately of migrant heritage. A striking number of them were ethnically Pakistani. Most—though not all—of their victims were white girls, which, judging by the vicious comments that have been reported, had a lot to do with anti-white racism. “All white girls are good for is sex,” one rapist reportedly told his victim, “They are just slags.”

Local authorities were uncomfortable about digging into claims of young girls being raped on the grounds of political correctness. In Telford, for example, according to an independent report, authorities feared “complaints of racism”.

Political correctness also dampened broader interest. A 2004 documentary, Edge of the City, was pulled by the broadcaster Channel 4 amid fears that it could “inflame racial tensions”. Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, Labour MPs, were widely condemned for emphasizing the role of Pakistani men in the gangs. This contributed to what I have called “a conspiracy of murmuring”. The phenomenon was gradually acknowledged—but in the barest possible terms. Instead of being buried, it was simply filed away.

Yet political correctness was not the only contributing factor. Indeed, the basest forms of classism and misogyny seem to have motivated police indifference. The victims, according to one witness in Rotherham, were seen as “undesirables”—teens from care homes or otherwise troubled backgrounds. “Police weren’t arsed with us, really,” said one victim from Rochdale, “They don’t give a f--- when you’re not from a wealthy [home].”

Thus, teenage girls faced consistent victim-blaming, with one of them even being arrested on charges of being “drunk and disorderly” after neighbors had heard her screams, and another being dismissed from a police station right into the arms of rapists. News outlets also demonstrated a bizarre willingness to ignore the true nature of grooming and rape. When Azhar Ali Mehmood, 26, burned Lucy Lowe, 16, to death, the BBC described him as her “boyfriend”.

Beyond all this, there was the grotesque, though by no means uncommon, impulse towards prioritizing the interests of institutions above the interests of people. In one memorably sinister email, a council worker in Oldham announced that they had fobbed off the concerns of a journalist who had been looking into the subject of grooming gangs before announcing, “PS. In case you didn’t know: We’ve also won Best City at Northwest in Bloom again today.” Great.

Slowly, the atrocities began to come to light. It is important to be clear that in an ocean of indifference, there were people who did a lot to make this happen, like the whistleblowers Maggie Oliver and Jayne Senior, the journalists Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, and the victims who had the astonishing courage to speak of what they had experienced.

But the scale of the response simply did not match up to the scale of the atrocities. Some of the rapists are already being released. Disgraced officials found cozy jobs elsewhere. No police officers faced serious consequences. Chillingly, files and laptops containing important evidence were stolen. The state avoided accountability while a cultural establishment that emphasized egalitarian and minoritarian narratives avoided the subject. When posts about the grooming gangs scandal went viral on X this week, there was widespread shock. People outside the UK hadn’t even heard about it—and many people within the UK hadn’t grasped its implications.

It is about time that there was a cultural and institutional reckoning. Of course, it is important to be clear that such crimes could still be happening today. It is important to be clear that such crimes can be, and have been, carried out by white people as well (and not for the sake of political correctness but to stop it happening).

Yet if Britain’s state and cultural institutions are allowed to forget what happened in Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and Oxford, and Bristol, and so many other places, there will not be meaningful attempts to tear off the ideological and institutional blinkers that have blinded them to atrocities in the past and could blind them to atrocities in the future.


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: groominggangs; islam; jihad; pedophiles; pedophilia; rapejihad; uk
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To: MtnClimber

The Brit elite, long known for pederasty and other deviancies, have built their own Epstein Mecca right at home and they aren’t about to let a common Tommy mess it up.


21 posted on 01/04/2025 9:39:16 AM PST by fella ("As it was before Noah so shall it be again," )
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To: allendale

Correct. Loss of alpha males leads to chaos, and to women choosing scummy criminals who impress them as being ‘manly’ over the remaining beta males. Same has occurred in the U.S.


22 posted on 01/04/2025 10:13:05 AM PST by drwoof
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To: your other brother

I was born and raised in England (came to USA in ‘87 as a teenager).

This has all been simmering for years. The murder of 3 girls last summer caused it to boil over. The government responded by releasing actual criminals and imprisoned people that spoke out.

They think they’ve squashed the problem - while only making it worse. It’s going to explode. I don’t see any politician that is going to do anything of substance, they’re all cowards. So it will only get worse, there will be a breaking point. Muslims do what Muslims do - inevitable.


23 posted on 01/04/2025 10:28:45 AM PST by fuzzylogic (welfare state = sharing of poor moral choices among everybody)
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To: MtnClimber

Churchhill was wrong, Hitler won the Battle of Britain. Sir Winston would be so ashamed of England now that he would likely take his mother’s side and become an American.


24 posted on 01/04/2025 10:32:30 AM PST by Midwesterner53
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To: grey_whiskers

“Who were foreigners brought in by the government against the will of the people.”

Don’t be so sure it was against the will of the people. Otherwise people would have protested (back when protesting government was legal in the UK). I think most welcomed them for much of the time (though not so much now), and the reason they were welcomed was the multi-generational brainwashing that took place in their schools and in their culture.


25 posted on 01/04/2025 10:55:47 AM PST by BobL
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To: BobL

Troll.


26 posted on 01/04/2025 11:26:46 AM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: grey_whiskers

Don’t be so sure - I know a lot of Brits and only recently did they start getting fed up. It was TOTALLY DIFFERENT there, not even imaginable to Americans.


27 posted on 01/04/2025 11:29:21 AM PST by BobL
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To: BobL

https://media.scored.co/post/369p5BD4uZzy.jpeg


28 posted on 01/04/2025 11:33:43 AM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: BobL
And another


29 posted on 01/04/2025 11:35:18 AM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: grey_whiskers

Saw that earlier - that is DEFINITELY today’s UK.


30 posted on 01/04/2025 11:37:09 AM PST by BobL
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To: grey_whiskers

This one is LEGENDARY!!!! More people need to see it - it gets everything there in ONE FRAME.

https://media.scored.co/post/369p5BD4uZzy.jpeg


31 posted on 01/04/2025 11:38:40 AM PST by BobL
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To: MtnClimber
I wish some of this had been translated into American.   And I have considered myself as understanding the King's English.
32 posted on 01/04/2025 11:48:28 AM PST by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: MtnClimber
Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald, The American Conservative and Arc Digital on a ...

A Brit living in Poland is in The American Conservative...

33 posted on 01/04/2025 11:53:56 AM PST by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: grey_whiskers

You could have mentioned Tommy Robinson is still in prison with solitary confinement.


34 posted on 01/04/2025 11:56:40 AM PST by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: higgmeister

Larger fish to fry.

Like a government importing, feeding, housing, clothing, and covering up the rapists of 250,000 of its underaged women.

From an impoverished foreign nation halfway across the world.


35 posted on 01/04/2025 11:58:35 AM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: fuzzylogic
They think they’ve squashed the problem - while only making it worse. It’s going to explode. I don’t see any politician that is going to do anything of substance, they’re all cowards. So it will only get worse, there will be a breaking point. Muslims do what Muslims do - inevitable.

We need to smuggle some of our 393 million firearms to South Yorkshire, for a rude awakening.

36 posted on 01/04/2025 12:15:48 PM PST by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: grey_whiskers

I see your point, but until they stop killing the messenger they’ll never get a handle on it.


37 posted on 01/04/2025 12:18:16 PM PST by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: MtnClimber
Two Tier Keir has a lot to answer for. So does the Deep State that enables him and all of this...

Labour blocks grooming gang inquiry into Starmer’s conduct as CPS head - Labour has blocked an inquiry into Sir Keir Starmer’s conduct as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service while investigating the Oldham child grooming scandal.

38 posted on 01/04/2025 12:20:55 PM PST by mewzilla (Swing away, Mr. President, swing away!)
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To: grey_whiskers

Comedian.


39 posted on 01/04/2025 12:21:03 PM PST by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: MtnClimber

prioritizing the interests of institutions above the interests of people


40 posted on 01/04/2025 12:31:33 PM PST by P.O.E. (Pray for America.)
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