(Jan 11, 2025 01:20 PM)confused2 Wrote: [...] Is it possible that a fair number of girls (just) over the age of 16 are attracted to a sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle which older guys are only too happy to provide? [...]
Celebrities of one stripe or another have always gotten exemptions in the overall Anglophone world, especially back in the old days with respect to groupies (like Jimmy Page having a sex affair with a 14-year-old model). But Jared Fogle and Jeffrey Epstein would be "recent" examples of those who transgressed beyond the free-pass perimeter for magnates and people in the entertainment industry. And, of course, Roman Polanski was one of the 1970s.
Age of consent reform in the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_con...ed_Kingdom
EXCERPT: In November 2000, an internet poll of 42,000 girls aged 12 to 16 was conducted. "Nine out of 10 respondents did not believe in waiting until marriage to have sex, while 87 percent said the age of consent should be lowered from 16. Sex education was criticised as out-dated, uninformative and taught too late, with little structured literature about sexually transmitted diseases, same-sex relationships and how to deal with pregnancy". Those surveyed also said that free condoms should be provided in girls' toilets and that the £60 million drive by the government to halve teenage conceptions would have been better spent on clinics for young people wanting confidential advice.
(Jan 11, 2025 03:36 PM)confused2 Wrote: [...] I believe some US states have a variable age of consent .. where it is legal for (say) a 17 year old to have sex with an 18 year old but not a 24 year old .. is that correct and might it help prevent what we see in the UK?
In recent decades, they even tightend it down in some areas to where teenagers can get into trouble having sex with other teenagers. I recall documentary and news story accounts like a 15-year-old girl caught performing oral sex on a 14 or 13 year old boy, and she got slapped with a sex-offender status extending well into her adult life. Such is good for hanging that kind of lead weight around the necks of adolescents for years and years afterwards. But useless for curbing organized child sex-abuse rings.
The original sin slash mistake that the UK police and magistrate system made in the latter context was the social justice bias of trying to protect the Islamic (or whatever safe-label "British Asian") community during the initial grooming gang outbreaks. Even though the establishment now claims that it has long since corrected that faux pas, the conservative community will never let them off the hook, and keep going to that well.
And there's apparently still a spotty effort to muddle, obscure, and interpretatively load data with respect to the ethnic identities of perpetrators. Since many sub-category population groups can be construed as white-adjacent or culturally Western (just ask Palestinian advocates about Zionist Jews being European colonizers), then trying to bundle as many molesters as possible under generic "white" category may merely arouse continued suspicions about those earlier tendencies of social justice paternalism. ("Establishment bean-counters, please don't feed the conspiracists.")
Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_...on_scandal
EXCERPTIONS: The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consists of the organised child sexual abuse of girls that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England, from the late 1980s until 2013 and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history", with one report estimating that 1,400 girls, primarily from care home backgrounds, were abused by "grooming gangs" between 1997 and 2013.
[...] The majority of victims were White British girls, but British Asian girls in Rotherham also suffered different types of sexual harassment and molestation. Social isolation and fear of dishonour may have prevented Asian victims from coming forward.
A care worker, who worked at children's homes from 2003–2007, told the BBC men would arrive almost 'every night' to collect girls, who escaped using a range of methods and were then usually driven off in taxis. The abuse included gang rape, forcing children to watch rape, dousing them with petrol and threatening to set them on fire, threatening to rape their mothers and younger sisters, as well as trafficking them to other towns. There were pregnancies (one at age 12), pregnancy terminations, miscarriages, babies raised by their mothers, in addition to babies removed, causing further trauma.
[...] The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class, religion and gender—fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism; contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; lack of a child-centred focus; a desire to protect the town's reputation; and lack of training and resources.
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Huddersfield sex abuse ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfie...abuse_ring
EXCERPTS: Twenty-seven men were accused of sexual offences including rape and trafficking against eighteen girls aged between 11 and 17, with two further women accused of child neglect. Due to the large number of defendants, the court proceedings against them were conducted in three separate trials. Reporting restrictions on the trial were imposed in November 2017 under the 1981 Contempt of Court Act to avoid prejudice on subsequent trials.
[...] Underreporting of child sexual abuse and low conviction rates remain barriers to justice, among other factors. In the UK, high profile media coverage of child sexual abuse has often focused on cases of institutional and celebrity abuse, as well as offences committed by groups, also known informally as grooming gangs.
[...] Figures from 2009–10 suggest girls are six times more likely to be assaulted than boys with 86% of attacks taking place against them. The charity Barnardo's estimates that two thirds of victims in the United Kingdom are girls and one third are boys. Barnardo's is concerned that male victims may be overlooked.
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Group-based child sexual exploitation in the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexu...ploitation
EXCERPT: Group-based child sexual exploitation and localised grooming are terms used to describe the sexual exploitation or grooming of children and adolescents by groups. This abuse tends to target girls who are particularly vulnerable, such as those who are in local care. The youngest recorded victim was 12 and the oldest was 18. A 2013 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee describes a group first making contact with the child in a public place. After the group's initial contact with the child, offers of treats (takeaway food, cigarettes, drugs) persuade the child to maintain the relationship. Sometimes a boy similar in age presents himself as a "boyfriend"; this person arranges for the child to be raped by other members of the group. Children may end up being raped by dozens of these group members, and may be trafficked to connected groups in other towns.
In August 2003, a television documentary reported details of an 18-month police and social services investigation into allegations that young British Asian men were targeting under-age girls for sex, drugs and prostitution in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley. The Leeds-based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (Crop) sought to bring this behaviour to national attention from at least 2010. In November 2010, the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw several convictions of child sexual abusers. In 2012, members of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring were convicted on various counts, and in 2016, following the largest child sexual exploitation investigation in the UK, 18 men in the Halifax child sex abuse ring case were sentenced to a combined total of over 175 years in prison.
Following further child sex abuse rings in Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Huddersfield, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, Telford, and others, several investigations considered how prevalent British Asian backgrounds were in localised grooming. In 2013, the National Crime Agency's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) branch collected data on group-based child sexual abuse from most police forces in England and Wales. It reported that 75% of offenders in grooming-gang cases were South Asian. In December 2017, Quilliam, a think tank, released a report which said 84% of offenders were of South Asian heritage. This report was criticised by child sexual exploitation experts Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, who said it was unscientific and had poor methodology, in a paper published in January 2020.
A further investigation was carried out by the British government in December 2020, which concluded most offenders were white and that there was insufficient data in this area to suggest South Asians, or any other ethnic group, were disproportionately represented among perpetrators. The British government originally refused to release the report but eventually did so after public pressure. In response to the report, then Home Secretary Priti Patel said: "This paper demonstrates how difficult it has been to draw conclusions about the characteristics of offenders." Reviews of the Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford cases identified several common factors, with offenders often working in night-time industries like takeaways and taxis, providing access to vulnerable children.
Several Conservative and Reform UK politicians have alleged that race was a factor in "grooming gangs" (a term which has been described by academics and child protection professionals as racially charged) and that concerns were not dealt with because of political correctness. After a 2017 case in Newcastle, former Conservative policing and justice minister Mike Penning urged Attorney General Jeremy Wright to consider the offences as racially motivated. The judge presiding over the case in question had ruled that the girls were not targeted for their race.
In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that victims had been failed due to political correctness. In 2023, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman said in an opinion piece that "grooming gang" members in the United Kingdom were "groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values". In response, the Independent Press Standards Organisation issued a correction stating that Braverman's article was "misleading", since it did not make it explicit that she was talking about the Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford child sexual abuse scandals in particular. Many experts and organisations called on her to withdraw her comments, saying she was amplifying far-right ideologies and making it harder to address the issue. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said that by focusing primarily on South Asian men, Braverman was fuelling "misinformation, racism and division". The charity said that "a singular focus on groups of male abusers of British-Pakistani origin draws attention away from so many other sources of harm".
Jan 10, 2025 08:52 PM
