Tip of the Iceberg – Reflections

“It is the tip of the iceberg and the issue is one that many still do not like to talk about. And then most only want to talk about ‘the others’ not the responsibility of concerning CSE in their own community.

Back in 1986 ChildWatch – an organisation I worked alongside at its inception – constantly campaigned and warned that Britain was ignoring the true scale and nature of CSE. They warned about all sections of society ignoring the issue. They warned against society collectively closing its eyes and ears and saying it only happens elsewhere.They warned about the lack of investment and publicity and awareness concerning the issue of real intervention. They warned about an inadequate system of practical and legal support and prevention. They warned about victims not being listened to. They warned about Britain not wanting to address CSE because we didn’t want to admit it was a national plague. And what did they – get shouted down. And not only by those in power, but by a society that didn’t want to believe it was a major problem because it was too odious to contemplate as being true – not in Britain they said – we are country that cares.

Let’s be honest the people of Rotherham – like elsewhere – have only taken notice because it has hit the headlines in the own back yard. Before it did they went about their daily lives in self assured innocence and ignorance and oblivious to the scale of the issue. Before the outrage hit the headlines they had the misplaced belief it only happens in other places. And before the true nature and scale became apparent they just couldn’t accept the fact – that Britain has a nation closes its eyes and ears – it is after all the British way.

Of course now every ones up in arms – and rightly so. Everyone is calling for justice. Everyone is pointing fingers and saying ‘why didn’t they tell us.’ Everyone is saying ‘how could it happen?’ And everyone is apportioning their own blame’. Many for valid reasons,some for personal gain, and some because they feel guilty because they didn’t listen to the ‘sages of doom’.

For 32 years all over this land I worked with children at risk as well as countless victims of CSE; for 32 years I spoke out and eventually was cast out for what I said and challenged. For 32 years I saw the suffering and injustice. (You can’t say you understand the experience – only victims ever truly can) For 32 years I constantly was accused of exaggerating the problem by all. (Including the vast majority of residents of many towns and cities). And for 32 years I hung my head in shame certain of the fact in this land – Britain – the ordinary people and the powers alike just didn’t want to admit what was going on. ‘Not in Britain.’ they said – ‘we are a nation that cares.’ I wish.

In some parts of Britain CSE is a major issue of a minority within a community’s warped cultural perception. In others it is not and is simply the evil that exists in all regions, all religions all cultures, all races, all sections of society and all classes. (And I mean ALL) But one thing is sure – wherever it emanates from CSE is an issue we are all responsible for; whether that be the actual abusers, those that tolerate or ignore it by their silence / cover up, or those that simply want to use the issue to score short term personal or political points. (The latter I feel – and it is my personal opinion only – offer nothing to a real and long term solution)

Regarding CSE – like many I’m not blind – and I’m not stupid for that matter. (Some would argue on the latter I am wrong but that’s another matter) ‘ I see what has gone on – and still is going on it is evident – in certain minority sections of the Muslim community – just as I see what is going on and is still going on in certain minority sections of the Christian or non religious communities of the land. If there is a cultural element or gender one in an instance of CSE it should be tackled in a focused, in depth, effective and intelligent and honest way openly. (Not used as a political football – but tackled fully and openly) I also see the way victims have been treat and still continue to be treat and dismissed by many sections of the higher echelons of the authorities and legal system and the bullying within these sectors – and it has made me weep – it still does. . But unlike some I (I think Ms May does too) I see the issue of CSE as a holistic moral crusade not a political one. My ethos is simple – wherever an abuser or grooming gang – or peadophile gang as they should be termed in my opinion – exist – they should be tackled with the full force of the law – including new and specific laws without mercy; as should those that conspire to ignore cover up at all levels.

Personally I don’t give a damn about the ‘suddenly concerned’ who sometimes come on here and elsewhere to vent their spleen NOW. (Although there are many exceptions who have offered valuable contributions and done great work on Roth Pol and elsewhere). I don’t give a damn about the ‘new found self righteous’ who take up a thread and add their twopenneth in ‘new found ‘moral indignation’. I don’t give a damn about those that that try to distort the holistic’s of the nature of CSE for personal gain, and gratification. I don’t give a damn about the politicos of all hues who shout and seek political gain or point scoring. I don’t give a damn about individuals that have ‘specific alternative agendas’ and shady ulterior motives, not CSE, as the main concern or focus. All I care about is that the victims EVERYWHERE get the justice they deserve, those who seek to cover up – wherever – are punished in the same way as abusers should be, that the system of prevention and support is overhauled, properly financed and made truly effective, and that people everywhere actually start to accept that CSE is not just an issue that effects a particular region or section of society at any one time, it is an issue that is here and now forever that should be tackled out in the open honestly and with determination.

Finally, if that upsets a few on here who have suddenly found ‘a cause’ ; I don’t give a damn. I’ve been fighting it for well over 30 years. Where were you – with a few valid and appreciated exceptions of course – until the local outrage hit the fan not looking deep enough I guess.”

SKT
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21 thoughts on “Tip of the Iceberg – Reflections

  1. To the person writing above,and stated to be ‘SKT’, please ,please carry on writing and talking,

    This needs to be kept in the public arena, no matter who is trying to cover it over, or threaten you to go away. When such brutal, evil practices are seen as ‘the fabric of society’ no child is safe.

    We must find a way to bring all the inspection and other agencies into the glare of light, until they clean up their operations, and begin to protect our children.

    I think we have all seen that this will involve a fair number of sackings.. especially at senior cover-up level.. but no child should ever suffer as these disbelieved youngsters have been left to suffer.

    No child ‘in care’ should be so uncared-about, and no protecting adult should be threatened and removed from their work.

    We need full corporate and individual accountability written into every work contract, and fully upheld.

    Your comments are absolutely necessary. Please keep them coming.

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    • You need have no fear that this subject, difficult as it is, will slip away from attention.

      Rotherham Politics has to enforce part of our conditions concerning registration of those who comment on this blog. Put simply, this is how to both register and preserve the confidentiality you may require.

      1. Choose an identity, best to keep it short.

      2. Email Rothpol rothpol@rikv.net putting register in the subject line and your chosen identity in the body text.

      3. When you receive a confirmatory email, you will then be able to comment freely.

      Rotherham Politics is a moderated blog , comments are published at the discretion of the moderator. This doesn’t equate to censorship, as Rothpol is prepared to publish comments that are adding to the debate, even if critical of Rotherham Politics!

      No one needs to reveal their identity, all Rothpol is asking is to be able to tell everyone apart, nothing else!

      Simply use a pseudonym, get a free email account in that name and use it to establish two way communication with me. Hushmail, is both free and secure, and is to be recommended.”

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  2. SKT people like you give me hope. Thankyou for that. The pedos in power have always been there. The information highway has not. There are good people whose instinct to protect wont let them turn away.

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  3. You obviously feel frustrated and angry about Child Protection in this country and rightly so, but so do all of us. Just think we put our trust in a collective of now what we know are a bunch of lying institutions and people. Believing they will protect us and our children. We now find out that not only did they know what was going on, they actively suppressed this information from the public, thereby placing us and our children at greater risk. Now they believe they are going to solve this problem, well we all know the answer to that don’t we. So in another 30 years or so, we be asking the same question, what went wrong.

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    • So what are YOU going to do about it? Be still on here in 30 years time “asking the same question”? Or actually doing something constructive to make a difference now that YOU know what’s been going on?

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  4. With information comes knowledge , knowledge comes power. Since now belatedly I know what the threat is, one can take resonable precautions to protect ones family and friends. When we all started hearing about this new phenomenon of child sexual exploitation, like most people we all couldn’t believe it. We always thought of CSE as the preptrators as opportunist , only hearing about group abuse in the Care homes in North Wales. These sick individuals were not specific in their victims. But this is something else.

    Although at first it was outright criminality, something was unusual in respect to the brazenness of the offending. Criminals normally hide in the shadows, having a healthy fear of capture for their misdeeds, these lot didn’t. Imagine parking outside of schools and selecting your victims, that’s, even by any standards is below the pale, but these characters didn’t think that.

    Then it was clearly racists, the ages, cultural. The group pattern involving members of the same family , yes there are family criminal gangs, but not usually in this sort of crime. Just because your brother, uncle or counsin is abusing a child, does it mean you have to follow suit.

    If the other communities, the vast majority of society knows it’s illegal as well morally wrong to have sex with a child, what drove these people to think it was acceptable. Then you realise that their Religion sanctions such behaviour. Mohammed had sex with Aisha when she was under 10. Also playing around outside one’s marriage is acceptable , if you view the victim as a slave. And how this same community kept quite “Ummah”

    But the biggest shock was that aurthorites knew this had been going on for decades, and did absolutely nothing to stop it, even aided in it’s proliferation. We the public, through our taxes pay these people wages and provide them with handsome benefits, the least we could expect that they would do their job properly. I bet their families weren’t harmed. So these Cllrs, MP’s, Councils, Goverments institutions, Child charities all are just as responsible these preptrators.

    There’s a old saying, you reap what you sow, you wanted multi-cultralism with the vast majority of the cultures abiding by the rules, but if you are going to allow one community to continually flaunts these same rules, you should expect the consequences.

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  5. Whether or not anyone likes it there has to be a political answer to CSE, it is the politicians who have allowed the cover up to continue. It is the politicians who have the power to make the police do their job properly and vigorously to bring the perpetrators to book. This then brings us to the question if we allow the same politicians who allowed the cover up go on to stay in position will anything get done. Every time I bring up the subject in local or borough council meetings I get told the same thing, I am point scoring, if we allow this belief, as is intimated in the piece above, to be believed then we will never change the cover up culture. It is not a band wagon, it is not point scoring and it is not for self gain, in order to get justice for the victims we have to have a change we need people who will ask question who will probe for answers, not ones who sit in a seminar where they are given detailed information and are then told the police are dealing with it; so they keep quiet for nine years. These are politicians and they need to be taken on politicly, they have to be replaced by genuine and honest people who will do the job they were elected to do; not become liars and money grabbers. We need political change.
    Dave Smith

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    • In that case, people like yourself have to convince the rest of us you can do a better job. That will make you a politician too. We need to start recognising that politicians are just people like us who have stood up for election at some stage – they’re not a different species.

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  6. ” I see what has gone on – and still is going on it is evident – in certain minority sections of the Muslim community – just as I see what is going on and is still going on in certain minority sections of the Christian or non religious communities of the land”

    You say this but the “Asian” grooming model represents an unprecedented step change which has no equivalence – we have targeted grooming of young girls. rape by multiple perpetrators on repeated occasions, torture(in the Oxford case so horrific the media wouldn’t reveal it), trafficking between towns and cities, pimping of the victims at immense profit, vile sexual slavery, extreme threats made to victims and families, perversion of the course of justice, corruption of political parties(well Labour at least), local authorities and police, and assorted other criminality. This is all on what is now finally admitted to be “industrial scale”, not only that the epidemic is underpinned by racial and religious contempt.

    This is about as bad as it gets and to pose it the way you have in the sentence from you I quoted seems to me to be an indulgence in a false equivalence.

    ” If there is a cultural element or gender one in an instance of CSE it should be tackled in a focused, in depth, effective and intelligent and honest way openly.”

    If? That’s a pretty equivocal way of putting it. What, in your view, are the cultural and gender elements in Rotherham et al pattern grooming, how should they be tackled and with what chances of success? Unless you are prepared to explain yourself here what you have to say, whilst unarguable at a superficial level, is rather anodyne really.

    You talk of shady motives and politicisation, but that’s exactly what happened with the “Asian” grooming model – years of evasion, denial, blind eyes and complicity. When the lid could no longer be kept on after the 3rd Rochdale trial the public was offered up a politically correct counter-poise; a moral panic, a witch hunt centred first on Savile, then Yewtree generally, now the alleged high level paedophile ring(s) involving Thatcher’s cabinet and MPs supposedly. A febrile atmosphere has been created in which it has been made very hard to see the wood from the actual trees, which can’t serve victims well. An excellent illustration of this is the collusion of SYP and the BBC in the raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s house. This was deeply sinister – what other motive could there be than to to trawl, in a great blaze of publicity, for more accusers and thus to keep the whole bandwagon running(just as Prof Jay was about to report by odd coincidence)? Michael Parkinson justly described this as a witch hunt.

    A malign consequence of the manufactured moral panic is that the remit of the CSA enquiry is so absurdly wide that it is hard to see that much will come of it but blind alleys and generalities – it looks like justice for the Rotherham victims and their families is as far away as ever

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    • If you’re going to pursue this, at least identify the right people to blame. You actually mean ‘Pakistanis’ don’t you? ‘Asians’ includes everyone else living in or originating from the biggest continent on the planet.. And maybe I’ve missed something but I’ve not heard there’s a problem with Sri Lankan, Chinese, or Indian grooming gangs. In fact, it would be even more accurate to refer to Pakistani (don’t know if any Bangladeshis are involved) Muslims as I’m sure the – admittedly few – Pakistani Christians, atheists and other minority beliefs are not represented in this issue.

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      • The quotation remarks around the word indicate irony, a contempt for the slanderous and libellous use to which it is put, and for the media who have made such free and inappropriate use of it

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      • You’ve rightly identify the offending community, Muslims and it is to this same community which must address this problem, instead of denying it. It needs to look at it’s Religious teachings, wether this is encouraging this criminality in regards for woman’s equality, slavery and sex with children. They already know the law of the of the land, should start obeying it. It also needs to be truthful and honest and where a crime is being committed, report it without fear of harming your community reputation, more damage is being done by not reporting it. It needs new leaders who can take them into the 21ist century, instead of keeping them rooted in the past.

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  7. Correct my knowledgeable friend, except in one respect. The criminal in the Oxford case was from North Africa accent, the Loverboys in Netherlands are either Turkish or Morroccan. This is truly a international problem, involving the Muslim community.

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    • The form of abuse we have seen has been facilitated by being organised within the one group of families or biraderi! The child prostitution rackett and other associated criminality and the involvement of the taxi trade in this, is what marks the ‘Rotherham Model’ out as different.

      The fact that they are coreligionists is a coincidence, nothing more.

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      • Andrew Norfolk summarised the issue thus

        “If you come from a rural Myapuri, Kashmiri community, where, whatever state law says, village tradition and sharia says that puberty is the green light for marriage-as it does-and if you recognise that most girls in this country are hitting puberty at 11 or 12, perhaps one begins to understand why it is not just lone offenders. There has to be something, given that so often this is a normalised group activity-not among a major criminal gang, but among friends, work colleagues and relatives-that does not have the same sense of shame attached to it as would be the case for your typical white offender, who works alone because if he told too many people, somebody would report him.”

        I suspect he might be understating the organised gang/biraderi element, but he’s the man who has done the research on the ground after all , and he sees it primarily in terms of groups rather than gangs as such.

        I just don’t believe that you can acquit religion in the way you do here – this is coming out of an essentially tribal culture in which religion plays a central role, from which the clan networks have sprung in any case.

        Taj Hargey’s points here are compelling

        http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10061217/Imams-promote-grooming-rings-Muslim-leader-claims.html

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    • Mancoi
      The Oxford case
      “The criminal in the Oxford case was from North Africa accent” well done Manc01 for at least getting the continent right. Those convicted were 2 Eritrean brothers (from what is usually known as the Horn of Africa – look it up on a map) and some 5 Pakistani. One of the two Eritrean brothers was the “ring leader” and deliverer of ” torture” (in the Oxford case so horrific the media wouldn’t reveal it)” – in Herr Parsonage’s phrase.
      I know the Habesha people well. Such behaviour is not specific to the Muslim community there – it is equally applicable to the marginally larger Christian community, and Habesha culture is not remotely like that of Kashmir.

      “Loverboys”
      Morocco is in “North Africa” – it is one of the countries of the Mahgreb (meaning “the west” in Arab). It’s another country I know well, but I know it’s neighbour Algeria somewhat better).
      Go to wikipedia: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loverboy_%28persoon%29#Externe_links
      and read the final 3 reports by the National Rapporteur on Trafficking and Sexual Violence against Children (the first report is a broken link). Then you might get a basic understanding of the issue – something you won’t ever get from the UK press..
      RR

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      • You’ve excelled yourself there RR, a gratuitous smear directed at myself – and all Germans; and another of your habitual snide remarks directed at Manc

        You might have spared your trouble in placing quotation marks around torture and the the spin you put on my comment, given that I merely relayed part of a BBC report

        “Det Insp Simon Morton, of Thames Valley Police, said: “They start out at 11 or 12 as ordinary girls, in our case, and by the time they’re finished they’re hollow.

        “They are shells of what they should be and the little girl in there is gone.

        “It’s sexual atrocities, it’s torture.

        “You can’t report it, you can’t put it on TV, you can’t write it down. We have had members of the press in tears in court.

        “It’s been horrendous.””

        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-22164676

        We do have some knowledge of the type of sexual torture inflicted RR, so for your benefit RR, here it is

        “A teenager has told the Old Bailey a man carried out a brutal sexual assault to “prepare” her to be gang-raped.

        The girl, who was 12 at the time, said Mohammed Karrar used sex toys and numbing cream used by dentists during the incident at an Oxford flat.

        Sobbing during her evidence, she said five or six men then came to the flat and all raped her on the kitchen table.”

        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-21578312

        And here again we get the denial tactics of the left, unreconstructed and otherwise; the ring leader was Eritrean, other communities in that benighted land are as allegedly prone to the same behaviour as the Muslim; no conclusions can be drawn, nothing to see, move on. Let’s just turn a blind eye to the predominant pattern we see in Rotherham and so many other towns and cities. Another example of the spin, evasion and deceit which has played no small part in the horrific epidemic

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    • Thanks Manc – I agree absolutely about the international dimension; which we see most egregiously inflicted by ISIS/ISIL on Yahzdi girls and indeed by Boko Haram – there are other manifestations I gather in India(Love Jihad), Burma, Australia as well as the ones you mention. It is of course the case though that it has presented here amongst Kashmiri
      Muslims predominantly

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