In response to Jane Kelly: Double standards over the abuse of poor, white girls, Groan wrote:
You mention the most prominent cases in a much wider series of prosecutions in English towns. It is an old old story of being able to de-humanise “others” so they can be abused in a way inconceivable to perpetrators when considering girls, boys and women in their own community.
Not a feminist myself, one would think it a clear cause for feminists. An explicitly “patriarchal” society proud of its traditions of male leadership is widely connected to case after case of abusive rings committing crimes on the scale of cottage industry. Yet silence, silence, silence.
As you say the welfare of vulnerable (often in care or at least under some form of child protection) young people is widely signalled to be of little real concern to the agencies and groups proclaiming protection is their business.
The irony is that an unflinching look at this would find the connections to be with specific cultures, not all Muslim cultures in the UK. Cultures themselves slave/surf owning into the modern era. But the silence, certainly here in the north west, feeds rumours and suspicions of clientelism as local government and police appear to conceal what local communities know. The silence feeds racism.
It all points to a tacit “deal” wherein minorities (or rather their supposed champions) band together to get their privileges from the State, and conspire in silence about issues that will divide them.
