It was more of a class and misogyny problem, which due to cultural reasons these groups of men were able to take advantage. There’s a story of police being called to a disturbance and found a group of older guys (mostly south Asian but there was a white guy too) with two teenage (I think about 15) drunk, working class girls. Instead of stepping back and thinking there’s something very strange going on here and seeing those girls as victims, who were vulnerable, potentially being groomed and obviously being taken advantage of, they arrested the girls for drunk and disorderly, were apologetic to the men and didn’t even record the names of those men.
Statistically in the UK, most grooming and sexual violence is some by family members or family friends, against both boys and girls, and are perpetrated by white people simply because the UK is still 83% white! If any of these people truly cared about vulnerable children, they would focus on more than just these grooming gangs but that doesn’t rile up their base, get more likes and give them more support. Yeah, these horrible men need to be arrested and put away but let’s set up systems that try to prevent these children being harmed in the first place.
This article is talking about the wider problems of children not being seen as victims, and agencies not communicating with each other. Whether it’s a black boy arrested for carrying drugs or a white girl ignored as being “promiscuous”, there are systemic issues in our system that need to be addressed.
Naich@lemmings.world 2 days ago
They used the “we didn’t want to be seen as racist” excuse to ignore the problem because they were misogynistic arseholes who ignored girls they saw as “sluts”.
Like the police were ever afraid to be racist.
FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 2 days ago
Some of it still looks a little like corruption to me.
There’s a huge report on this with more detail than anyone could reasonably read, somewhere way back in my comment history on Reddit. The way the problem was moved off to cross force specialised teams and then sat on is very odd, but could just be disorganisaton
HumanPenguin@feddit.uk 2 days ago
At the very least, CYA. It was well over a decade ago, but.
I vaguely remember comments about the force’s post investigation not wanting to be racist in suspecting gangs. Being little more than ignoring the fact the teen girls had no option to consent. While ignoring the threat or fear as the motive when they refused to testify. Just assuming the girls were involved in underage prostitution willingly. This attitude as I remember increased the fear in these victims as the police became a threat that just returned the girls, rather than a potential solution.
While actually ignoring teen girls and parents reporting approaches by some cultures as assumed racism from the harassment victims. Rather than dealing with very complex investigations, they lacked the labour to manage effectively. So basically using the excuse to remove reports from the accounting.
FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 2 days ago
They were specifically worried about race riots.
Look at the London riots years ago, that was caused by going after a gang member and escalates by gangs.
The police forces in these areas were absolutely right to worry, it wasn’t just about causing offence but the real threat of organised criminal members of a community mobilising that community against the police.