Rotherham
(source: Stanley Walker, geograph project, Wikimedia Commons)
The
English town of Rotherham has been in the news. Between 1997 and 2013, at least
1,400 school-age girls were "groomed" for prostitution—a process that
begins with seduction and ends with confinement, trafficking, and serial rape.
The girls were white. The groomers were older men of Pakistani origin, except
for a few Afghans and Roma.
This
in a town of some 250,000 people. And that figure of 1,400 is
"conservative." It's hard to avoid concluding that many of
Rotherham's white families have been affected, perhaps one in ten.
Grooming
may have even left a dent in the census data. In Western countries, boys
outnumber girls at birth, and this gender gap gradually shrinks through the
higher mortality of boys until it is gone by the age of 20. This trend holds
true in Rotherham up to the 15-19 age group, at which point the gender gap
strangely widens. There seem to be around 500 girls unaccounted for. Evidently,
this figure would capture only the final "confinement" stage of
grooming and would exclude earlier stages when the girl is voluntarily living
with her Pakistani boyfriend (Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, 2013, p.5. Figure 1.5).
What do the
academics have to say?
Not
much. British academia has either ignored the issue or cast aspersions on
anyone who brings it up, as seen in this paper:
The
implications of the current fixation with grooming and 'Asian sex gangs' are
examined and shown to further a political agendum and legitimise thinly veiled
racism, ultimately doing victims a disservice. (Cockbain, 2013)
Cockbain
cites two official studies to show that this fixation has no scientific basis:
Widespread
concern around grooming resulted in two large-scale government studies: the
Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre's (CEOP) assessment of
'localised grooming', and the Office of the Children's Commissioner for
England's (OCCE) study on 'child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups'.
[...]
Like The Times, CEOP focused on
community-based CSE, specifically excluding familial, peer-on-peer,
professional or primarily online abuse. Unlike The Times, CEOP removed limitations on victims' age and gender and
covered both solo and group offenders. Of the 31 per cent (N = 753) of suspects for whom race was known, 49 per cent (N = 367) were white and 46 per cent (N = 346) Asian. Meanwhile, the OCCE included all forms of CSE
in England, both online and offline, but was restricted to offenders acting in
groups of two or more, the exclusion of solo offenders seriously undermining
its claim to provide the 'most thorough and comprehensive collection of
information' on CSE to date. The statistics presented in the report are often
confused and incoherent, exacerbating methodological shortcomings and
understandable data deficiencies. What can be disentangled is that only a
minority of submissions to the call for evidence included any information on
suspects. Of a total of 1,514 suspects thus identified, race data were
available for 84 per cent (N = 1266).
For those suspects where race was known, 43 per cent (N = 545) were white and 33 per cent (N = 415) Asian.
Almost
half the suspects were homegrown whites? That figure seems far removed from the
picture one gets in the British press. It also seems far removed from the
picture one gets in a Dutch study of Amsterdam "lover boys":
The
young men were all between 21 and 24 years of age. Some of them were the
children of Moroccan and Turkish guest labourers who had come to the
Netherlands in the 1970s. Others had migrated at a young age with their parents
from Surinam or Curacao, or were born in the Netherlands. (Van San and Bovenkerk, 2013)
Is
seduction for profit more of a white boy thing in the UK than in the
Netherlands? Or is the difference due to some bias in data gathering? The
second explanation is suggested by the incompleteness of the British data. Only
31% of the CEOP files had information on the suspect's race, and only a
minority of the CSE files had any information at all on the suspect.
This
incompleteness can be traced to two biases in data gathering, which, curiously
enough, reflected a desire to avoid "bias":
1. Fear of
harming community relations
First,
there was a fear that evidence of Asian sex gangs, if publicized, could damage
community relations and hinder investigative work:
For
example, ever since projects for sexually exploited children were first opened
by Barnardo's there have been reports of Asian gangs at work. This information
was, very sensibly, not publicised by Barnardo's because they knew that their
workers depend on the goodwill and support of the local population — also
largely Asian — to gather information about the girls so they can help them.
Publicly highlighting the racial profile of the perpetrators would inevitably
turn the community against them. (Linehan, 2011)
Cockbain (2013) similarly evokes a fear of "fuelling racist rhetoric, distorting
policy and practice and exacerbating community tensions."
These
fears seem to have shaped public policy, as confirmed by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual
Exploitation in Rotherham:
Several
councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be
'giving oxygen' to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist
political groups and threaten community cohesion. To some extent this concern
was valid, with the apparent targeting of the town by groups such as the
English Defence League. (Jay, 2014, p. 93)
2. Fear of
seeming racist
Another
reason, cited in the Inquiry, was simply a fear of seeming racist:
Several
staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of
perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear
direction from their managers not to do so. (Jay, 2014, p. 2)
[...]
there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people
in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of
CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they
were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'. (Jay, 2014, p. 91)
She
also reported in 2006 that young people in Rotherham believed at that time that
the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of
racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we
met during the Inquiry, but was not supported by specific examples. (Jay, 2014, p. 92)
Those
who had involvement in CSE were acutely aware of these [ethnic] issues and
recalled a general nervousness in the earlier years about discussing them, for
fear of being thought racist. (Jay, 2014, p. 93)
A systematic
bias
Because
of these fears of either harming community relations or seeming racist, there
was a systematic bias toward underreporting of Pakistani involvement in
grooming. This bias in data gathering led to a distorted view of reality among
public officials:
Within
social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior
managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE,
regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as
a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports
known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their
description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was
effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it
contained. This had led to suggestions of cover-up. The other two reports set
out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality
in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with
the issues that were identified in them.
In
the early 2000s, a small group of professionals from key agencies met and
monitored large numbers of children known to be involved in CSE or at risk but
their managers gave little help or support to their efforts. Some at a senior
level in the Police and children's social care continued to think the extent of
the problem, as described by youth workers, was exaggerated, and seemed intent
on reducing the official numbers of children categorised as CSE. (Jay, 2014, p.1)
In
a BBC interview, a researcher described how an official reacted to one of the
reports: "She said you must never refer to that again. You must never
refer to Asian men. And her other response was to book me on a two-day
ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues"
(Brooks-Pollock, 2014).
It
makes sense that public officials had trouble believing the evidence being
brought to their attention. After all, it ran counter to the findings of the
authoritative CEOP and CSE studies. The situation is not unlike that of the old
Soviet Union, where official statistics said one thing and reality quite
another.
How could this
have happened?
The
answer is easy. We live in a society where "racism" is viewed as a
major evil. Once this view had gained the full backing of moral authority, it
was just a matter of time before everyone fell into line ... and acted
accordingly. The average social worker became reluctant to report evidence of
sex crimes if the suspects were non-white and non-Christian. The average police
officer became reluctant to lay charges or pursue them if already laid. The average
politician became reluctant to bring the matter up in council or parliament.
The
result? Underreporting on a massive scale. This all could happen in broad
daylight and no one would see a thing.
This
massive underreporting then distorted the findings of official reports, which
in turn convinced people in authority that the whole thing had been greatly
exaggerated, undoubtedly for mischievous purposes. There was thus growing
pressure from above to root out racist politicians, racist police officers, and
racist social workers ...
Antiracism
is self-validating. On the one hand, it leads people to dismiss evidence that
may undermine its view of reality. On the other, it strengthens its view of
reality by encouraging people to create supporting evidence. There is no
conspiracy. There is only the madness of ideology.
References
Brooks-Pollock,
T. (2014). Rotherham researcher 'sent on diversity course' after raising alarm,
The Telegraph, September 2
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11069178/Rotherham-researcher-sent-on-diversity-course-after-raising-alarm.html
Cockbain,
E. (2013). Grooming and the 'Asian sex gang predator': the construction of a
racial crime threat, Race & Class,
54, 22-32.
http://rac.sagepub.com/content/54/4/22.short
Jay, A. (2014). Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997-2013
http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherhamLinehan, T. (2011). Child sexual exploitation in the UK is all too common. But notions of gangs and grooming are a distraction and hinder our efforts to combat the problem.
Rotherham
Metropolitan Borough Council. (2013). Demographic
Profile of Rotherham,
http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/jsna/downloads/file/38/rotherham_demographic_profile_-_2013
Van
San, M. and F. Bovenkerk. (2013). Secret seducers. True tale of pimps in the
red light district of Amsterdam, Crime,
Law and Social Change, 60, 67-80.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-013-9436-z
