1. 1,400 girls repeatedly raped over 16 years, in a faded English town by
gangs of Pakistani men.
That is basically the flagrant crux of what has flayed Rotherham. This
is much more than just a horror story.
While the journalistic gaze is transfixed, and rightly so, on more
pressing issues blistering the world down, including Israel and ISIS or
Gaza and Hamas, let us give Rotherham’s story an apropos dwelling of
shame in the nightmarish summer of 2014.
Raped by numerous perpetrators, doused with petrol, trafficked to
other towns, abducted, groomed with alcohol and drugs, thrashed,
burnt, urinated on, assaulted and intimidated. The sickening nature of
abuse that the victims suffered is not a cinch to describe.
But the story has floated ashore just now. An independent report
authored by Professor Alexis Jay exposed the veracity behind the
banal north England town, just outside the city of Sheffield in South
Yorkshire.
The authorities
Senior social care managers "underplayed" the quandary, police
considered many victims with contempt, local authorities chose to
overlook it in the distress of being termed racists/bigots, whatever you
want to call it. Local politicians had better reasons - the vote bank
dilemma. They were too petrified of losing votes from Rotherham's
enormous Muslim population.
"Several councilors 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," the report says.
And hence, the rapes continued relentlessly.
Those who made an effort to speak out were threatened with guns and
forced to watch brutal gang rape videos. The rapists told the girls they
would be next if they dared to reveal. A female employee of
Rotherham council who decried, finally, was accused for being
Islamophobic and sent to a “ethnicity and diversity course” by her
child protection superiors. She was also told to “never, ever” again
refer to the ethnicity of the perpetrators.
2. So, the whole system was sinking into a gutless abyss of political
correctness, or as the report says “collective failure”, that allowed
naïve girls, mostly white and from dysfunctional, humble backgrounds,
to be assaulted constantly and systematically.
Victims
Often the victims were children from negligent and troubled families
and housed in state-run social care facilities, apparently for their
protection. Usually a lonely girl would be approached by a young man,
befriended, introduced to other, older men at parties who plied her
with drink, drugs and free gifts.
And then the abuse began, almost unexpectedly and abruptly. Some of
the victims were as young as eight years old.
One victim, now 24, says she was 12 when first approached by a
group of boys in an arcade in Rotherham. The pattern was almost
robotic. The young men struck up a friendship with her.
She was completely unaware of the fact that she was being “groomed”
for sexual abuse. The grooming went on for a year, in which she was
introduced to older men, to soft drugs and alcohol, just as the protocol
was designed. She never felt unsafe or uncomfortable with these
gangs of men until this point. And then it began.
She was raped, gang raped, once a week, every week.
Her abusers began to force her to have sex with "whoever wanted to
come and have sex with me".
She gathered courage to go to police only three months after this
started, with her clothes as a piece of evidence. But the police lost the
clothes and hence the evidence vanished in thin air.
The police refused to offer any assistance unapologetically and she had
no choice but to drop the charges.
They started threatening her with the idea of raping her mother. They
knew all about her and her family as she had told them during the
time her grooming was on.
3. The only way out was moving out of the town. That’s what saved her
life from turning more morbid.
The predators
Pakistanis first came to Rotherham in the late 1950s and early ’60s,
swayed by the immigration wave that brought men from the Indian
subcontinent to Britain. They were typically from rural Kashmiri
villages, socially conservative and regressive in thought.
This community has not evolved or progressed much and remains
conspicuously penurious, with more than two-thirds of Pakistani
households below the poverty line. The unemployment rate for the
least educated young Muslims is close to 40 percent.
Rotherham has the third-most isolated Muslim population in England.
The bulk, 82 percent, lives in just three of the town’s council electoral
wards. During elections, voter turnout can be as low as 30 percent,
and winning or losing is based on small margins. This scenario has led
to what you call patronage.
Rotherham is governed by Labour politicians, who allied themselves
with conservative Pakistani leaders, who then, held power. This clearly
elucidates why this issue has remained underground for eons.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative politician said that it allows
some Pakistani men to consider young white women “fair game.”
If working-class Pakistanis were represented better in the political
class, police authorities, social care, and media, the attitude towards
ethnicity would have been less nauseous.
Fortunately for them, in Rotherham, the predators discovered that
their ethnicity and religion sheltered them because they belonged to a
community, not many dared to challenge. And the acts became a local
way of living.
The economic conditions
Once known as a flourishing centre of Britain's steel and coal
industries, Rotherham now epitomizes the poverty of post-industrial
Britain.
4. Some believe that it is poverty, and not racial sensitivities, that is the
key culprit to be blamed for such gigantic-scale exploitation in
Rotherham.
Social stigmas, vulnerability, misplaced notions of racism/ethnicity all
amalgamated with the fact that the victims belonged to deprived
backgrounds. This could easily become about race and community,
white victims and Muslim perpetrators, when it is also about socio-
economic truths.
Why
Do you get the privilege to be politically and socially untouchable
because you belong to an ethnic and religious background that is
apparently untouchable in one part of the world, while in most other
regions, that particular ethnicity/religion is seen with a perpetual
skepticism?
Should there be a class hierarchy for victims? Is it valid to argue on
class distinctions since the victims hail from poor backgrounds and are
considered “sexually available” owing to their skin colour. The racially
inflected misogynistic police officers, thought that vulnerable white
girls exploited by immigrant men were “tarts” and deserved what they
got. That they were not really worthy of any protection.
This scandal is a viscous assortment of many iniquities -
traditionalism, racism, power, retrogression, exploitation, vote banks –
each one as truculent as the other. Yet, the mystery did not unfold
until 2014. It is unnerving as well as shocking to comprehend how
such acts can remain obfuscated from and in the modern world for
decades?
How can such heinous acts be snubbed for 16 years without grabbing
eyeballs? How can such appalling crimes be obscured so meticulously
by the residents and authorities? Where were all the busy-money-
minting media houses and journalists hibernating? How can those who
write neurotically about patriarchal vices and rape culture neglect the
vile acts that occurred in Rotherham?
During a period when journalism thrived and how, when nothing was
unheeded from the keen eye of media, honest and audacious
investigative reportage could have been the only sharp weapon that
could have enfeebled this atrocity without a doubt.
