Rotherham and the failure of multiculturalism

multiculturalismThe news from Rotherham, UK, has been chilling. Gang rape of vulnerable teens and pre-teens was endemic:

No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day. In May 2014, the caseload of the specialist child sexual exploitation team was 51. More CSE cases were held by other children’s social care teams. There were 16 looked after children who were identified by children’s social care as being at serious risk of sexual exploitation or having been sexually exploited. In 2013, the Police received 157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation in the Borough.

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With the publicity associated with this travesty, it seems that other British cities have exactly the same problem:

Child sexual exploitation is happening in a “number of towns” in different parts of the country, according to the author of a damning report into abuse in Rotherham.

The root of the problem, according to the report, was that the girls involved were virtually all “Roma-Slavic” or, as more commonly referred to as Gypsy. The men were mostly Pakistani. But regardless of ethnicity they had two traits in common. They were Muslim and everyone was scared of offending them.

The dangers in Rotherham and Birmingham were clear enough. The authorities, local government, social services, education authorities, and police alike had begun to talk about their relations with “the community” as though it were a sovereign body and accepting that different codes of conduct applied within it than within the host society.

In short, parts of Birmingham and Rotherham had become places more like the bantustans of the old apartheid South Africa, places of separate development, than towns in the United Kingdom.

The authorities had allowed the imposition of Sharia by Islamic courts, even where, as in respect of the rights of women, it conflicted with English law.

A blind eye was turned to election practices imported from Pakistan. Indeed the evil doctrine of political correctness and the perversions of equality legislation, alongside those foreign election practices were used to intimidate politicians into silence about the scandalous crimes being openly committed.

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And the advent of gang rapes in Rotherham and elsewhere coincides with the beginnings of the policy of the Blair Government of encouraging mass immigration from Pakistan to (stop me if any of this sounds too familiar) provide cheap labor and

 

Mr Neather claimed that earlier, unpublished versions of the report made clear that one aim was to make Britain more multi-cultural for political reasons.

‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,’ he said.

What is missing from the discussion is the feminist left. One would think with their utter fixation on an alleged “rape culture” that the same claque of harridans who have basically been insisting that every sexual encounter between men and women be videotaped to ensure that there is 100% positive assent to every conceivable aspect of the act would be up in arms. As Ian Tuttle writes in National Review, the perpetrators of the rapes are of no interest to the left or the feminist movement because they are Muslim and Pakistani, not upper middle class white lacrosse players. The victims are of no interest because they are poor and neglected, not fashionable, and need I say it, white.

In Rotherham there is a real-life “rape culture.” But you will not learn anything new about it from Salon, the Daily BeastJezebel, or Slate. It has gone unmentioned at FeministingBitch Media, or the Feminist Majority Foundation. There have been no outraged op-eds from Jenny Kutner, Jessica Valenti, or Samantha Leigh Allen.

These are, apparently, not the rapes they are looking for.

It is hard not to interpret the feminist blogosphere’s silence on Rotherham as an indication of the movement’s ultimate lack of seriousness. Perhaps they are not interested in confronting the ethnic and religious homogeneity of many of the perpetrators: Emma and the majority of the 1,400 victims were abused by “Asian” men — i.e., Muslim men typically from Rotherham’s Pakistani community. Local government leaders, social services, and law enforcement — for fear of being labeled racist — ignored numerous reports they received.

Or perhaps the rapes of young girls overseas are of no particular interest. The victims were, after all, often in and out of government housing, truant or absent from school, and sometimes around domestic violence. Many had gone serially missing. They are not the upper-class types likely to fall victim to sexist fraternity pranks. They are not prospective Salon readers.

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The subtext is clear: what do you expect from those people?

In Atlantic, one sees an early attempt to spin the tyranny of multiculturalism as a problem with men and misogyny:

What hasn’t gotten quite as much attention is an explanation that crosses all cultural boundaries: a very old, but somehow new, contempt—that’s the word the report uses—for girls seen as “deviant or promiscuous.” Jay told the Times that police officers referred to the girls as “tarts” making “lifestyle choices”—which perhaps was also code for consorting with Pakistani men. This attitude seems to have contributed to, for example, a reluctance to take missing-persons reports from friends or family. The police had excellent procedures in place for dealing with victims, according to the report, but they seem to have disregarded them. Instead, they “displayed attitudes that conveyed a lack of understanding of the problem of [child sexual exploitation] and the nature of grooming … children as young as 11 were deemed to be having consensual sexual intercourse when in fact they were being raped and abused by adults.”

as well as in The Guardian

So yes, the Rotherham scandal, as in Oxford and Rochdale, is about race. But look deeper and it’s really about wider attitudes by some men to women and girls. Or “slags”, as I notice in the search terms that people use everyday to find articles about these cases. And that might be the most uncomfortable truth.

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The awful truth here is that the officials in Rotherham, and probably other places in the UK, had placed a premium on ethnic sensitivity and denigrated the concept of assimilation to the point where uttering the word made you a racist. We’re seeing the same shambling, grunting, slouch towards Gomorrah in America. An utterly misogynistic body of law, Shari’a, had been allowed to govern arbitration between private parties. Large parts of our legal profession and educated class see nothing wrong with the grafting onto American life something both foreign and is opposition to American culture. We print ballots in multiple languages when a requirement to receive citizenship is some fluency in English. We’ve gone from teaching our children about the virtues of the Melting Pot to extolling the virtues of a “salad bowl.

Rotherham is the logical outcome of a cultural and legal regime that declares all cultures are equal and aggressively punishes anyone from mentioning that they really aren’t. We can either look down our noses at Rotherham or learn a valuable lesson from them.

 

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