I sincerely hope they’re paying particular attention to wealthy white Christian males over 50. Particularly if they are now or have ever been employed by the BBC [/sarcasm]

More seriously; child sexual abuse in England is, in my experience, *overwhelmingly* perpetrated by middle class white men. Even if every single Muslim male in the country was a child abuser, there would still be less of them than there are in the ‘white male Christian’ category of child abusers; there simply aren’t enough Muslim men in the country for anything like parity.

I don’t see the BBC listed among the supporting organisations and wonder why?

@BobB LOL, too right. And the BBC so caring and responsible and all.

“Paramedics were told they could not rush to the aid of a BBC staff member who appeared to be having a cardiac arrest in the newsroom because of strict rules designed to regulate on-screen behaviour, it has been reported.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2321107/Security-BBCs-new-1bn-HQ-tight-paramedics-stopped-reaching-man-having-heart-attack.html

We want to encourage all our partners to help us remove the veils of secrecy and control that allow abuse to flourish.

Will this include parents allowing girls from the Muslim community to be more sexually active and more normally promiscuous?

Because that would go a long way to resolving the issue.

[1] ‘More seriously; child sexual abuse in England is, in my experience, *overwhelmingly* perpetrated by middle class white men’ – this campaign is about ‘street grooming’, and certain patterns of behaviour amongst certain groups of men.

Either say there is no problem, implying groups like the Islamic Society of Britain are mistaken in their assessment, or stick to what should be done about it if there is a problem amongst a specific group.

What is it with this reflex self loathing?
Yes, white middle age christians abuse children (many of whom will have been abused themselves of course) , but as far as I know they do not form christian gangs in order to recruit young women from different ethnicities in order to abuse them.

A&E Charge Nurse:

Er, I see no self-loathing here. I’m not a child-abuser. I’m talking about spending several years as a volunteer counsellor, and therefore working with people who as adults were processing childhood sexual abuse trauma. A shockingly high percentage of the people I worked with in that context were white, middle-class and had been abused by family members, typically an uncle, sometimes a cousin, father or grandfather. Very, very occasionally, a mother.

Street-grooming is a tiny problem in terms of actual incidence (how often it really happens) which is receiving vast amounts of political and media attention because of Us and Them: it’s Them doing it to Our girls.

Sexual and physical abuse of children by white middle-class men is endemic across the country, and has been terrifyingly common for at minimum five decades, as the current scandals involving clerical and celebrity paedophilia in the 70s illustrate nicely. But Saville and company were all One of Us. The ‘street-groomers’ are clearly of Them.

Even if every single one was a street-groomer, there are simply not enough Muslim men in Britain to make this a problem even a tenth as outrageous as the systemic abuse of their own children by the British middle class. But attacking *that* with this level of press vigour would involve talking about people Like Us. Who clearly don’t do that sort of thing. Whereas those *brown* people over *there*…

Well according to Barbara Hewson all this is merely “persecution of old men” and “an unfortunate consequence of the present mania for policing all aspects of personal life under the mantra of ‘child protection’.”

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13604/

Ahhhh, poor old men …

More seriously; child sexual abuse in England is, in my experience, *overwhelmingly* perpetrated by middle class white men. Even if every single Muslim male in the country was a child abuser, there would still be less of them than there are in the ‘white male Christian’ category of child abusers; there simply aren’t enough Muslim men in the country for anything like parity..

If everyone who went Cambridge was a rapist that wouldn’t add up to the number of rapists who didn’t go to Cambridge – but that wouldn’t mean there wasn’t a problem with Cambridge educated rapists.

Even if every single one was a street-groomer, there are simply not enough Muslim men in Britain to make this a problem even a tenth as outrageous as the systemic abuse of their own children by the British middle class. But attacking *that* with this level of press vigour would involve talking about people Like Us. Who clearly don’t do that sort of thing. Whereas those *brown* people over *there*…

This initiative is supported by such notoriously anti-brown organizations as ‘the Muslim Council of Britain, Muslim Youth Helpline, Muslim Community Helpline, the Federation of Muslim Organisations, the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB), Faith Associates, the Christian Muslim Forum, City Sikhs Network, plus women’s rights networks including Inspire, the Henna Foundation and Making Herstory.’

They think there’s an issue even if you don’t.

[6] ‘But attacking *that* with this level of press vigour would involve talking about people Like Us. Who clearly don’t do that sort of thing’.
Jimmy Tarbuck.
Stuart Hall.
Ken Roach.
Dave Lee Travis.
Rolf Harris.
One simply cannot open a newspaper, or switch on a telly program post-saville without hearing about sexual abuse by whitey – before that there was a lot of coverage because of abuse by catholic priests, white, catholic priests.

If you are saying street grooming is insignificant , and merits not attention (in the context described in the OP) just say so.

You have referred more than once to white middle class men abusing children – are you saying these rates are disproportionately high compared to other groups

No, I don’t think street grooming is a non-problem. I also think false accusations of rape are a problem. But given that they happen so rarely compared to actual rapes where the perpetrator goes free, I’d rather we focussed on the bigger problem.

The current operation launched to probe into famous people from the 70s *should have been launched in the fucking 70s* but it wasn’t. Cui bono? There should have been screaming headlines, police probes, imprisonments. There weren’t, because in this country white men have power.

To abuse power, you first have to possess it.

In Britain, where is most of the power? In the hands of white, Christian men. Do the math, guys.

Yes, I’m saying it’s disproportionately white men who abuse children in this country because: a) it’s disproportionately men who commit sexual abuse, b) abuse of children is nearly *always* done by a close friend or family member and c) in this country, during the time-span 1950 to the present, it is a simple matter of demographics that most men with the power and status necessary to successfully perpetrate child abuse were white and at least nominally Christian.

Remember Victoria Climbie? *Why* do you remember Victoria Climbie? Because the people who abused her were black. Literally thousands of children were beaten, raped, starved, abandoned, and otherwise abused in this country in the same year, but they and their abusers didn’t make the headlines.

Now ask yourself why they didn’t make the headlines.

What I am *also* saying, and this is where things get slightly more interesting, is that the era 1950 – 1990 was unusually bad in terms of endemic sexual abuse of children in the middle class. It’s anecdata: this is a class of statistic that’s very hard to fully capture, but the anecdata in question is quite broad.

I know a *terrifying* number of middle class white kids raised in that era who were sexually abused as children, for years, by adults who were never confronted by their crime let alone prosecuted for it. No dad wants to know that his little brother was raping his son for six years. No mum wants to talk to her 8-year old daughter about the fact that her own father, who was so sweet to her as a child, has been molesting the grand-daughter. No-one wants to hear about the raped alter-boys. No-one wants to hear that Jimmy Saville was a serial sex pest.

So people write it off, and ignore it, or punish the kid for ‘making stuff up’. And then someone like me has to try and clean up the psychological time-bomb 20 years later. It will get ignored unless there’s a hook to fire up the tabloids: the perpetrators were black radical Christians. The single father was on benefits. The priest turned out to be gay as well as a paedophile, and can thus be used as a stick to beat the LGBTQ community with. The celebrity is safely dead.

I have no dog in the fight about street-grooming at all. In so far as it actually happens, which is not particularly far by comparison, it’s a definite problem.

But the scope, scale, and devastation of that problem is so much smaller than that of the consipracy of silence about the abusiveness of England’s middle class towards their children that I really just don’t care all that much about it.

[10] ‘There should have been screaming headlines, police probes, imprisonments. There weren’t, because in this country white men have power’ – so how does that explain why there has not been even one successful conviction for FGM, and only two, or three prosecutions, unlike France, say, were convictions have been secured?

Yet according to one report it is estimated ‘as many as 80,000 women in the UK – more than a quarter of them under the age of 15 – are at risk of having all or part of their external genitals removed’.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/special-report-female-genital-mutilation–unreported-ignored-and-unpunished-8439824.html

Surely we can’t blame white middle class christians for that?
And are you suggesting that child abuse occurs at far lower rates in other countries providing the predominant skin colour is not white?

Shatterface at 8:

Sorry, didn’t see you there.

The various organisations you list are all, and quite rightly, much more concerned about the behaviour of the Muslim community than they are about the behaviour of BBC presenters. They see the behaviour of the Muslim community as reflecting on them and theirs. They quite rightly recognise this, very recent and so far very small-scale, street-grooming scandal as *their problem*. Fine.

It’s just not a big enough issue to make me care terribly much *by comparison* with the fact that no-one wants to talk about how incredibly badly the English middle class treated their children for most of the second half of the 20th century. That reflects badly on us and ours, and there’s a hell of a lot more of it and it’s been going on in many more places for much longer.

A&E charge nurse:

o.0 Good lord, how can you possibly have read that from what I said?

I haven’t mention other countries *once*.

The reason child abuse is a bigger problem among whites than non-whites, and Christians than non-Christians, is that *most people in this country are white and Christian*.

I am not comparing incidence *rates*, I’m talking about the *total scale* of each problem. Thought I’d been reasonably clear about that 🙂

Oh, yeah, and: your 80,000 women at risk of FGM. I’m sorry, how on earth do they relate to the street-grooming problem?

The comparison I’m making is about total scale of different problems nationwide. If you’re in fact saying that FGM across Britain is *more of a problem* than street-grooming (which according to the OP is a problem in Bradford, not nation-wide), then on those statistics I’d have to agree with you. Lets get Shatterface’s list of groups to march against FGM instead, or ideally as well!

[10] ‘Remember Victoria Climbie? *Why* do you remember Victoria Climbie? Because the people who abused her were black’ – do you really believe this?

This case attracted attention because of well documented official failures to recognise that an 8 year child old shipped off from another continent to live with unhinged relatives was being tortured and finally murdered despite repeated contact with social services and the NHS.

Needless to say some tried to label Laming as a racist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/oct/20/raceintheuk.uknews

[14] ‘Oh, yeah, and: your 80,000 women at risk of FGM. I’m sorry, how on earth do they relate to the street-grooming problem?’ – I’m not trying to compare it to street grooming, let me explain and explain my point.

You imply that sexual abuse was endemic in the 70s but was never given the attention it should have received because of power weilded by white middle class men – I was merely pointing out that there are far more extremes of abuse going on right now yet there has not been even one conviction.

If we can’t blame white middle class men for this apparent indifference then who do we blame?

Er, sorry, no.

You just compared ‘actual people who were abused’ with ‘people who may according to one study be *at risk* of abuse’. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things involves actual victims in very large numbers, not a somewhat arbitrarily calculated pool of ‘at risk’ people.

Do I really think that the newspapers love telling stories about evil immigrants killing babies? Yes, I do. Do I think they love telling stories about evil benefits recipients killing babies (P?) Yes, I do.

Do I think that when it’s a nice middle-class white family in suburbia with good jobs and kids who go to private schools, who are members of the golf club and go to Glyndebourne, that not only do the papers never hear about the abuse, neither does anyone else? Yes, I do, and I think that due to a number of years of bitter bloody experience.

Now, returning to your FGM thing:

“If we can’t blame white middle class men for this apparent indifference then who do we blame?”

Actually, you probably can blame middle-class white men for the *indifference*. You can certainly blame them for the epic indifference towards rape and sexual assault displayed by our criminal justice system, and I can’t see why apathy over FGM would be any different.

Middle-class white men run the newspapers, the TV channels, most of the blogs and the government. If there’s political apathy in Britain about an issue, you can bet real money it’s because most white men don’t give a shit.

It’s worth noting I *am* a middle-class, white man. Just like Shatterface’s list of groups, I care about the hideous hidden sins of the English middle class because *not* speaking out about them would make me culpable by contagion: these disgusting stories reflect on me and mine, and I don’t bloody like it.

@17

“It’s worth noting I *am* a middle-class, white man. Just like Shatterface’s list of groups, I care about the hideous hidden sins of the English middle class because *not* speaking out about them would make me culpable by contagion: these disgusting stories reflect on me and mine, and I don’t bloody like it.”

So your self disgust is projected into a blanket essentialist condemnation of a vague group of people labelled the White Middle Class. It’s really not all about you you know.

[17] ‘Actually, you probably can blame middle-class white men for the *indifference*’ – maybe, but not for the cutting, eh?

Anyway, my guess is that FGM, rather like the street grooming belongs to a category were racial sensitivities put questioners at risk of being labelled racist, as Laming found to his cost.

Yet we are all safe if we wish to label white middle class christians as nonces.

@ 10

Remember Victoria Climbie? *Why* do you remember Victoria Climbie? Because the people who abused her were black.

Yes that was an unusual and tragic case.

But I also cannot forget Stephen Lawrence…..

So a response, from some commentards, to a group that is trying to tackle problem X is to criticise them for not trying to tackle problem Y is it?

@Chris Naden #10:

Remember Victoria Climbie? *Why* do you remember Victoria Climbie? Because the people who abused her were black. Literally thousands of children were beaten, raped, starved, abandoned, and otherwise abused in this country in the same year, but they and their abusers didn’t make the headlines.

Presumably baby P and his abusers didn’t make the headlines, then:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/baby-p/6005916/Baby-P-Peters-killers-named-for-the-first-time-as-Tracey-Connelly-and-Steven-Barker.html

Oh. Maybe there’s another reason we remember Victoria Climbié; maybe it’s the same as baby P – because they were both apparently failed by social services? Or is that too simplistic? Is it necessary for there to be a racial dimension?

Robin: You’ll notice I do actually reference Baby P. The scandal-mongers need a hook; race / immigration isn’t the *only* one. Attacking benefits recipients is just as good a hook as attacking black people.

Have to agree with Ceiliog here. All this stuff about white men on this thread is sheer whataboutery.

We should be applauding the groups involved in trying to tackle this horrendous issue that is not only appalling for the young people being abused, but also has terrifying implications for race relations if it is not tackled.

Because this particular sexual abuse has an ethnically aggravating factor to it, in that men of a specific ethno-religous group have deliberately targeted girls of ethnic groups other than their own.

That has explosive potential. It needs to be neutralised asap.

Remember Victoria Climbie? *Why* do you remember Victoria Climbie? Because the people who abused her were black.

Remember Jamie Bulger? *Why* do you remember Jamie Bulger? Remember Millie Dowler? *Why* do you remember Millie Dowler? Remember the Soham murders? *Why* do you remember the Soham murders? Remember Madelaine McCann? *Why* do you remember Madelaine McCann? Remember Baby P? etc etc etc

Because stories involving the murder of children are generally given massive coverage in this country. Regardless of whether the suspects are black or white, working class or middle class.

Seems like a comendable enough initiative. Hopefully it will prevent the sexual abuse of many young girls at the hands of these gangs and end any possible excuse (though no doubt they’ll find some excuse) for politically motivated mobs turning up to enact pogroms and collective punishment against a hard-pressed minority community.

@Chris Naden #23:

Are you seriously suggesting that if Victoria Climbié had been white, the case would have been ignored? Seriously?

The reason child abuse is a bigger problem among whites than non-whites, and Christians than non-Christians, is that *most people in this country are white and Christian*.

You might as well argue that, since the majority of people in this country are (a) non-muslim and (b) not paedophiles that there are more non-Muslim non-paedophiles in this country than Muslim non-paedophiles.

Actually, you probably can blame middle-class white men for the *indifference*. You can certainly blame them for the epic indifference towards rape and sexual assault displayed by our criminal justice system, and I can’t see why apathy over FGM would be any different.

Do you want to compare the statistics of prosecutions for rape – by any ethnic group – against prosecutions for genital mutilation?

@Chris Naden #17:

Do I think that when it’s a nice middle-class white family in suburbia with good jobs and kids who go to private schools, who are members of the golf club and go to Glyndebourne, that not only do the papers never hear about the abuse, neither does anyone else? Yes, I do, and I think that due to a number of years of bitter bloody experience.

Two words – Madeleine McCann. There wasn’t even any abuse, yet the parents were accused of everything from negligence to murder.

The Islamic Society of Britain (ISB) and anti-fascist group Hope not hate (HNH) plan to launch ‘Community Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation’ (CAASE) in Bradford on 10th May.

Hope Not Hate? They are an anti-Fascist group, nothing to do with children.

Nick Lowles from Hope not Hate said:

We want to encourage all our partners to help us remove the veils of secrecy and control that allow abuse to flourish. We also need to ensure that the media, and far-right groups, do not promote an anti-Muslim agenda over so-called ‘grooming’ trials either. HOPE not hate will focus on busting myths that groups such as the EDL and BNP like to promote in their quest for hate and division.

Ahh, now it is all clear. They have another agenda that has nothing to do with helping children. It is about fighting the EDL. And how can they do that? Well they can write a bunch of press releases for the usual Islamist suspects and then claim it is evidence they are doing something about grooming. While, of course, no one is actually doing a damn thing.

Clever.

1. Chris Naden

More seriously; child sexual abuse in England is, in my experience, *overwhelmingly* perpetrated by middle class white men.

That is interesting but is it relevant? More people die in car crashes than from HIV. So should we stop funding HIV research?

Chris Naden

Er, I see no self-loathing here.

Yeah but that is the problem isn’t it?

A shockingly high percentage of the people I worked with in that context were white, middle-class and had been abused by family members

Which is interesting but how do you know if it was truly representative? How do you know that it wasn’t just where you lived?

it’s Them doing it to Our girls.

It is them doing it to girls in a particularly nasty and brutal way. Public spaces should be safe for girls. We ought to be trying to make them that way.

Sexual and physical abuse of children by white middle-class men is endemic across the country, and has been terrifyingly common for at minimum five decades, as the current scandals involving clerical and celebrity paedophilia in the 70s illustrate nicely.

Sorry but if Muslim child offenders are a tiny minority, clerical and celebrity child abusers are vanishingly small. You are simply, and hypocritically, having it both ways. If we should ignore one, we should ignore the other. How do you know child abuse is endemic across the country? Or has been common? The plural of ancedote is not data you know.

Even if every single one was a street-groomer, there are simply not enough Muslim men in Britain to make this a problem even a tenth as outrageous as the systemic abuse of their own children by the British middle class.

I love the way you go for the smear. The Middle Classes are no more sexually abusing their children than Muslims are. It is just as wrong to say they are as it is to say all Muslims abuse children.

But attacking *that* with this level of press vigour would involve talking about people Like Us. Who clearly don’t do that sort of thing.

Actually they clearly do not. A sex abuser is least likely to be white and middle class. Britain just has a lot of white and middle class people. But given the enormous effort we have put into finding people who are white, middle class and sex abusers, your comments are just utterly irrational. Self loathing is never pretty.

17. Chris Naden

Do I think that when it’s a nice middle-class white family in suburbia with good jobs and kids who go to private schools, who are members of the golf club and go to Glyndebourne, that not only do the papers never hear about the abuse, neither does anyone else? Yes, I do, and I think that due to a number of years of bitter bloody experience.

Actually such abuse is so rare that the newspapers would have a hard time finding enough to report. But when it does happen, of course they report it.

You can certainly blame them for the epic indifference towards rape and sexual assault displayed by our criminal justice system

You would have to show there is any such indifference. Which I do not think you could do. You need to believe it, but that does not make it true.

It’s worth noting I *am* a middle-class, white man.

As people keep point out, of course you are dear. Hence the recognition of your self loathing.

I care about the hideous hidden sins of the English middle class because *not* speaking out about them would make me culpable by contagion: these disgusting stories reflect on me and mine, and I don’t bloody like it.

So every single Muslim group that did not immediately condemn 7-7 and 9-11 in the strongest possible terms is, according to you, culpable by contagion?

Anyone hear Joseph Harker of the Guardian on Stephen Nolan’s BBC radio Five Live show last night?
The guy is an absolute twat. Look it up and listen to it on the I-player. He kept on going on about white people and Jimmy Saville etc, like he did in a recent column before this Shropshire story was heard of.

”It’s time to face up to the problem of sexual abuse in the white community”

He basicly refuses to acknowlege that Pakistan is different to England and that it has a different culture and the common attitudes there towards women …. which men who have grown up there and then come to Britain as adults will possibly have. He refuses to accept that and keeps going on about Jimmy saville.

Then I listen to the BBCs Owen Bennit Jones on Radio 4 describing what it’s like right now in Pakistan with the elections looming – and I realise how useless we’ve become in our discussing of cultural issues.
Also yesterday, I say what must be ”respectable” Muslim girls coming out if the Muslim school in Glouster, all together going home in Muslim girl groups only and wearing school uniform hijabs and the long gowns over trousers. Nothing at all like the young girls their age who were running about in the evening in Telford and Derby, hanging out in Kebab shops and taxi offices.
”Slutwalk” got it wrong obviously. It was the girl’s fault for being out at ten PM and not tucked up at home like good girls. Like in Pakistan too. If they were out roaming the streets in the evening, then that was the problem (so some Muslim callers into Nolan’s show said).

[35] just read Harkers article – could not find any stats measuring abuse rates proportionally in relation to the different populations within different ethnic communities in the UK.

Is Harker saying that skin colour is a critical variable, because if he is then he sounds like a bit of a racist – it would take a special sort of fool not to recognise that abuse is found in all societies?

Put another way in countries were there are fewer honkeys what are the typical patterns of abuse – according to one report by the United Nations ‘the issue is especially problematic in the North West Frontier Province region (of Pakistan) where the surveyed victims did not even realize that sexual abuse was a crime.’
http://www.thelamplighters.org/llblog01/child-sexual-abuse-in-pakistan-2/

Apparently Harker is ‘beginning to feel sorry for whites’ – I feel sorry, for anyone who clearly seems to know very little about child abuse other than what the MSM say about jim’ll fix-it.
International comparisons are hard to make because it is mainly western countries that try to gather data – needless to say Harker doesn’t mention this in his, err, article.

@1 What exactly is your experience ? Because every paper I’ve read on the subject shows that, all other thing being equal, the lower down the socio economic pecking order you are, the more likely you are to be either a victim or perpetrator (or both) of child abuse. Baby Ps “carers” were probably not regulars at Waitrose and were in their early 20s. Ian Huntley was in his 20s and was a school caretaker. The 70s celebrity child abuse set were all in their 30s/40s for the majority of their offending, the US case in the media recently was perpetrated by unemployed/menial occupation Hispanic men living in a very working class area.
It’s possible that middle class child abuse is underreported, but if thats true then by definition it’s an unknown quantity. So I’m not sure where this middle aged middle class stereotype comes from, unless it’s based on the fact that for a variety of reason sex offenders are often prosecuted many years after their offences, and are obviously therefore more likely to be older when arrested and probably a bit richer too.

“Nick Lowles from Hope not Hate said:

We want to encourage all our partners to help us remove the veils of secrecy and control that allow abuse to flourish. We also need to ensure that the media, and far-right groups, do not promote an anti-Muslim agenda over so-called ‘grooming’ trials either. HOPE not hate will focus on busting myths that groups such as the EDL and BNP like to promote in their quest for hate and division.”

Why “so called “grooming trials””?

How else would Lowles express it?

What myths?

Now the scale of the grooming and the terrible nature of the abuse is becoming clear those in serial denial for years are into damage limitation expediency.

Lowles’ couldn’t care less about the victims.

@ 6 I’ve just read what your experience is. Fair enough, but isn’t it a possibility that you see more middle class victims because the middle classes are far more likely to seek/have access to/be culturally orientated towards counselling than other social classes ? All forms of counselling are overwhelmingly practiced and received by the middle classes, therefore presenting counsellors with a distorted picture, where they understandably believe that because they see fewer poor/non-white victims there must therefore be fewer poor/non-white victims ?
A friend of mine was quite a big cheese in social services child protection and his experience was the opposite, that victims were overwhelmingly poor and often from migrant communities. I think that was partly based on the fact that his patch was a deprived part of London, perhaps if he’d covered Notting Hill he would have a different view ?

There is a woeful lack of awareness about the scale of the street grooming that has taken place over the last 15 years.

Some elements in the media have actively contributed to that ignorance.

For instance the Guardian has an online article about an alleged indecent assault committed 30 years ago by Jim Davidson but they have absolutely nothing to say about yesterday’s report on the conviction and jailing of another grooming gang

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-22379414

This is wilfully dishonest, it is politically correct spin. For god’s sake – which is the more serious?

A good start point for info is the Times reportage, though unfortunately it is behind the paywall

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article2863078.ece

Is Harker saying that skin colour is a critical variable, because if he is then he sounds like a bit of a racist – it would take a special sort of fool not to recognise that abuse is found in all societies?

There’s no ‘sounds like’ about it: Harker’s one of the most openly racist writers in Britain but since he has claimed only white people can be racist Guardian readers are too shit-scared to call him on it.

To be fair, I’ve been surprised at how LITTLE pogrom-type public disorder there has been against Muslims (or people who are just casually assumed to be Muslim). I would have expected an incendiary issue like this to have caused much more violence than it actually has.

@9

“Ken Roach”?

I think you’ve merged the actor’s name with his character’s name. Bill Roache plays Ken Barlow in Coronation Street. LOL.

I was in a small town in the west of Ireland about ten years ago and after school the town (Ennis in County Clare) filled up with kids coming out of school.
They were all doing the usual school teenager things like stuffing themselves with chips and drinks and carrying on the way they do – being a bit loud and boisterous. I noticed that some of the girls had shortened their school skirts and pulled up their white socks up over their knees to create a ”sexy schoogirl” kind of look.
Being their father’s age, I just noticed this and thought nothing of it. It was just innocent stuff, even if some people might have tut tutted slightly to themselves. Or their teachers, if they’d seen them, might have had something to say about it.
But it’s a totally safe environment because that’s what it’s like there in small town Ireland.

There were a group of about a half a dozen or so asylum seekers standing about in town that I saw. They tended to hang about by some park benches at the top of the high street. I noticed that they were very interested in the school girls. They were openly staring and passing comments and laughing. They looked like Afghanis, so this was a very different culture to what they were used too. Most of them were young too, but what ages really you can’t be sure. Some were older.

I wondered about these men and how suitable a small Irish town was for such people. Back then they were living in an asylum hostel there. How many more would come? Were they any danger to the people of the town?
Who could say? They came from a war ravaged country full of guns, were woman in many parts had to wear burkas just to go outside. And here now there was absolute freedom and all kinds of possibilities.

No doubt, if you go back to that town, these guys will have settled in somewhat and be the very guys who run the kebab shops and work as taxi drivers.
What do they think of the freedon of Irish girls to go drinking underage, and smoking and wearing ”sexy clothes” in public? Did their attitudes come to mirror those of the wider society and that it was mostly harmless and just a part of growing up? … and that it was entirely inappropriate to try to chat them up or anything like that if you were more than a few years older?
I really have no clue as it’s not something anyone tells you, so you can only guess.

@ Chris Naden,

“Even if every single Muslim male in the country was a child abuser, there would still be less of them than there are in the ‘white male Christian’ category of child abusers; there simply aren’t enough Muslim men in the country for anything like parity.”

Parity has nothing to do with total numbers and everything to do with ratios. There would still be fewer of them, yes, but there would not be ‘proportionately’ more white men involved in child abuse, there would be proportionately more Muslim men involved.

You don’t actually understand what ‘proportionate’ means, do you? It means in relation to total demographic numbers. A smaller number in real terms can be disproportionately large if it constitutes a larger percentage of the whole than one would expect from demographic breakdown.

For example, if 10% of the population commits 20% of a particular offence, then it that is a disproportionately large amount of offences compared to what one would otherwise expect. The fact that it is still only 20% of the total does not alter that. And if 35% of the population commits 22% of the offences, that is disproportionately low.

“I’m talking about spending several years as a volunteer counsellor.”

Good on you. Unfortunately you don’t appear to understand how basic statistical analysis work, so it might be better to learn about that subject before you talk about it.

Abuse is abuse, no matter what colour, race or religion. The problem in this country is that if a person accuses a Muslim or (as seen with the saville case) a celebrety, then the authorities run scared! They dare not take action as in the case of a celebrity, it would make front page news and consume the very little resources the authorities have. And in the case of a Muslim it would be perceived as being racist and subject to cries of ‘its them against us’… We need to treat a ubusers equally, irrespective of how rich, famous they may be and no matter what colour or religion they are!

After listening to this morning’s Nicky Campbell radio programe on BBC Five Live, I’ve come to the conclusion that discussing things like this is a waste of time.
Everybody just spins this like crazy. There were apologists and people in denial about what made this a specifically south Asian/Muslim issue … and they weren’t having any of it. Joseph Harker was still going on about Jimmy Savile, and another guy accused Ann Cryer of having ”an agenda”. Presumably an anti Muslim aganda.

Campbell himself got close to it when he started saying how dreadful things were in Pakistan, where women who were raped can end up in prison etc. But no one else seems to want to pick up that point and develop it.
It ends up being totally divisive to try to spin this story into bland PC bs, as the last caller (a Gerodie) was almost ranting trying to bring the topic back to the nature of the abusers and what so often was the common trends making this same patern repeat itself in different parts of the country. The fact that they have the attidudes towards women that is the norm in Pakistan.
That girls who go about drinking and hanging out in town centres of an evening are not to be respected and protected, but to be taken advantage of perhaps.
But in our culture, it’s seen as normal for teenagers to push at the barriers that adults put on them and to go off doing stuff that we might not strictly approve of – but know is a normal part of growing up. Underage drinking and hanging about like teanagers do. To men who grew up in Pakistan, this kind of behavior is beyond respectability, and it seems that that idea can be passed on to some of the younger people in that community too.

I’d like know what happens to these guys in prison. Do they all just revert to being pious muslims and all hang out together? Demanding the ‘halal’ seperate religious lifestyle. Or are they despised ”sex cases” in need of protection.

The state promotes adoption, but has not yet monitored the number of adoption breakdowns, and encourages care orders, but cannot cope with, afford or even trace the over 67,000 orphans, it has now created and parents at a cost of £ 3 billon per annum.

75% of english residential homes are privately owned- 5 made £ 30million profit last year. Yet the £200,000 per annum, paid per child, does not even provide a proper 24 hour service, last year the police spent £ 40 million searching for 10,000 children who had absconded from care , the Department of Education’s published the figure at 930, with 80 still missing.