RUTHFULLY YOURS

Depressing revelations about the sexual abuse of teens and young women in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England continue to rear their ugly head. Just last week the Freedom Center’s own Robert Spencer wrote about reports that the “sexual exploitation of vulnerable children has become the social norm in some parts of Greater Manchester.” Now the Daily Mail reports that dozens of child sex offenders are still at large there because the police aren’t bothering to arrest them.

In early 2012 nine “Asian” men (the Euro-media’s familiar euphemism for “Muslim”), ages 22 to 59, were convicted of rape and sex trafficking and jailed for a total of 77 years. They had “groomed” vulnerable white girls as young as 13, passed them around the group for sex, and kept the victims quiet with alcohol, food and small sums of money. Even more disgusting was the later revelation that the girls were victims of the grooming gang longer than necessary because police and social workers who were aware of the abuse turned a blind eye to it, rather than clamp down on the mostly Pakistani gang and be accused of racism.

Last Wednesday, Greater Manchester’s Police and Crime Commissioner put forward a report listing a whopping 13,000 cases of child sex abuse in the last six years, of which only 1,078 offenders were convicted. The Commissioner promised to review the unsolved cases of sex abuse allegations, but whistleblower Sara Rowbotham isn’t optimistic that further justice will be served.

According to Rowbotham, a social worker with more than 13 years experience who was responsible for gathering the main evidence in the 2012 Rochdale investigation, the police have put a “cap” on the number of child sex offenders they would arrest for raping and abusing young females. She said that during the 2012 case, police officials became “obsessed” with convicting just nine of the perpetrators, while “limited resources and manpower” resulted in the police allowing many more sex offenders to remain on the loose:

It’s very shocking, but there are dozens of child sex offenders still on the streets because they put a cap on the number of people they would arrest. In the end this was just a tiny proportion of the number of offenders raping and abusing children and they were allowed to escape. But not only did they cap the number of offenders but they also put a ceiling on the number of victims they would interview and proceed with.

She said that even today the police weren’t doing enough:

It’s still going on. The same perpetrators are still out there because police put a ceiling on the number of arrests. The actual number of suspects is huge but the number of victims is equally large. They are still having to deal with the trauma of that on a day-to-day basis knowing no one has ever been brought to justice for abusing them.

Rowbotham, let go from her job back in February, said she was frustrated that no one has been held to account for the police’s and social workers’ failings. She was also disappointed with the results of a report led by Member of Parliament Ann Coffey. “The victims deserve their evidence to be taken seriously,” she said. “I referred dozens of cases to the police that I know were never acted upon.”

But Coffey said the child sex abuse cases in Rochdale and other Manchester areas were a “deafening wake-up call.” She has proposed measures aimed at improving arrest and conviction rates of child sex offenders in Greater Manchester (including a review of cases whose investigations have stalled), new initiatives led by children themselves, and more training for public sector workers to recognize the “grooming” aspect of sex trafficking.

As for Rowbotham’s charge of police apathy, Ian Hanson, chairman of the Greater Manchester Police Federation, said,

It is grossly unfair that both the organization and our police officer members collectively are singled out and blamed by some for what is a failure of the whole system. We expect officers to build relationships with victims in the most difficult circumstances imaginable in a fraction of the time where often the education and social care system has failed to do so.

Detective Superintendent Jonathan Chadwick said that “Operation Doublet,” the sex-trafficking investigation launched in the wake of the Rochdale convictions, remains ongoing, with “a large number of staff being assigned to building relationships and trust with the victims and, wherever possible, dealing with those responsible through the criminal justice system.”

The tragedy is that all of these efforts are shaping up to be too little, too late. This trafficking became widespread in the first place because Manchester authorities were bound so tightly in the straitjacket of political correctness that, rather than face the stigma of charges of racism and so-called “Islamophobia,” they allowed girls and young women to be horribly abused. Had the perpetrators been white Englishmen, justice presumably would have been swifter. As Robert Spencer has pointed out, this kind of sexual exploitation may not be limited to Muslim culture, but “only in Islamic law does it carry anything approaching divine sanction.” [For chapter and verse of that sanction, read Robert’s piece here at Jihadwatch.]

Over recent decades, Islamic supremacists and their progressive sympathizers (and not only in England, but throughout the West) have so effectively demonized anyone who dares raise concerns about Islam, that even today, the Manchester authorities remain more concerned about suppressing the full extent of their cowardly failure than eradicating a Muslim sex trafficking gang. As tragic as this is for the victims, it’s also indicative of a larger, cultural tragedy. A host culture that cannot muster the will and self-confidence to stand up to a subculture hostile to the host’s values is doomed.

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