how the unthinkable is normal by 1kiki

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how the unthinkable is normal

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 17:19
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Thursday, September 4, 2014 1:04 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.

But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost. “All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges.

Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way.

... the report also outlined how those victims and parents who did ask for help were mostly let down by the police and social services, despite a great deal of detail known to them for more than a decade, including, in some cases, the names of possible offenders and their license plate numbers.

“Nobody can pretend they didn’t know,” Ms. Jay said in an interview.

Increasingly, the girls were shared not just among groups of men locally, but sold, or bartered for drugs or guns. They were driven to cities like Sheffield, Manchester and London, where groups of men raped them, sometimes overnight.

When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up, Ms. Jay said. Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time.

... Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.” In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12. “These girls were often treated with utter contempt,” Ms. Jay said.

Life in an English Town Where Abuse of Young Girls Flourished

By KATRIN BENNHOLDSEPT. 1, 2014

ROTHERHAM, England — It started on the bumper cars in the children’s arcade of the local shopping mall. Lucy was 12, and a group of teenage boys, handsome and flirtatious, treated her and her friends to free rides and ice cream after school.

Over time, older men were introduced to the girls, while the boys faded away. Soon they were getting rides in real cars, and were offered vodka and marijuana. One man in particular, a Pakistani twice her age and the leader of the group, flattered her and bought her drinks and even a mobile phone. Lucy liked him.

The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.

She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.

At night, she would come home and hide her soiled clothes at the back of her closet. When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.

But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.

“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed.

Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way. One girl told investigators that gang rape was part of growing up in her neighborhood.

Between 1997 and 2013, despite numerous reports of sexual abuse, only one case, involving three teenage girls, was prosecuted, and five men were sent to jail, according to an official report into the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham published last week.

Even now, the official reaction has been dominated by partisan finger-pointing and politics. The leader of the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has resigned, and the police chief is under pressure to follow suit. But criminal investigations continue, and more than a dozen victims are suing the police and the Council for negligence.

The scale and brutality of the abuse in Rotherham have shocked a country already shaken by a series of child abuse scandals involving celebrities, public officials, clerics and teachers at expensive private schools. The Rotherham report suggests that it continues unchecked among the most vulnerable in British society.

It has highlighted another uncomfortable dimension of the issue, that of race relations in Britain. The victims identified in the report were all white, while the perpetrators were mostly of Pakistani heritage, many of them working in nighttime industries like taxi driving and takeout restaurants. The same was true in recent prosecutions in Oxford, in southern England, and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale, where nine men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin were given long prison sentences in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls. Investigators in Scotland have reportedly uncovered a similar pattern of abuse.

Sexual abuse of children takes many forms, and the majority of convicted abusers in Britain are white. But as Nazir Afzal, the chief crown prosecutor in charge of sexual violence and himself of Pakistani heritage, put it, “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”

The grooming tends to follow a similar pattern, according to Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work who was commissioned by the Rotherham Council to carry out an independent investigation following a series of reports in The Times of London: a period of courting with young men in public places like town centers, bus stations or shopping malls; the gradual introduction of cigarettes, alcohol and sometimes harder drugs; a sexual relationship with one man, who becomes the “boyfriend” and later demands that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends; then the threats, blackmail and violence that have deterred so many girls from coming forward.

But the report also outlined how those victims and parents who did ask for help were mostly let down by the police and social services, despite a great deal of detail known to them for more than a decade, including, in some cases, the names of possible offenders and their license plate numbers.

“Nobody can pretend they didn’t know,” Ms. Jay said in an interview.

Unimpeded, the abuse mushroomed. Over time, investigators found, it evolved from personal gratification to a business opportunity for the men.

Increasingly, the girls were shared not just among groups of men locally, but sold, or bartered for drugs or guns. They were driven to cities like Sheffield, Manchester and London, where groups of men raped them, sometimes overnight.

When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up, Ms. Jay said. Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time.

Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”

In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12.

“These girls were often treated with utter contempt,” Ms. Jay said.

Lucy, now 25 but too scared to give her last name because, she said, the men who brutalized her still live nearby, knows about contempt. During an interview at her home outside Rotherham, she recalled being questioned about her abuse by police officers who repeatedly referred to the main rapist as her “boyfriend.”

The first time she was raped, there were nine men, she said, one on top of her, another to pin her down and force himself into her mouth. Two others restrained a friend of hers, holding open her eyelids to make her watch. The rest of the men, all in their 20s, stood over her, cheering and jeering, and blinding her with the flash of their cameras.

It was November 2002, and Lucy was 13.

When she went to bed that night, she found a text message from the man who had groomed her for months: “Did you get home all right?”

She hesitated, then texted back: “Yes, I’m fine.”

At that moment, she said, rape became normality. “I thought, ‘This must be my fault, I must have given them a signal,’ ” she said.

Unlike other victims, Lucy came from a stable family. Her parents owned a convenience store and post office. They lived in a middle-class neighborhood. “I had been brought up in a nice world,” she said. “I thought rapists were people hiding in bushes, and pedophiles were people who drive white vans and park outside schools.”

After that first rape, she said, she began to think she had overreacted, and told her friend that she had been upset because she had lost her virginity. After school, they went back to the town center. The leader of the group took her to McDonald’s and rolled her a marijuana cigarette, she said. For a week, it was as if nothing had happened.

Then he raped her again, and soon the rules changed. The girls were to speak only when spoken to. They had to sit quietly in town and wait. Taxis would come by and pick them up. They were raped by different men in different places, mostly outdoors.

There seemed to be no way out. “They threatened to gang-rape my mother, to kill my brother and to firebomb my house,” Lucy said.

Once, she said, when they thought she might go to the police, a man with gold teeth whom she had never seen before dragged her into his car, a dark-green Honda with left-side drive, and put a gun to her head: “On the count of three you’re dead,” she said he told her. He pulled the trigger on three, but nothing happened. “Keep your mouth shut,” he said. “Next time there will be a bullet inside.”

Eventually, Lucy’s parents sold their business and moved to Spain for 18 months. “It became quite clear that leaving the country was the only way we could save Lucy,” said her mother, who participated in parts of the interview.

Lucy experienced years of depression and anorexia, her mother said. She now works as a consultant on child sexual exploitation issues for police departments and charities.

“They say it’s vulnerable girls these people are after,” her mother said. “Well, of course they’re vulnerable. They’re innocent. They’re children.”

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Thursday, September 4, 2014 8:54 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

The police in England are not ignoring just this type of crime.

Quote:
Victims of crime are being "encouraged" to investigate offences themselves, an inspection of police forces in England and Wales has found.

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said criminal damage and car crime were "on the verge of being decriminalised" because forces had "almost given up".

In some cases victims were asked to check for CCTV or fingerprints.

The Association of Chief Police Officers said austerity meant forces had to set priorities.

'Material concern'

The review also found that police community support officers were being used as "detectives" in some forces.

The inspector who led the review, Roger Baker, said: "It's more a mindset, that we no longer deal with these things. And effectively what's happened is a number of crimes are on the verge of being decriminalised."

He added: "So it's not the fault of the individual staff; it's a mindset thing that's crept in to policing to say 'We've almost given up'."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29053978

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:10 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

As long as they're doing it to each other, why get involved ?

Seems to be the over all mindset of cops, everywhere.

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Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:17 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Who's the 'they'?

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

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Thursday, September 4, 2014 6:52 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

This is such a shocking story.

Awful.

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Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:26 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

It is, isn't it?

It seem to me the question to ask is 'how did this happen'? How could so many children of a community be preyed upon by a group that didn't even bother to hide, for so long, while the police looked the other way?

I think it comes down to political powerlessness, like the people of Ferguson.

Assuming each group has at heart the motivation of the greatest reward for the least cost, the police would most likely be looking for less work at the same amount of pay. Who has the power to decide if they keep the doing their job? Not the community. The people with structural control over the levers of effort and reward are the politicians.

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Friday, September 5, 2014 8:40 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Who's the 'they'?

Pakistani immigrants , inner city blacks in Chicago , etc...

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Friday, September 5, 2014 8:52 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Who's the 'they'?

Pakistani immigrants , inner city blacks in Chicago , etc...

www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/old-contempt-rotherham
. . . because most of the perpetrators were Pakistani and most of the victims were white, local officials were reluctant to proceed, worried about inflaming ethnic tensions. Last week, the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, denounced what she called “an institutionalized political correctness” at work in this case. Though this might sound like a rhetorical flourish, there seems to be some truth to this claim. Rotherham is an economically stressed city of two hundred and fifty-eight thousand people, with an ethnic minority population of about eight per cent. The Labour Party has long controlled the town council, but, in recent years, the Party has been joined by a few members of the populist right-wing faction U.K.I.P. When investigating individual cases, the Rotherham report found no evidence that ethnic consideration had determined outcomes for children. But, when it came to setting policy, a certain skittishness seems to have played a role. According to the report, “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.” Perhaps that, too, is a concern that deserves some sympathy—though because its immediate result was a failure to rescue children from brutal circumstances, the sympathy only goes so far.

What appears to have been at work is a problematic multiculturalism to which European countries have subscribed too easily. It’s the kind of multiculturalism that is really a form of separatism: you stay in your enclave and we’ll stay in ours; it’s the kind that David Cameron has faulted for failing to offer a vision of a more inclusive British society for young Muslims, and for creating a niche in which extremist ideology can grow.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, September 5, 2014 10:53 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

The reason I asked rappy is because you specifically said As long as they're doing it TO EACH OTHER, why get involved ?. And you further elaborated Pakistani immigrants , inner city blacks in Chicago , etc....

But in this case the perpetrators were Pakistani, older and male, the victims WHITE, younger and female. And the police force primarily WHITE, older and male. You got a major chunk of the story wrong. It doesn't break down by 'race'.

http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cs
e_in_rotherham

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/old-contempt-rotherham

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/world/europe/reckoning-starts-in-bri
tain-on-abuse-of-girls.html

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Friday, September 5, 2014 11:24 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Rap seems to be saying that so longer as girls of ethnicity other than anglo are being abused by men of ethnicity other than anglo, then there should be no action taken.

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Saturday, September 6, 2014 2:15 AM

FREMDFIRMA

What makes it all especially galling is just how COMMON this is, on both sides of the pond and regardless of gender/sexuality.

Boystown, Larry King, Jerry Sandusky, Marc Dutroux, it's a long damn list and it never gets no shorter.

Even worse is the sheer amount of complicit blind eyes required for such to happen, cause everyone seems to have this attitude that so long as it's not THEIR kid, fuck it - till one day it IS their kid, and suddenly they care.

And you can forget addressing this through the system cause by the time it becomes that sort of problem the local cops and courts are at the very least complicit if not outright involved themselves.

Generally (and this seems to be an exception for once, thankfully) one could expect no support from the media neither, despite mounds and mounds of evidence, the instant you bring up this issue you're generally dismissed out of hand on the spot because it's all "just an urban legend" and a "conspiracy theory" and "does not exist", don't you know.
Believe me, I went through a LOT of that shit over the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete being used as a recycling bin by Catholic authorities to hide abusive priests till the heat died down, at which point they'd then be inflicted upon another unsuspecting parish...
Nobody denies it NOW, but getting anyone to even listen to you THEN ?
*snort*

One reason I am well aware of it is cause this kind of thing was VI's bread and butter for a couple years back in the mid-80's to early-90's.
See, after failure to address the matter via more polite means sometimes prominent members of a community with this sort of problem resorted to hiring their own thugs, which makes sense when your legal and law enforcement systems are in the hands of the other side, and more interested in keeping a lid on it than addressing the problem.
Generally that was a contingency plus loot type of deal, a flat fee plus whatever we could get our grubby little hands on along the way, which is how we financed that escalating campaign against the hellcamps mind you.

Not sure if hiring your own goons is as viable an option these days as it was back then, but seriously, sometimes you NEED a Villain.

Also, regarding Pakistani men born/raised in that culture - there does seem to be some serious psychological and cultural barriers to getting "female=people" across to them.
Not to say it ain't possible, but certainly very difficult and I've had to fire a couple of otherwise promising personnel because they just couldn't grasp the concept.

Anyways, I could hope the system shreds these bastards, but generally it's more token prosecutions and rug-sweeping and nothing that solves the damn problem.
Were I one of the parents in all this I'd see about paying off some soccer (or as y'all call it, football) hooligans, while plying on their sympathy and hatred of abusers to reduce the price....

-Frem

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Saturday, September 6, 2014 3:17 AM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

If your cultural values are entrenched with gender inequity, then men are going to treat women badly. That is the very nature of inequality, one group of people is subject to another. So next time someone here screams 'feminazi' because women dare to get strident about inequality, have a think about why it's so important to fight for this stuff.

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Saturday, September 6, 2014 7:36 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Rap seems to be saying that so longer as girls of ethnicity other than anglo are being abused by men of ethnicity other than anglo, then there should be no action taken.

No, Rap seems to be saying that , thanks to such things as political correctness and multiculturalism, society seems to look the other way when THE UNTHINKABLE IS NORMAL. Like when immigrants do unspeakable things, or when minorities shoot each other at a true epidemic rate, and nothing gets done.

Love how some simpletons look for the tiniest thread to pull, and go after anyone they FEEL is the enemy, while ignoring the actual issue.

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Saturday, September 6, 2014 9:29 AM

KPO

Sometimes you own the libs. Sometimes, the libs own you.

I really hope heads roll for this. 'Multiculturalism' is no kind of excuse for the police not to do their job - especially concerning allegations as serious as these.

It's not personal. It's just war.

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Monday, September 15, 2014 7:00 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Rap seems to be saying that so longer as girls of ethnicity other than anglo are being abused by men of ethnicity other than anglo, then there should be no action taken.

No, Rap seems to be saying that , thanks to such things as political correctness and multiculturalism, society seems to look the other way when THE UNTHINKABLE IS NORMAL. Like when immigrants do unspeakable things, or when minorities shoot each other at a true epidemic rate, and nothing gets done.

Love how some simpletons look for the tiniest thread to pull, and go after anyone they FEEL is the enemy, while ignoring the actual issue.

Similar happenings among the Hmong, like here in Wisconsin, particularly Madison. The accepted courting ritual is 1. Kidnap your intended wife, between the ages of 9-14 is best, 2. rape her immediately, 3. she is your wife. Libtards keep saying this is not kidnapping and/or rape, us reasonable folk and other conservatives are just being culturally insensitive.

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Tuesday, September 16, 2014 5:19 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

JSF: ... Libtards keep saying this is not kidnapping and/or rape ...

I'm sure you can find many. many quotes to back up your claims since they "keep" saying it. Or how about just one?

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