This reminds me of something that happened to my sister in the US. She received a phone call saying that our father had been kidnapped and she was to perform sexual acts or they would kill him. She was told if she contacted the police they would kill him. She left the house in tears but would not say why. Our mother called the police, and my sister was stopped before she reached her destination. Of course, my father had not been kidnapped.
The point of my comment is that in the 30 years since then I have not heard one public comment on this technique or others used to entrap girls into human trafficking. Surely, knowledge of this sort of thing should be made common to protect girls. It appears that reluctance to publicly address this issue may be a common problem elsewhere.
> In 2001 Weir took a young girl who’d been raped to report the crime to the police. While in the police station her abuser contacted her to say he had her younger sister. The gang had already broken her brother’s legs and so the terrified girl dropped the complaint. ‘You can’t protect me,’ she said. How the abuser found out she was in the police station has never been explained. When Weir complained to the police, she was told to never do it again, she and a colleague told off ‘like naughty schoolgirls’.
>It gets more and more bleak. A girl in Telford tells how she was raped a thousand times. In this Midlands new town built in the optimistic post-war era, children were sold for sex in a house, where local men would visit and note their names on a piece of paper; what the documentary makers describe as a ‘paedophile honesty box’. The girls were frightened because of what happened to Lucy Lowe, a 15-year-old girl who had been burned to death with her mother, sister, and unborn child — murdered by an abuser. In Telford a group of teachers complained that ‘there was a problem in this authority with Pakistani youths’ abusing girls; a council worker accused them of being racist. One council worker failed to share reports because it was fearful it would ‘start a race riot’.
>And people still say to me today, “why did they actually do nothing”. And I can’t give you the absolute answer to that, all I can tell you is what they said at the time: “the children were consenting”
A phenomenon such as the one described in the link raises myriad fascinating questions in anthropology, ethics, history, government, and more. Those who’ve flagged it either believe that the HN community is not capable of profitably engaging with the subject, or seek to suppress discussion of topics that make them uncomfortable.
Why is this intellectually interesting? Because it shows us that things we assumed were true about the world are in fact false. Most of us probably think of the UK as a flawed but highly developed, humane, evolved, sophisticated exemplar of civilization. Yet, the rape of children at an industrial scale occurred recently, and is likely still taking place, in the heart of that civilization, and all its institutions, from Parliament to the BBC to the local police and social service agencies, did not care.
This is heart-breaking. So many young lives changed forever. I hope the right changes happen to stop this.
I wonder if us humans are getting worse, or if things have always been so gut-wrenching, and there is just more awareness of such things now due to journalism, social media, etc.
Any reading of history indicates that people have gotten less violent and callous to suffering over time.
But it's easy to global awareness of bad stuff to warp your perspective. It's the "things are better than ever before yet everyone things we're living in the worst time ever" phenomenon.
"Anything that gratifies ones intellectual curiosity." So clearly on-topic.
It's a flame-bait topic, no doubt, but the idea that this (progressive pressure leading to tolerance of girls being abused) isn't a topic for the intellectually curious is contentious to say the least.
Specifically, mainstream press and TV have not covered this until their hands were forced, so flaggers should probably clarify why they are doing so.
I do understand the distaste for flame-ish subjects, but that's ultimately down to the conduct of the commenters.
There won't be any outrage outwardly at least. Almost all the perpetrators in the grooming gangs are Pakistani/Bangladeshi Muslims, so to outrage would be Islamophobic.
The point of my comment is that in the 30 years since then I have not heard one public comment on this technique or others used to entrap girls into human trafficking. Surely, knowledge of this sort of thing should be made common to protect girls. It appears that reluctance to publicly address this issue may be a common problem elsewhere.