Somebody is out to get me.
Commenting on -
//I listened to this at the time and thought the attitude of the interviewer was one of the reasons those 'northern cities' got into so much trouble in the first place //
Hypo writes -
//Public Office terms and conditions of employment. Thou shalt not say anything which may be *perceived to be* racist, or prejudiced against an identifiable minority group. Uttering certain word sequences *will* cause you to lose your job, should they be heard by someone who despises you or covets your job.
It's really kind of twisted when self-preservation is the driving force behind PC utterances, instead of a genuinely good disposition to all of your fellow human beings.>>
A cynical observation, Hypo., but a true one. No need for a deliberate cover-up , is there? - everybody concerned in the protection of children, police included, knows what NOT to say and what action NOT to take. There is a further class of people, of course, who believe (quite reasonably) that people are "much the same everywhere", but derive a false conclusion from this premise - that moral attitudes and values are distributed equally among all cultures. The moral defect in the one group and the intellectual defect in the other have made both complicit in and enablers of child prostitution.
The scale of the abuse and the cover-up is still largely unrecognised. The title of the OP says it all: Rotherham has been portrayed as an "exceptional" case (maybe with lesser abuse in a few other "northern towns". Actually the abuse has been known about for more than two decades. The first known cases are in the late 1980s. Many of the victims then were Sikh girls. The few "northern towns" narrative is more spin; the phenomenon of grooming gangs has existed in all towns and cities with large Muslim populations, including London. Remember the Rotherham Muslim community was only %3, far less than Bradford and Leicester. Nor were the perpetrators always "Asian"; in Bristol they were "African" of the Somali variety.
A few examples of Britain's children being betrayed by those who are charged with their protection and other special interests:
Anne Cryer MP for Keighley (near Bradford) raised the issue of "Asian" grooming gangs as long ago as 2002 and was vilified by "community leaders" for having (wait for it - I'm quoting the words of a fellow high-flying Labour MP) "failed the local minority ethnic community". She actually presented a list of 35 names and addresses of known groomers to local imams and mosque committees and was told in all cases to "p*** off!".
In 2004 a Channel 4 documentary on Muslim grooming gangs in the Bradford area was not shown at the request of the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire.
In 2008 a film was made called "My Dangerous Lover Boy". It was a remake of a Dutch film where the grooming phenomenon was well-known, although the perpetrators were "African" (Moroccan) as well as "Asian" (Turkish). It was shown in the Netherlands to young school girls in order to warn them of the methods of the groomers. (Those of you who admit to watching EastEnders will remember a story line about grooming a few years ago, athough the groomer and his fellow rapists were exclusively white British of course,) This film was given to the UK Human Trafficking Centre, but was never shown to the girls it was intended to protect.
As late as 2010 two of my favourite human rights groups Unite Against Fascism and the Muslim Council of Britain were both claiming that the Muslim grooming gang was a "racist myth". This claim has apparently been withdrawn from the MCB website, but I dare say Mikey will roll up shortly to accuse me of perpetuating it.
And a final "you couldn't make it up" story in the words of that esteemed organ The Daily Mail:
"Deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz, who failed to speak out about sexual abuse by British Pakistani gangs, took voluntary redundancy from her £99,333-a-year post on April 30,