Good morning.

This is absolutely sickening. Once again, the authorities, this time ones that are supposed to protect children, did nothing.

The write from CNN:

1,400 cases of ‘appalling’ sexual exploitation revealed in UK report

(CNN) – Hundreds of children have been systematically raped, beaten and sex trafficked in a northern English town for more than 12 years. And it is still going on, a government commissioned report says.

The “appalling” revelations also expose cultural tensions and lack of communication between authorities and the town’s ethnic minorities that may have helped stop it.

Social counselors saw evidence of sexual exploitation early on, but turned a blind eye, according to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham.

The city’s government recently made the inquiry’s report available on its website.

And so the abuses amassed, which included gang rape and death threats at gunpoint.

At least 1,400 cases of abuse went on between 1997 and 2013 — a conservative estimate, the report says. This year, specialist investigators are handling 51 cases. Other teams are looking at additional cases.

Torturous sexual abuse

The exploitation has reached a level tantamount to torture, according to the report.

“There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,” the report says.

Some victims were not even in their teens.

“Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators,” the inquiry says.

The report accuses politicians, social services and police of “blatant” failure to stop them, citing an inability to traverse cultural barriers with Rotherham’s small Muslim community.

Fear of label of racism

The perpetrators often worked together and were mostly of Pakistani heritage; the victims were mostly white girls, the report says.

An earlier report said that “Asian” gangs originally were exploiting women and girls “for their personal gratification” but later turned to making money with it, passing girls around.

Social counselors often took a hands-off approach to the cases for fear of being branded as racists or stoking a right-wing backlash in the city.

“Several (counselors) 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. To some extent this concern was valid, with the apparent targeting of the town by groups such as the English Defence League,” the report says.

Though known victims were mostly white, the report delved into an underbelly of alleged systematic abuse by select groups of Asian men against women in their own ethnic groups.

These often go unreported, because the victims fear vengeance or public shame in their communities, the report says. Perpetrators may be using that fear to blackmail these victims into continued sexual servitude.

Community left out

Cultural differences also hindered effective involvement with concerned members of Rotherham’s Pakistani community.

Authorities turned to male community leaders and imams and greatly left out women. Many ethnic Pakistani women told the Inquiry that it made them feel disenfranchised and prevented people from speaking openly about abuse.

Members of both genders said they missed any direct engagement on the topic by officials. “This needed to be addressed urgently, rather than ‘tiptoeing’ around the issue,” the report said.

Under the rug

Some social counselors also hoped cases they were seeing were one-off occurrences and hoped they would go away. That may have been bolstered by the fact that the vast majority of child sexual abusers in Britain are white males.

Research reports on the problem began appearing a few years ago, but they had little effect.

“The first of these reports was effectively suppressed, because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained,” the report said.

Social services managers downplayed the problem. Officials thought reports were exaggerated. Law enforcement gave it little importance.

“Police gave no priority to (child sexual abuse), regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime,” the report said.

Improvement but frustration

By the time awareness of the problem increased by 2009, thinly staffed social service workers were overwhelmed by the number of potential victims.

There has been a marked improvement in training police to recognize sexual abuse and work together with social services, the inquiry says.

“But the team struggles to keep pace with the demands of its workload,” according to the report. And finances are running low.

And still, few cases even make it to court.

Additionally, I found this on youtube:

And this write from the NY Times tells Lucy’s story in more depth:

Years of Rape and ‘Utter Contempt’ in Britain

Life in an English Town Where Abuse of Young Girls Flourished

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.

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.

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.”

*****

Readers: And once again, young girls who are the victims are interrogated and treated as if it was their fault.

Ladies, it is really up to us to save our own lives because no one else is going to be more invested in our lives than us. This happened in the U.K., but as we all know, this could easily happen in the U.S. too.

It’s obvious that women and girls don’t matter much to men or we wouldn’t have to endure what we encounter on a daily basis around the world. Men seem to forget that they come from a woman’s womb…if it weren’t for women they wouldn’t be here. Yet, they continue to abuse and viciously rape and torture females treating us as if our lives are worth nothing.

Until there are strict laws that are put into place, to protect young girls and women, this will continue to happen. Until authorities stop blaming the victim and perpetrators pay a heavy price…so heavy that they will think twice, and perhaps if only for the reason of self-preservation,  before committing a heinous crime against women, this will continue to happen.

How can we do this? It all starts by women supporting women and making sure that our voices are heard at the polls, by voting in politicians who truly care about the overall well-being of women and support women. We haven’t gotten what we need from men and we’re not going to.

It’s up to us. I know I keep saying this, but how much more evidence do we need…how much atrocity do we have to experience…how much more pain and suffering do women and girls need to endure before we do something to change it?

The time is now.

And the time is in November when our voices can make a difference by the people we vote in to be in charge, and to make the changes that we need for our own self-preservation.

Are you with me? Anything to say? Blog me.  

Peace & love…we could certainly use more of both. 

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

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