One of the major problems of today’s 24 hour news cycle and social media knee-jerk ‘citizen journalism’ is the assumption that any problem is an essentially modern invention and that sex itself was invented last week. Alas, nothing is new under the sun, as any biblical scholar will tell you. Women have been sacrificed to the broader narrative for at least 4,000 years now.
We’ve known there was a problem of ‘grooming’ (by which we mean preparation to rape) young girls in English inner cities since the time of Charles Dickens. Indeed, the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act was primarily intended to address the problem, raising the age of consent to 13; the legislation has a poor reputation today, since it also specifically criminalised consensual homosexual acts between adults.
Later, when the infamous Eliza Armstrong Case was brought in 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette said:
“All those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who would prefer to live in a fool’s paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are passed in the London inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days”. One presumes the same lad’s writing the Daily Mail leader to this day.
So, we always knew it was a problem, and just as they don’t happen my magic overnight, problems like this don’t just go away, now matter how regularly you tell a victim it’s her own fault. The politically divisive issue today is that the most recent perpetration of these offences appears, on the tiny amount of evidence motivated actors are prepared to research and publicise on social media, to be concentrated disproportionately in the south Asian Muslim communities of cities across the country.
As so often before, victims of heinous, disgusting crimes are instantly ignored in the maelstrom of the culture war. Bonus points if they’re women.
It’s (to our credit, I suppose) difficult to think of the crimes themselves, and it’s far easier to consider them as statistical collateral damage in the intractable war between embattled multiculturalism and a newly invigorated free-speech core. It’s fucking dull thinking, and it allows us to ignore the fact that, when there are few consequences, groups of men acting in concert are often just gross.
There is a broader cultural root to this whole mess, of course, and it comes back, at least in some dimension, to our society’s historic and ongoing fundamental imbalances and ignorances on the rights and equality of women and girls. On some level, the public policy debate commodifies the girl and ignores the consequences of any offence on her. We really seem to hate women on a deep, gross level.
Categorizing the problem as a “Muslim” problem is a mistake and an intellectual misstep, although it absolutely is a problem and it certainly seems to be a concentrated issue. This is a ‘men’ and ‘closed communities’ problem above all. Many will comment, not without some evidence, that these are disproportionately Pakistani community problems, but it doesn’t suit their agenda to note that child rape is a racially diverse enterprise. People who don’t like Per Capita analyses will just have to accept that joint enterprise rape is not monocultural; people who rely on Per Capita analyses will have to accept that concentration of offences is often correlated with lower levels of crime detection. Smugness of analysis in the dark is a curse of X as the public square.
The best disinfectant is sunlight, of course. No community wants to be known for these filthy abuses of children, and interventions now to understand why policing policy appears to have been – well, how shall we put this – a total clusterfuck. An inquiry is in everybody’s long term interests. Starmer’s all about fixing things, isn’t he?
Starmer is resisting an inquiry. This is unwise, because that centre can’t hold. He will have to agree to one in the end, and it will cause serious problems for race relations if it’s handled as badly as he handles mild criticism. His continued failure to act decisively now is a legacy-defining error. He could simply establish a robust inquiry and let it get on with the terrible job of uncovering and recommending solutions to these horrific crimes while he gets on with the job of planning his government’s next five relaunches.
Photo nicked from Sky News.
