NY Times
A report released on Tuesday on accusations of widespread sexual abuse
in the northern England city of Rotherham found that about 1,400 minors
— some as young as 11 years old — were beaten, raped and trafficked
from 1997 to 2013 as the local authorities ignored a series of red
flags.
Some children were doused in gasoline and threatened with being set on fire if they reported their abusers, the report
said, and others were forced to watch rapes and threatened with the
same fate. In more than a third of the cases, the victims appear to have
been known to child protection agencies, but the police and local
government officials failed to act. [...]
The vast majority of perpetrators have been identified as South Asian
and most victims were young white girls, adding to the complexity of the
case. Some officials appeared to believe that social workers pointing
to a pattern of sexual exploitation were exaggerating, while others
reportedly worried about being accused of racism if they spoke out. The
report accused officials of ignoring “a politically inconvenient truth”
in turning a blind eye to men of Pakistani heritage grooming vulnerable
white girls for sex.[...]
The report described the failures of the political and police leadership
as blatant. Even as social workers reported that the sexual
exploitation of children was becoming a serious problem in Rotherham,
senior managers in the local authority and South Yorkshire police
ignored them. When victims came forward, Ms. Jay said, the police often
regarded them “with contempt.”[...]
Children are the weakest members of any society. In Rotherham a possible backlash involving racism was seemingly the reason this medieval-style mass abuse took place. In Vienna, Austria, the Jewish Community appears to be operating along similar lines. There, the fate of two innocent little Jewish boys is being ignored by the silence of the community's leaders - both secular and religious. Nobody is "kicking up a stink" about the way the father, a loyal member of this community, is subjecting his sons to his example of hatred, vengeance and pure malice. Silence reigns. What is worse than a sin of commission but one of omission?
ReplyDeleteThe Vienna Jewish Community is extremely concerned about the anti-semitism still prevalent in Austria nearly 70 years after the Holocaust. Yet the community itself seems to a watcher from abroad to be sadly practising a not unfamiliar form of this - Jew vs Jew. In 2014 in Vienna a mother and her children have been ostracised and the father supported by, for instance, his being allowed to daven in one of the various Vienna shuls. His behaviour has not been criticised and his children cannot speak normally at 5.
This could be called Rotherham on a mini-scale. The damage that is being done in Vienna presumably involves numerous people and merely 2 victims. But the effects of abuse remain forever, whether 2 or 1400 are the sufferers.
I think Rotherham is roughly an Ashkelon-sized city.
ReplyDeleteFrom the inquiry report download page (http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham): "Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council: Where Everyone Matters".
Sheffield Telegraph, 2014/8/26 (http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/news/regional/no-discipline-possible-over-abuse-1-6805874): "No council employees will face disciplinary action in a South Yorkshire town where 1,400 children suffered sexual exploitation in a 16-year period, the local authority's chief executive has said."
Sp!ked, 2014/8/27 (http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/what-rotherham-reveals-about-the-corrosion-of-community-life/15683):
"There have been two broad responses to the Rotherham revelations. Some are arguing that abuse like this happens everywhere, and Rotherham should serve only as a wake-up call to our bigger ‘paedophile problem’. But this actively discourages meaningful analysis of what is particular about the Rotherham scandal, of the specific dynamics behind the abuse that is said to have occurred between an ethnic minority and the children of certain parts of Britain’s native working classes. The second response is to talk up the dangers of PC, the way in which extreme cultural sensitivity has dulled some officials’ ability to be impartial and just. Yet this encourages us to focus on what happened in response to the abuse, after the fact, if you like, which is of course important but it also avoids excavating the specific social foundations of the reported 16-year pattern of abuse.
"It is not surprising that so many want to avoid asking what might have brought about the twisted relationship between sections of the Asian community and sections of the white working-class community, for answering this question is likely to expose some far more profound problems that official reports can do nothing to fix. ..."