Have you been paying attention to the disgusting story about the sexual abuse of 1,400 children, mostly working class white girls, in Rotherham, England? I have. It hasn’t gotten the press that it deserves, during this summer of evil news stories.
There are two elements to this evil story. First, the grooming and the abuse itself. Horrific. Then there was incredible stupidity and incompetence of the police in handling these cases. They either the girl’s stories, discounting them as stories from loose girls. They lost evidence. They let these cases get mired in bureaucracy. Race and political correctness may have been a factor.
Ross Douthat writes about this story today. Whatever you think about his politics, he gets a shitload of credit for talking about these rapes. Where are the other pundits on this topic?
And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.
The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.
So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.
Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.
Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity, and your conventional wisdom is what’s most likely to condemn victims to their fate.
Apt. 11d 
Seventeen comments on “$400,000 and Broke” and not one comment on state protected child rape. And my comment is not even going to be helpful or enlightening, I’m just in despair. Douthat’s article was good, but the WSJ had an equally good article on August 26th, just not by a pundit. Yes, where are the other pundits on this horrific story?
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I don’t know enough to comment on the Rotherham story — and the link doesn’t tell enough. There are assumptions in Douthat’s commentary, that the abuse occurred because the people appeared trustworthy. But that’s always been the story of abuse of the vulnerable, the nuns/group home in Ireland, Rotherham, the priest in the Dominican Republic, the priests in all the diocese around America, the disabled men who were working in virtual slavery in the factory, putting cognitively disabled men on death row for a crime they didn’t commit. In all those stories we have the combination of vulnerability and dispossession and the trust, and, yes, the relief that someone has taken a problem (the bastard child, the homeless rebels, the cognitively disabled, . . . .) of our hands and away from our sights. Closed communities (small towns, the Vatican/church, etc) are also a significant risk factor.
If we really want to talk about what happened, we need to talk about the details, and how we the nuts and bolts of oversight might moderate risk, things like mandatory reporting, non-local policing (I think that’s a big issue, exposing the transgressions to a larger population). And, we have to talk about costs. The story doesn’t let us talk about any of them, yet because we don’t know the details.
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Did they lose evidence or did they “lose” evidence?
I agree with Douthat on this:
“So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s.”
In the contemporary US, I would expect that some of the best opportunities for abuse will come from being the “good dad” who is always willing to help with carpool and pickups, from working in show biz with children, and from working in any setting where parents will be so blinded by greed, need and ambition for their kids that they won’t think about how foolish they are being.
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There is a bit of dogwhistling going on here and that is why someone like Douthat has picked up on it, instead of, for instance, the evidence of entrenched and ongoing abuse in the Catholic church which is coming out here in Australia (note that both examples are in different countries from his.)
“Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.” This is a dogwhistle for “Politically correct liberals afraid to challenge abusers because they’re Pakistani”. this is nonsense, of course – Governments, bureaucracies and other networks have refused to believe women and children and enabled abusers in every case in every country. But this case is popular with conservatives because it plays into the “liberals too pee-cee to question immigrants and look what happens!” story.
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Eh, do you honestly think that in 1950s England, that the police would have favored the word of Pakistani taxidrivers over the word of lower class ethnically English woman? Really?
That seems most improbable–isn’t it stereotypically English to think the very worst of foreigners? This is a recurrent theme in Agatha Christie and other English mystery writers, both as a phenomenon to criticize (Poirot is always getting apologized to by insular English people who forget he, too, is a foreigner), and also used as a plot point (the sinister Chinaman, the brutal Negro, the moneygrubbing Jew, etc.).
Think of the US. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the alleged victim of rape is believed because she is white, regardless of how disreputable and shiftless her family is, whereas the man accused of rape is disbelieved because he is black.
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