Just a few dozen perpetrators, not victims. I rather suspect they didn't stop at one each...

The racism issue worried me too; that one should even *consider* the ethnic group of a perpetrator other than as identification when a crime is reported is sheerest idiocy. But Rotherham is - and has been for many years, I think - a strongly Labour-controlled council and therefore subject to the PC idiocy for which Labour was rightly infamous.

There was an interview on Radio 4 Tuesday morning (around 7.20?) with one of the victims - Emma - and her story was heartbreaking.

Rotherham
Rochdale
Peterborough
Derby
Manchester
Birmingham
Burton
Telford
Oxford
Bradford
Newcastle
Middlesbrough
Leicester
Bolton
Barnsley
Coventry
Ipswich
London
High Wycombe

What do the above towns and cities have in common? Sex grooming gang convictions is what.

That's a lot of places throughout the Uk for "sex gangs" to operate, and the vast majority are perpetrated by "asian" men and mostly of pakistani origin, fact.

What this suggests to me (i accept it may not be a religious led issue) is that there's clearly a national network of men who implicitly trust each other to perform these vile acts and to pass the girls around, and so this is clearly cultural in nature. Add to this the fact acknowledged again today by members of the pakistani community that the offenders parents and wider friends/family MUST have known it was happening and you will get the gist of just how widespread this is and how complicit vast swathes of their community must be involved.

They pick on "vulnerable" girls for 2 reasons - 1 is they must be virgins when this starts, and 2 therefore by extention will be free of sexual diseases.

It all begins to sound highly organised doesn't it?

proccy is right, this is a cultural issue. Pakistani men see women as 2nd class citizens and not as equals.

Quite how our society has allowed so many backward ideologies to flourish is beyond me.

Yes *Emma* was the interview I heard on the news at 10, I was shocked at how calm she was about the whole thing, total lack of emotion - unless it was an actors voice or the whole ordeal has fully destroyed her.

Very disturbing indeed.

So did white British men less than 100 years ago.

150 years ago we were whipping black people and hanging them from trees.

I think the main problem that those on the left have with those on the right is the selectiveness of what those on the right choose to be vocal about.

I didn't see the EDL or (right-wing Facebook group) Britain First shouting from the rooftops or marching in the street when the IRA shot that soldier a couple of years ago or when Ian Watkins was making headlines.

What? you're justifying what is happening now based on what happened in aless civilised society 150 years ago!!

We have moved on since then, introduced equal rights for one and faught 2 world wars to prevent these kinds of atrocities!

No. Of course not.

I'm amazed you don't see the irony in your previous statement though.

My wife is a nurse and is very good friends with a Pakistani doctor. Her husband certainly doesn't think she's a second class citizen.

Irony in what statement? If saying you justified child rape because it was not seen as such a bad thing years ago then no, I see no irony.

If you mean my comment about the victim then I'm totally lost for words.

Also, your wife having a pakistani friend doesn't make a network of men across the country raping children that are pakistani in origin, whilst their family and freinds whom will also be mainly pakistani, ignore there actions and public officers are affraid to come forward because of the race card played by, amongst others, people of pakistani orgin any less directed at or place any less blame on those people.

I'm sure that some people on here are Mary just for the laugh sometimes.

I'm sorry, I was referring to the comment made by Danielthemanual where he tarred all Pakistani men with the same brush by saying they all see women as second class citizens, which simply isn't true.

My apologies to you for thinking it was you who wrote it. I wasn't paying attention.

But I will reiterate that their race has nothing to do with their actions.

Ah, you quoted me so I assumed! I agree it's not really a race thing, more the culture of the origin of the individuals.

On a quest to understand why some men seem to feel that this sort of thing is acceptable behaviour, it occurred to me that *all* religions throughout history have been patriarchal and consider women second class citizens, if they consider them at all; pretty much every civilisation throughout history has considered women as property and chattels; pretty much every society has considered slavery a natural and wholesome thing.

It's only in the last couple of hundred years that even in the 'progressive west' women were allowed to own property in their own right; that they could vote; that they got some say in who they married and with whom they copulated. As recently as the early 1900s (and quite possibly later) domestic servants, though nominally 'free' and able to leave, were considered sexual partners for the men of the household (in addition to their legitimate partners).

For years and years and years, mens' work and womens' work has been separated and controlled; for people to do the tasks normally attributed to the other sex has been at least a cause for comment and often punishable. Even Judaism, which counts its calendar over five thousand years, still has separate parts of a synagogue for women and other sexual differentiation: part of the morning prayer for men includes thanks that they were not born a woman; women are considered ritually unclean once a month.

This is - from our point of view - stone age thinking. But it's been going on since, well, the stone age. Any wonder that there are still whole societies that think it still?

Is it?

You think otherwise?

I think Derek made a funny!

Nice to see that not only are the people in charge scared of the words "Asian males" but they will also let this into schools.

I feel for anyone who lives around these schools that isn't Muslim / the right sort of Muslim.

Sadly it seems there has been another beheading

What can be done?

Well, Daniel, what do you personally think should be done about an extremist group in the Middle East beheading hostages?
Tell us in your own words what your solution to this incredibly complex problem would be and don't forget to relate it to Islam in the UK. I'm sure UKIP must have some ideas, but I'd be really, genuinely interested to hear what you, personally, think the answer is.

I'm sure we'd all be Jim, but in fairness I'd be surprised if anyone has a solution to this problem right now.

But if these atrocities are taking place, even if they are apparently "justified" as a retort to western "oppression", it makes one think the surveillance society we have here is preferable to such retrograde barbarism.

No. The surveillance society is not acceptable; it assumes criminality of everyone and has not been shown to be effective.

What *is* effective against stone-age barbarism is education.

And that is precisely my point.

These atrocities are being carried out and placed prominently in the media deliberately to provoke the anger and outrage that is now predictably being shown. The wider purpose of this, I suspect, is to goad the US and "The West" into retaliatory action that will be used in turn as a recruitment aid for extremist fundamentalist groups.

I don't have an answer any more than you or Daniel, but I suspect another agenda in his post.

Education of what though? Less extreme religious beliefs and/or being more civil about things (rather than chopping peoples heads off) & accepting people of other faiths.

There seems to be some evidence that many jihadists are almost entirely ignorant about the actual beliefs of Islam and simply cherry pick the bits that are fed to them by those recruiting them. The young Brits, Australians, French, etc that end up giving clenched-fist salutes, toting machine guns and bazookas and committing acts of incomprehensible brutality and inhumanity are as far from genuine Islam as any IRA bomber, White Supremacist nutcase in Norway or Mexican drug gang hitman. There will always be people prepared to step outside of human decency and commit grotesque acts in the name of a religion, an ideology or just plain greed.
Education is indeed the key, but creating the conditions for that education to be received is no easy trick.

For my money, education from the age of three that religion is nothing but a power trip... but I digress.

Lovely cartoon in the Eye last week: an Iman saying to a tooled-up fighter "You're not going to like this, but we're returning to a fundamentalist Islamic basis: tolerance of other religions, education for all, leading Europe in scientific and mathematical discoveries..."

There is one solution, fight fire with fire.

Make a statement of hand yourself in or allow all of your fellow countrymen to die because of you. Then nuke / napalm the entire area. That should help show that we are all rather bored with the whole affair.

Sadly I know there is a million things wrong with that solution. Including lots more pointless deaths.....

Negotiations won't work, I assume it would be like trying to talk yourself out of a fist fight with the local drunk yobbo. We know war doesn't work, we also know there are too many desperate wanting the top job when we bump off the top man.

Finally, and maybe the best action, is to withdraw all people from the area, ban any news items and totally ignore them. No publicity, no media no one cares...... Once no one cares,then there is no fight.

There's a good article in yesterday's Guardian about the involvement of Pakistani men in child abuse, well worth a read.

Excellent. I particularly like the final thought about being deported.

Good, impartial article. Not something that can be said about very much media coverage of this issue.

Yep, it echo's my moan earlier on in this thread! It's the peoples background nothing more or less.

The point I made earlier: men who happened to be Asian abusing girls who happened to be white, down to availability and opportunity rather than any particular racial fetish.

Well, you say that but Pakistani is pretty much a race and they have a fetish for power over women.