It's inaccurate to call grooming (purely) “a racially motivated crime”. It was (also, maybe primarily) a sexually motivated crime committed by men against the most vulnerable girls in society. The comparison with the genocide in the former Yugoslavia is just stupid and crass. This was not rape as ethnic cleansing. It was rape as sexual exploitation, with a racial vector. It is horrendous on its own terms without the need to pretend this was a civil war. The claim that Labour specifically is “up to its neck in the actual crimes” is also stupid - if it were true, the Conservatives have in any case had control of the country from 2010 to last year. The MP who has done most work on this is Sarah Champion (Lab). The police are not institutionally left wing (see Stephen Lawrence), though they are depressingly often corrupt (see also Stephen Lawrence). You may believe Labour is uninterested in controlling immigration, but Starmer's meetings with Meloni suggest otherwise. And so on. But all this is by the way. If your comment on sexual crimes does not even include the words “men” and “girls”, it is hardly worth listening to at all.
I just realized I misread this sentence -- " depending on how you count the grim calculus of rape vs murder (8,000 killed in the Bosnian genocide vs likely 10s of thousands raped over decades here)" -- in a way that was highly flattering to you. You weren't comparing rapes in the Bosnian genocide with rapes in the grooming scandal, as I carelessly assumed. You were discounting rapes in the genocide. This is sociopathic. Try to be less transparent when instrumentalising violence against women.
Ok so your point is... what? The problem is that addressing how you protect the most vulnerable girls from systemic abuse is much, much less emotionally gratifying than portraying yourself as the person breaking the silence. The question of how these crimes potentially relate to clan politics and embedded cultural misogyny (including against the Asian girls and women who were also victimized) are good and important ones. But they're not questions you're attempting to answer, because you are more interested in the cultural capital you can derive from these crimes.
I have been despairing this week of all the people who have just discovered the grooming scandal and are now rewriting history. It’s especially infuriating when their “answer” is to blame Starmer and demand another inquiry, when the outstanding actions are really to keep implementing the recommendations of the first inquiry.
It's almost as if these conclusions were presented to them ready-made, and they did not need to make any effort to get inside the issue and figure out the best way forward by themselves.
I find it amazing that people can go from uninformed to misinformed over one internet session, and become convinced of their own subject matter expertise from that point. You are so right about the entrenchment. "I googled and while there were 100s of results for that story, another story had more results... so case closed: covered up"
It's interesting what made other publications feel confident about reporting on the allegations about Gaiman.
On a podcast: bit nervous, maybe refer to it obliquely in regards to series being cancelled and so forth.
It's partly a UK/US thing with the difference between Tortoise and NY on Gaiman -- much more leeway on libel for US publications. (The Depp outcome changed this for a bit I think, and my US legal read on Toxic was actually harder than the UK one. Or maybe that was just a publisher culture thing.) But it's also easier to get a claim over the line when someone else has gone first: the Tortoise podcast led to more accusers coming forward, so more corroboration, and so on.
I look forward to these posts so much! I’m really not at all keen to see Babygirl - it sounds uncomfortable to watch from so many different angles and even a large popcorn can’t convince me I need to see Nicole fail at orgasm.
I’ve been so annoyed at the rounds of people crying “why was no one talking about this?” When many investigative journalists were not just talking about it but doing the heavy lifting to actually report it. Andrew Norfolk come to speak to my students back in 2014 about the rape gangs. He was the Times journalist who’d been working on the story since 2004! Thank you Sarah for this excellent takedown of the anti MSM bleaters.
One thing I find really infuriating is that, if these people are going to be mad that they weren't told, they should be mad *with the media that they consume* rather than the "MSM" that they obviously ignore. But the media they consume is predicated on "telling the truth" without doing the work of finding out what the truth is: power without responsibility.
I think this is spot on. Of course, people are free to argue that the vast amount of media attention the stories have received for years *still* isn't proportionate to the crimes, because those are even vaster. That seems like a stance worth considering. But it's one that would have to be adjudicated via boring old longitudinal quantitative media analysis etc. Which doesn't provide any of the egotistical thrill of pretending you've revealed a cover-up.
I have been left baffled and also thinking WTF when reading some of the news/reports and so on following Musk's 'attention' to the grooming/rape gangs. The concern that Musk and others (e.g., Robert Jenrick) have expressed towards the victims is especially galling given that some of the victims have stated that the existing recommendations from the first inquiry are enough (they just need to be implemented, as stated by a reader below). And let's not forget some of hateful and misogynistic words/phrases that have been used to describe Jess Phillips. Very female friendly!
The fact that people may double-down on their views about something even when evidence points to the contrary is something that really interests me. As you highlight, some of thinking is related to human psychology. I certainly think that cognitive biases have something to do with this (e.g., availability and confirmation bias).
There's an AI tool that tries to talk you out of conspiracy theories. I had a go with one of my ones (a lightly held one about what happened on the grassy knoll), and it made me much much more convinced that I am right.
Gonna hazard a guess that Hadley, Tortoise Media et al. weren't to be considered credible/worthy of attention because they're TERFs, right wing, and so on.
I think you can ascribe some honourable motivations to the WWNOTAT crowd. (I'm not sure it will catch on as an acronym!). The internet in general makes us feel very powerless to help or influence what is happening two inches away on our screens and 100s of miles away in real life, and perhaps there same thing applies here. 'If only I had known sooner, I could have done something!'. The same motivation, I think, drives people to offer extreme advice online, especially wrt relationships (nearly always 'leave the bastard' - thankyou mumsnet). We can't help in any real way. So we force the sensation a little and become angry with other people because it hurts less than our helpless, mutated sense of empathy.
How is Tortoise right wing? I turned to them as my left-wing alternative when the Guardian when mental/ when Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son did a podcast with them about his mother’s investigations and murder.
It's inaccurate to call grooming (purely) “a racially motivated crime”. It was (also, maybe primarily) a sexually motivated crime committed by men against the most vulnerable girls in society. The comparison with the genocide in the former Yugoslavia is just stupid and crass. This was not rape as ethnic cleansing. It was rape as sexual exploitation, with a racial vector. It is horrendous on its own terms without the need to pretend this was a civil war. The claim that Labour specifically is “up to its neck in the actual crimes” is also stupid - if it were true, the Conservatives have in any case had control of the country from 2010 to last year. The MP who has done most work on this is Sarah Champion (Lab). The police are not institutionally left wing (see Stephen Lawrence), though they are depressingly often corrupt (see also Stephen Lawrence). You may believe Labour is uninterested in controlling immigration, but Starmer's meetings with Meloni suggest otherwise. And so on. But all this is by the way. If your comment on sexual crimes does not even include the words “men” and “girls”, it is hardly worth listening to at all.
I just realized I misread this sentence -- " depending on how you count the grim calculus of rape vs murder (8,000 killed in the Bosnian genocide vs likely 10s of thousands raped over decades here)" -- in a way that was highly flattering to you. You weren't comparing rapes in the Bosnian genocide with rapes in the grooming scandal, as I carelessly assumed. You were discounting rapes in the genocide. This is sociopathic. Try to be less transparent when instrumentalising violence against women.
No, leave it. It's useful to see when you think raped women count and when you don't care about them.
Btw, the reference to "Asian men" is in paragraph three of the Times front page in this post. It was discussed. You just weren't reading it.
Ok so your point is... what? The problem is that addressing how you protect the most vulnerable girls from systemic abuse is much, much less emotionally gratifying than portraying yourself as the person breaking the silence. The question of how these crimes potentially relate to clan politics and embedded cultural misogyny (including against the Asian girls and women who were also victimized) are good and important ones. But they're not questions you're attempting to answer, because you are more interested in the cultural capital you can derive from these crimes.
Lucifer I can accept, but that middle name is a bridge too far.
I have been despairing this week of all the people who have just discovered the grooming scandal and are now rewriting history. It’s especially infuriating when their “answer” is to blame Starmer and demand another inquiry, when the outstanding actions are really to keep implementing the recommendations of the first inquiry.
It's almost as if these conclusions were presented to them ready-made, and they did not need to make any effort to get inside the issue and figure out the best way forward by themselves.
I find it amazing that people can go from uninformed to misinformed over one internet session, and become convinced of their own subject matter expertise from that point. You are so right about the entrenchment. "I googled and while there were 100s of results for that story, another story had more results... so case closed: covered up"
It's interesting what made other publications feel confident about reporting on the allegations about Gaiman.
On a podcast: bit nervous, maybe refer to it obliquely in regards to series being cancelled and so forth.
In a magazine/online article: ok let's go.
It must be a lawyery thing?
It's partly a UK/US thing with the difference between Tortoise and NY on Gaiman -- much more leeway on libel for US publications. (The Depp outcome changed this for a bit I think, and my US legal read on Toxic was actually harder than the UK one. Or maybe that was just a publisher culture thing.) But it's also easier to get a claim over the line when someone else has gone first: the Tortoise podcast led to more accusers coming forward, so more corroboration, and so on.
I look forward to these posts so much! I’m really not at all keen to see Babygirl - it sounds uncomfortable to watch from so many different angles and even a large popcorn can’t convince me I need to see Nicole fail at orgasm.
I’ve been so annoyed at the rounds of people crying “why was no one talking about this?” When many investigative journalists were not just talking about it but doing the heavy lifting to actually report it. Andrew Norfolk come to speak to my students back in 2014 about the rape gangs. He was the Times journalist who’d been working on the story since 2004! Thank you Sarah for this excellent takedown of the anti MSM bleaters.
One thing I find really infuriating is that, if these people are going to be mad that they weren't told, they should be mad *with the media that they consume* rather than the "MSM" that they obviously ignore. But the media they consume is predicated on "telling the truth" without doing the work of finding out what the truth is: power without responsibility.
I think this is spot on. Of course, people are free to argue that the vast amount of media attention the stories have received for years *still* isn't proportionate to the crimes, because those are even vaster. That seems like a stance worth considering. But it's one that would have to be adjudicated via boring old longitudinal quantitative media analysis etc. Which doesn't provide any of the egotistical thrill of pretending you've revealed a cover-up.
Thanks for writing this Sarah.
I have been left baffled and also thinking WTF when reading some of the news/reports and so on following Musk's 'attention' to the grooming/rape gangs. The concern that Musk and others (e.g., Robert Jenrick) have expressed towards the victims is especially galling given that some of the victims have stated that the existing recommendations from the first inquiry are enough (they just need to be implemented, as stated by a reader below). And let's not forget some of hateful and misogynistic words/phrases that have been used to describe Jess Phillips. Very female friendly!
The fact that people may double-down on their views about something even when evidence points to the contrary is something that really interests me. As you highlight, some of thinking is related to human psychology. I certainly think that cognitive biases have something to do with this (e.g., availability and confirmation bias).
There's an AI tool that tries to talk you out of conspiracy theories. I had a go with one of my ones (a lightly held one about what happened on the grassy knoll), and it made me much much more convinced that I am right.
You can play along at home:
https://www.debunkbot.com/
Thanks! Will check this out.
Gonna hazard a guess that Hadley, Tortoise Media et al. weren't to be considered credible/worthy of attention because they're TERFs, right wing, and so on.
I think you can ascribe some honourable motivations to the WWNOTAT crowd. (I'm not sure it will catch on as an acronym!). The internet in general makes us feel very powerless to help or influence what is happening two inches away on our screens and 100s of miles away in real life, and perhaps there same thing applies here. 'If only I had known sooner, I could have done something!'. The same motivation, I think, drives people to offer extreme advice online, especially wrt relationships (nearly always 'leave the bastard' - thankyou mumsnet). We can't help in any real way. So we force the sensation a little and become angry with other people because it hurts less than our helpless, mutated sense of empathy.
How is Tortoise right wing? I turned to them as my left-wing alternative when the Guardian when mental/ when Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son did a podcast with them about his mother’s investigations and murder.