When Scandals Become Narratives

Today: The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

A grim topic. First I'll deal with the title. Including my own little anecdote. Then I'll move on to the numbers.

Formerly this issue was called the grooming gangs scandal. The label has since been upgraded to rape gangs. The logic of this is understandable. Firstly, there have been acts of outright rape and gang rape. Not to mention violence, torture and other heinous things. So it's not accurate or moral to use a word as soft as grooming in these cases. Then secondly, as under-16s can't legally consent to sex, any acts that were non-forced were technically rape too. Which, again, is a correct assessment ..technically.

However, though technically correct, the reality is, this rebranding somewhat misrepresents the overall picture. As the vast majority of what took place fell into the second category, and grooming, in plain English, is a better descriptive word for it. (Which is why it was originally used.) These girls were generally charmed, chatted-up, manipulated. They believed these men were their boyfriends or partners. In plain English we use the word rape to mean forced, non-consensual sex. And yes, though in specific extreme cases this did happen, in the round that's not what was happening in these northern towns.

I live in a northern town, and I'll give my little anecdote.

When I was about twenty I started seeing this girl that I met on a night out. She was eighteen and she lived in the town centre. This was in the early 2000s. She had a little friend who was also about eighteen, who'd sometimes be hanging around with her when we met up on our little dates. Anyway, one night I met up with her - this was maybe only the third or fourth time I'd met her. Her little friend was tagging along and we were walking through the town centre, talking. It was maybe about 8 o'clock, evening time. Maybe later.

Anyway, as we were walking along talking, all of a sudden a car pulled up alongside us with three Pakistani men sat in it. They looked a lot older at the time, but were probably late twenties, early thirties. One of them popped his head out of the window, said something, and the little friend who was with us just said, "Bye, see ya later," jumped in the car, then it drove off.

I turned to the girl I was with, shocked, and said, "What the f*ck? What's going on? Where's she going??" Or words to that effect. She replied, "Don't worry, she knows them." In that sly, coy way that women do when something's going on and they don't want to speak bluntly. From the smirky look on her face it was obvious that her friend was involved physically with one of the men. So I replied, "What do you mean, 'knows them' ? She's friends with them? One of them is her boyfriend? What do you mean?"

Again, with a similar coyness she responded, "Don't worry, she knows what she's doing?"

At the time I felt annoyed that she wouldn't give me a straight answer. I was fairly inexperienced with the opposite sex, even in my early twenties, so though she was a few years younger than me I kind of felt like she was speaking to me like I was an inexperienced child that wouldn't approve of the adult things her friend was getting up to. In fact, I stopped seeing this girl not long after, partly because of that sense that she wasn't being honest. It sounds selfish, but I can remember thinking, "If she thinks it's fine for her friend to jump into a car with a bunch of older men, what's she been up to?"

I didn't have a frame of reference for what had happened back then. I'd never heard of grooming gangs. So initially I was just shocked and disgusted. However, when I thought about it, I soon got a decent framing, "Ah, okay, these girls live in the town centre. It's where the Pakistani lads live. It's poor and rough, they're from single parent homes. The Pakistani guys are older and have cars and money."

This girl was about eighteen, but it wasn't hard to imagine it would've started younger. So naturally, when I heard the stories about grooming gangs later on it was totally believable to me. It wasn't at all hard to imagine.

And it wasn't too different to what I'd seen on the council estate where I lived. Only there it was white gangs of lads, and drug dealers and drug addicts and other ne'er-do-wells. The fifteen year old girl going off with some older lad in a car. The countless teen pregnancies. People forget what the eighties and nineties were like. It was pretty rough. There were girls in my year at school that left and ended up in prostitution. There was actually a teacher at my secondary school (a white English man for the record) who got caught visiting his ex-pupils for paid sex. He got caught because he was stupid enough to visit them in the school minibus.

Back in those days the town was so poor and there were so many young women walking the streets that men would travel in cars from all over the north to take advantage of it. Again, these were mainly white men. So this mass exploitation of white working class girls wasn't solely Muslim, far from it, though undoubtedly the cultural differences did indeed have an influence on the form it took. With the Muslim men viewing these girls much the way that western men visiting Thailand would view a Thai prostitute. It's the same exploitative, crocodile-like behaviour. Where men take what they can, because they can, with little care or thought for the girl or her wider life.

People may point to the extreme examples of Muslim abuse, and yes, they are grave and sickening. But likewise there are sickening examples of abuse on council estates. Be it child abuse, or young girls ending up in relationships with violent drug addicts or wife beaters. There's a spectrum, and the extremes aren't representative of the general. The men who visit Thai brothels are undoubtedly bad and immoral, but their behaviour is clearly not as extreme as the behaviour of someone like Gary Glitter. So it would be an inaccurate misrepresentation to paint all those men as Gary Glitter. As if that was the norm.

Anyway, The Numbers

The report states that, "at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma."

That's a pretty big and difficult to believe number. That "at the very least" almost makes it comical.

Over two years ago I posted this on Twitter, as the trend for exaggeration was apparent back then:

A lot of the people that believe and share these ridiculous numbers are also the sort of people that call Jewish people liars for stating that six million people died in the Holocaust. Alas, they fail to see the irony. They're even calling for Nuremberg style trials at the moment, so it's funny. It should serve as a good education to everyone.

The Nazis were bad. They ended democracy, they invaded countries. They killed lots of people. They put Jews in camps. They killed Jewish people. They euthanised the disabled. 

However, at the same time, the six million figure probably is an exaggeration, and some of the propaganda, especially from the soviet side, is just that, propaganda.

Likewise, it's similar here. Appalling things happened to some of these girls. Sickening crimes, that need to be exposed and punished.

However, the huge numbers being thrown around are not a reflection of reality. (I've even seen people state there were over one million victims.)

People don't share these huge numbers because they're liars (though there may be the odd trouble-making individual). It's just the human propensity to believe ever bigger numbers. Especially when such numbers support a narrative or worldview.

It's like the war in Iraq. People against the war will say, "One Million Civilians Were Killed!" Whereas people in favour of the war will naturally gravitate to the lowest estimates for civilian casualties. It's just human nature. And if you try to give an impartial estimate that's somewhere in the middle no side wants to hear it.

I do think it's important to keep trying to temper this urge though, as sooner or later things become too detached from reality. The problem with the woke worldview was that it sailed off the cliff into phantasms. Now the other side are clutching their pearls in similar hysterics every time people fail to pay sufficient lip-service to their narratives.

Like if you dare to use the word groomed instead of the word raped.