Sex grooming cases spark racial tensions

[Baitball Blogger]

ROCHDALE, England (AP) — She was lonely in the way only an adolescent girl can be: No friends, no boyfriend, not much of a relationship with her parents. So she felt special when a man decades older paid attention to her, bought her trinkets, gave her free booze.

Then he took her to a dingy room above a kebab shop and said she had to give something back in return. His demands grew: Not just sex with him, but with his friends. It went on for years, until police charged nine men with running a sex ring with underage girls.

The story of Girl A, as she became known in court, is tragic by any measure, but it has also become explosive. Because there is no getting around it: The girls are white, and the men who used them as sex toys are Asian Muslims, mostly Pakistanis raised in Britain. And it's not just Rochdale -- roughly a dozen other cases of Asian Muslim men accused of grooming young white girls for sex are slowly moving to trial across northern England, involving up to several hundred girls in all.

In today's Britain, which prides itself on being a tolerant and integrated society, the case has stripped away the skin to expose the racial sores festering beneath. It is also feeding an already raw anger against the country's Asian Muslim minority, in a movement led by far right groups at a time when the economy is stalled.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20120630/14346a5f-55b8-41bc-a396-275a76bb01fd

Personally, considering the heightened issues over the last eleven years, any muslim group that would do something like this is so incredibly criminally stupid, they're a danger to themselves as well as the girls they prey on.

[Baitball Blogger]

1. Further down in article it gets even more specific

The Rochdale men do not fit the classic profile for sex offenders in Britain -- the majority of pedophilia crimes are committed by white men who target boys and girls via the Internet. However, there is a consensus among prosecutors, police, social workers and leading national politicians that "street grooming," which happened in Rochdale, is largely dominated by Asian men.

Ella Cockbain, a University College of London crime science specialist, says research shows that mostly Asian men make up the big groups of offenders who work together. She chooses her words carefully because the sample size is small and the topic sensitive.

[xfundy]

2. Men of any religion can be pedophiles.

Catholics?

The article you posted seemed poised to blame Muslims. Yet pedophilia is a problem among all religions and no religion.

My belief is all religions are inane, made-up myths. But this problem obviously has no boundaries, religious or otherwise. I have no answers, other than locking up offenders, but truly wish an answer could be found to separate child molesters from children.

[Chan790]

3. I think you're missing the elephant in the room...

in your efforts to be ecclesiastic. This is likely cultural, not religious, in origin. It's unlikely that the same practice would occur organically among a large clade of individuals sharing common traits; far less likely than that its' occurrence results from a spreading via a "best practices" modality. To put it another way, you're seeing a common tactic among Asian Muslims not because they're Asian or Muslim but because they're a community sharing what has worked for one or a few of them.

[JCMach1]

4. you are right... it is unfortunate that this behavior was largely from one group,

but that is also the reality.

UK will just have to deal with the latent (and not so latent) racism on both sides that these cases bring-up.

I read some of the detailed reporting on this when it first happened. As a father of daughters of about the same age I was just absolutely sickened by the actions of these people. That ultimately isn't about race, but sick behavior that society cannot tolerate.

[reorg]

5. this has nothing to do with pedophiles

forced prostitution, plain and simple.

[Baitball Blogger]

6. I agree with you.

And I do believe it is culturally driven. Granted, it is the extreme form of the culture and mainstream Muslims would abhor this as much as we do. But there are traditionalists everywhere in every society.

[4th law of robotics]

8. Er, if this were about catholic pedophiles

people would be blaming catholics.

No one would say "yeah well muslims are pedophiles too!"

This one-way hyper-sensitivity isn't doing anyone any favors.

[Baitball Blogger]

10. Catholicism came under the gun because priest have to take a vow of celibacy.

On top of that, there is an absolute authoritarian structure in the Vatican that believed it would lose power once its followers began to question them. Which is why the Vatican has chosen to hide these cases, rather than face them head on where they would get publicity.

As a Catholic I see the religion as the perfect storm to attract pedophile priests. But I also understand that it's the power to squelch information and the helpless followers who are required to provide blind obedience which makes all religion suspect of having essentially the same problems.

Also, as a latina, I understand the concept of machismo. It is very much like the muslim culture where men think they're dominant simply because they're male.

Sometimes PC gets in the way of understanding the limitations of ethnic cultures. But machismo is very much the reason why I began to see myself as an American at a very early age. I believed that America could afford me the power to be who I wanted to be much, much more readily than being raised in a machismo culture.

It didn't turn out to be a perfect world, however, because, wouldn't you know it? Behind the nuttery that you find in retired military, good ole boy communities is the concept of machismo.

[4th law of robotics]

7. Would it be ok if the girls weren't white?

Or if the men were?

Why does the race matter? It seems the only relevant descriptor is "scumbag"

[T_i_B]

12. "Why does the race matter?"

Because far right groups such as the English Defence League will use this issue to make as much political capital as possible and further a racist agenda.

I really wish it weren't so but that much is sadly inevitable.

What's worse is that there appears to be more then one gang of men doing this http://www.democraticunderground.com/10882316

[mzteris]

9. There was an article in Vogue

from not too far back (I think we were still on DU2, though) - discussing this very same type of tactic being used here in the United States. And the men running it were DEFINITELY NOT Asian or Muslim.

[ZombieHorde]

11. Very disturbing article. nt