Mark Steyn: Is our society one that accepts the abuse of the most vulnerable girls?

Mark Steyn: Is our society one that accepts the abuse of the most vulnerable girls?
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Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn


Published: 01/02/2022

- 20:50

Updated: 14/02/2023

- 11:28

What we know happened in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere is shameful. When a society declines to be ashamed, that is far worse, and very telling

As recently as the eighteenth century, twenty-five per cent of all unmarried females in Britain’s capital city were prostitutes; the average age of a London whore was sixteen; and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of fourteen. In the 1790s, a respectable gentleman, a solid citizen could walk past an eleven-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill or a misshapen tree when you’re strolling in the country.

The man who helped destroy that cruel, casual assumption was William Wilberforce, a backbench Member of Parliament of rather greater distinction than most of those in the present House of Commons. As Mr Wilberforce wrote in 1787:


“God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”

We know about the first of those great objects: Wilberforce did more than any other single human being to help eradicate slavery from most of the world. The latter goal was perhaps even tougher. But he did it. A century later, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages - and the Victorian concept of a “social conscience”.Are English cities now returning to the state of London a quarter-millennium back?

A society that accepts the abuse, the exploitation and the degradation of its most vulnerable girls? A new report from the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse says yes. And, if you’re thinking, oh, yeah, Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, well, no. This report chose to focus not on any of the criminal cases you’ve heard about, but a random sampling of places you surely haven’t, from Tower Hamlets in the East End to Warwickshire.

Shakespeare’s county. Very leafy. Their conclusion? “Children are sexually exploited by networks” – that’s “grooming gangs”, a term that is unsatisfactory and ultimately euphemistic – “in all parts of England and Wales in the most degrading and destructive ways.” And the failures of South Yorkshire Police and social workers in Rotherham a decade ago and more remain the failures of almost all other constabularies and government bureaucracies today – in particular, the need to blame the victims, which we’ve talked about before: You’re a thirteen-year-old girl in foster care shanghaied in a cab to go and have sex with a dozen men, who then urinate on you, douse you in petrol - and the authorities describe you as quote “promiscuous”, and putting yourself at risk and placing yourself in situations of vulnerability.

So there’s a lot of victim-blaming – in Warwickshire, in Tower Hamlets, in Bristol, Merseyside, South Wales…and there’s a remarkable lack of curiosity about the perpetrators, so that, despite instruction from Priti Patel and the Home Office, the police still don’t bother recording the particular characteristics of the gang members.

From the criminal prosecutions, they would appear to be significantly quote “Asian”, in the preferred euphemism of Fleet Street: if you read out the names of, say, those convicted in Huddersfield – Zahid Hassan, Mohammed Kammer, Mohammed Rizwan Aslam – they might appear to have certain things in common.

But, as the report points out, this might be totally unrepresentative and very unfair and all the rest are called Nigel and Jeremy and Peregrine, because Britain’s useless coppers are keeping all the most basic details to themselves. So we don’t know. What we do know is that there isn’t a lot to be said for any society that, as in Wilberforce’s day, accepts the sex slavery of large numbers of its daughters as merely a fact of life.

What we know happened in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere is shameful. When a society declines to be ashamed, that is far worse, and very telling.

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