I grew up in a protected, though rather unusual middle-class family. It was a shock in my teens to find that the Spanish played cricket and that their kids thought Spaniards had invented everything. The world, so it turned out, was nothing like the one of my upbringing and classroom and yet very much the same.
Just now, it’s hard to eat tea without fuss about the vital (and utterly boring) concerns of my teenage grandson and his mates. Their tiny world is of no interest, just passing noise, like Waterloo Road – sadly no off button applies. He’s 13 and I’m already aware of dangers in the still mostly white population around here. I worry less than most, though I’m more acutely aware of the problems than most. My novel, nearly finished, has a backdrop of exploitation and it’s based on fact.
Exploitation is waiting everywhere for kids and even reading academic literature (most academics, do strangely little of this) you can find such as:
Three types of sexual grooming were thus identified: self-grooming, grooming the environment and significant others and grooming the child. Based on these findings, a new definition of sexual grooming is suggested.
I have no interest in paying to find the definition. Such material should be free. The world, everywhere, tends to conceal ‘sexuality’, though one can always find either what you are looking for or details for research like Tariq Ali here on Pakistan:
The resulting moral vacuum is filled by porn films and religiosity of various sorts. In some areas religion and pornography go together: the highest sales of porn videos are in Peshawar and Quetta, strongholds of the religious parties. Taliban leaders in Pakistan target video shops, but the dealers merely go underground. Nor should it be imagined that the bulk of the porn comes from the West. There is a thriving clandestine industry in Pakistan, with its own local stars, male and female.
I can tell you of practices going on in the backwater I call ‘Deadwood’ – a standard Northern town in England, from consenting homosexual dungeons which need not concern us to much more obvious goings on that should.
Police and other social agencies will refuse to see many of the dangerous practices in which children are at risk. Part of this is that they get substantial numbers of false complaints, but this is only one facet of the problem. The weird thing is that there is no shortage of lackwits to tell you to phone social services if you have problem neighbours, and a shortage of people who will be able to help if you have neighbours abusing their own kids and a danger to others.
The ‘fault’ is broadly ours. You probably have more chance of damaging someone with a false complaint in our society than protecting anyone with a virtuous complaint.
There’s a complaint now that ‘Muslim society’ is somehow producing and defending sexual grooming in the UK. I have little doubt there is some truth in this. I’m quite sure Islam doesn’t recommend it. I was taught Onward Christian Soldiers and am no more Christian than most Muslims I’ve met are Muslim. The dark teachings of religion span us all. My father could barely issue the words Catholic or Jew without his lips drying up – I;m pretty sure we didn’t know what Muslims were. Japs, Nips (I thought they were different peoples) and Krauts were unspeakable, though as these were killed in droves in movies, we got the message. I shot many myself as a kid in our war games. The only good Injun was a dead Injun. Other races were so useless we should wipe them out and populate their worlds ourselves – I had no idea this was the real fashion in history.
I wish my grandson and his mates would grow up – yet really we have failed to do so. We mostly live and die more or less where we are born and even turn holiday destinations into Blighty with sun and cheap booze.
The grooming of kids is dire and more widespread than we admit – Germain Greer’s stuff on Daddy teaching his daughter to flirt doesn’t help here though she is taken out of context. Lolita was not about a girl seduced by foreigners. People elsewhere in the world still actually sell their children and I’ve seen close here.
The real questions are about why we can’t just clamp down on child abuse, whether about Muslim men and white girls (thinking of the Baci Baza is it just girls?) or anyone else. Cops who have been trained in these areas admit to having their eyes opened – they’d been missing the ‘sign’ before.
Personally, if anyone does anything like this to one of mine, whether Muslim homosocial-racist inspired or the likes of Moat or some twerp with a bit of money, they should get the same. It won’t happen, because I would stop it at the ‘sign’. But what is such ‘sign’?
The big sign remains poverty. This is as sure for the boy sold into the Baci Baza as the young Romanian girl working as a a prostitute for a drugs-connected Pakistani in Rochdale. Or the girls working for mother and father pimps not far away. Or the kid on a Kenyan beach …
Yes there are religious-ethnic tinges – these should be ignored whether white, Muslim or Zogorian. In noise complaints, one is supposed to take the ethnicity of the area into account. Who voted for that! There should just be law. My own suspicions on the ‘ethnicity angle’ is that there is a massive problem and that our authorities have been backing off because victims are generally poor (voiceless) and the perpetrators able to hide behind authority perceived racism in the complaints. ‘Racism’ is a ploy created in our politics by the powerful to evade investigation of what it’s like to live poor and a crude interpretation of what people most affected by immigration are saying and what they are trying to represent (always without representation). The idea that ‘culture’ or religion is any excuse for anything is a total nonsense. Otherwise we would be celebrating the KKK as a cultural phenomenon or Sambian sexual practices as a viable norm for us. We don’t.
I suspect ‘we’ have groomed the ground in which these disgusting offences have taken place. This is the ground in which many young people have been deserted to schools no use to them, parents who have no hope and the resulting ghetto in which policing and social services are expected to keep the lid on and spending tight. This is no denial ethnic problems are involved, just that they are ill-defined. One night, driving a taxi to fund my PhD, I refused to take 6 black men to Manchester (60 miles away). The guy on the rank behind me did. He was mugged. Go on, tell me I’m a racist bastard. I don’t get in Muslim taxis either, unless I know the driver, but I don’t care who comes from my private hire firm. Bad experience, not racism is the reason. And why is it that taxis have become so Muslim dominated where I live? There’s racism in this, but it ain’t mine. I didn’t turn the guys down because they were black, but because they treated me as shit. After three consecutive bad experiences (uninsured, unlicensed drive etc.) I don’t do black cabs anymore (which tend to be driven by Muslims) unless my mate Derek is about (he’s black). I may change my private hire firm soon as I like talking to the driver. I know plenty of white guys who would like to be driving taxis. How are they being excluded? They ain’t got better jobs. Anyone asking them, in the wonderful state of political correctness?
And why are we so silenced on this Muslim sexual grooming issue? Part of it the vile political correctness – but some is because we dare not speak of our own. More is to do with much more carefully programmed economics that shifts problems on purpose into poor areas, including crime and those immigrants most likely to turn to it or be unlikely to be able to turn to the police and other authorities to help like those already there. My father saw all this years ago like many others and ensured we didn’t grow up in it. It was less ‘white flight’ than ‘evil poor’ flight then.
We talk about multiculturalism in the UK as though any culture is fine and anyone who doubts this is racist. We talk about sexism as though half Manchester United’s first team should be women. We’ve missed the point to the degree that I would have no problem with the idea of half my managers having been women because they could not have been any worse than the dolts I’ve had. And that of not being able to work out, in a time of huge unemployment, why there are no white taxi drivers and you’re lucky to find a black cabbie or nice Indian chap. None of it is really about race, it’s all been about keeping the cost of basic work down. And with this we have brought in people who would have turned Pankhurst’s face a deeper shade of purple than it was in 1910. They have probably only taken these poor white girls away from another dire fate – unemployment and hopelessness, or maybe the white boys who might have had a bit of money if there was any work.
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