With the conviction of six people in connection with child sex abuse in Rotherham, I think it is time to comment on it.

I don’t have detailed knowledge of the situation, beyond press reports and the report from Louise Casey’s enquiry last year, so what follows is to a certain extent informed by prejudice and hearsay. But the same is true of much other commentary on the case, so I think it’s at least worth exposing the differences. Don’t treat the claims below as authoritative.

The view on the outer right is that Rotherham, like sexual violence in Cologne and sex slavery in the Islamic State, is just an expression of Islamic attitudes to women. There is probably a grain of truth in that, but there are far more significant aspects.

The first thing about Rotherham is how enormously fucked up white British working-class society is today. The victims were overwhelmingly girls “in care”, wards of the state living in childrens’ homes or foster homes. A few weren’t, but involving them was the act of stupidity that eventually blew the racket away. It was actual parents who went to the media after the local authorities and the police failed them.

Without intending disrespect towards today’s enlightened, empowered sex-work professionals, the traditional position of a whore was a woman who had nothing of value to offer but her body. It is, in a sense, the default social role of a woman, as manual labourer or bandit are the default social roles of a man. It is an error made by some traditionalists to see the default social role of a woman as being that of wife; that is a role that requires a level of achievement, to become someone that a man with means of supporting a family would choose to keep his house and bear his children. A woman who fails to attain those achievements, and also fails to achieve other marketable abilities, is a whore. She may or may not have sex for money, but she has sex for everything else.

It appears that most girls in care, failed by the wreckage of what used to be family life, do not have either the traditional achievement of potential wife nor the modern achievement of useful education. They are unintentionally, and tragically, raised to be whores. I would be surprised if one in ten reaches their sixteenth birthday virgin. Note this paragraph in particular is an impression based on rumour and hearsay, and might in truth be badly mistaken

It is too easily assumed that the world no longer works this way, since the welfare state will feed and house these girls for their entire lives, and they therefore do not have the economic necessity to sell their bodies like a medieval pauper. But humans don’t work that way—we need to fit a social role, we need to exchange value with other humans in order to validate ourselves. Offering value to others is an essential part of social living, and a girl with nothing of value to offer but her body will offer it, not out of economic necessity but out of emotional necessity. The staff of children’s homes are fully occupied with keeping their charges out of violent situations; stopping them from having boyfriends is out of the question.

As an aside, if the staff taking personal advantage of the situation is more than a rare exceptional incident, then that is because they can see what is in front of them. These girls are available.

Once the available girls were pulled in to the ring’s activities, they were trapped and controlled using violence and threats, as well as drugs and everything else from the standard playbook on how to control and exploit defenceless women. [inserted 27Feb]

So that’s part 1 of the situation: whores from care homes or foster homes. Emphasising this side of the problem isn’t “victim blaming”—it’s not the fault of these girls that they’ve been raised as whores in the rubble of English working-class culture, and it doesn’t mean they deserve any less sympathy or protection. Pretending that everything would have been fine for them were it not for these predatory Pakistanis is doing no favours to the girls in the same situation today.

Part 2 is the gang. This is not a story of immigrant thugs committing violent crime because they’re not part of society. Quite the reverse: the gang was all too integrated into Rotherham’s society, economy and politics. This is straightforward organised crime, with the usual organised crime aspects of political and police connections. In a large immigrant community, like Rotherham’s Pakistanis, those links are easier to form.

One girl said the Hussain brothers “owned” Rotherham, while another told the jury: “The police gave them a free card to do what they wanted.”

So, the organised crime situation is somewhat characteristic of a divided society, and it’s probably also true that the gang saw these white girls as unprotected and available, and did not see Pakistani girls the same way. But in that they were simply being realistic.

If we pull together Rotherham, Cologne and the Raqqa slave-market, they are, as I said, very different, but the common thread is the attitude that a woman without the protection of male family members is there for the taking. You can call that an Islamic attitude if you like, but I tend to think it’s almost a universal attitude, one which Western society has only recently rejected. To make it untrue, rather than merely unfashionable, requires more ruthless and determined state action than Rotherham Metropolitan Borough or the South Yorkshire Police were willing to take.

Which takes us to part 3, the one point where Rotherham and Cologne are exactly alike: the cover-up. For the local government staff, fully indoctrinated into modern leftism, going public with the news that gangs of Pakistanis were systematically raping white girls would be—and has been—a far worse disaster than the abuse itself. The major takeaway from the Casey report a year ago was that, even after the Jay report commissioned by Rotherham Council concluded that over 1400 children had been sexually exploited in the town, the council staff rejected the findings. It could not be true, and anyone who said it was, from The Times to Professor Alexis Jay herself, was part of a racist conspiracy.

For an organized crime ring like the one in Rotherham, anti-racism is just one more weapon available to defend their position. The local government has been controlled by the Labour party for ever, so there is nobody to even oppose the political orthodoxy.

To my mind, the political situation is the biggest problem of all. The Labour Party in towns like Rotherham is dominated by Muslims, and enmeshed in their internal cultural networks, and if those cultural networks include drug dealers and child prostitution rings, then the links are hidden from the national party, whose local representatives are unable to act on or disclose what they know because of anti-racism. The existence of this problem does not require that the immigrants be any worse than the native population; it is a simple consequence of mass immigration combined with democracy. I actually suspect that British society could absorb large numbers of these immigrants without significant damage if it did not give them votes and protected status. But an immigrant community with its own social standards and religion, plus a major voting bloc, plus a native establishment which is afraid to criticise them, is a lethal combination.

27Feb—I’ve added a paragraph; I never intended to imply the girls weren’t victims of horrendous violence and rape, but the account could have been read to imply that.

13Sep2016—Supporting evidence emerged for my view of the situation of children “in care”, from MP Simon Danczuk. I have excerpted his speech to the Commons here