Wednesday 4 March 2015

Child grooming.

This is a blog I never thought to write. I have watched the reports over the last years of the incredible fact that children in various places have been targeted by groups of men and been groomed into becoming the victims of gangs of men who used their bodies for sex with no apparent guilt about ruining a child's life or future prospects.
To target the children already in care, who had already been hurt by society betrays a cynical disregard for those children who needed loving care rather than the sort of brutality they experienced at the hands of men who clearly thought the young girls to be fair game.
I was shocked by the reports about Rochdale. More shocked when the same thing was reported in Rotherham and then yesterday in Oxford.
The fact that the men were mostly of Pakistani origin seems to have been the clue as to why we are only just finding out about it.
We were all afraid of being branded a racist.
That simple fact is I believe a major factor in why it has been allowed to happen all over this country. It is not just a single aberration.
When as a young teacher I taught English as a second language in Rochdale my four year old daughter went to the Nursery school a couple of miles away. Her school finished half an hour before my school so I paid for a taxi to bring her to my school every day.
I now remember that her taxi man was Pakistani and I go quietly sick inside!
It's not that I think anything happened, there was certainly no evidence that it did..she was always beaming when she arrived...but the thought of what might have happened fills me with horror!
This pattern of abuse is now being showed to have been repeated all over the country. How many more cases will be discovered?
Were these men acting in this way in touch with each other in different places or was it just random acts for sexual gratification that got out of control.
The evidence that it was mainly men from a different culture and continent is now clear. The colour of their skins is unimportant..I now pray that all the gangs have been found and the guilty imprisoned.
But we will never be sure.
The young women growing up after experiencing sex as a debasing brutal activity need to be cared for by us all and loved by us all..
The act of love being debased into a brutal expression of lust must leave its mark on all of these girls. I pray for them all.

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