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Walter Egon's avatar

I am just a Norwegain woodworker, but I am not stupid and I read widely. I have known about these mostly pakistani rape gangs for ... a decade?

I can imagine all too well the soul-crushing effect of officialdom's 'negligence' on a father of these girls. What worse betrayal could you conjure up? The crime itself despicable beyond belief, and then the cowardly, mincing sweeping under the rug?

Enough to make one want to kill someone. Where I come from, we used to do that, to those kinds of criminals; Outlawed and fair game. How we have progressed since then!

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The Birds 'n' the Bayes's avatar

Wow that tweet is somehow worse than I was steeling myself for it to be upon clicking through. I tried mostly to stay away from discussion of this because I know how easy it is to over-index on unspeakable horrors that will, sadly, always be going on somewhere, at some time, but which are much rarer than they tend to appear based on cultural fascination with them. I think it tends to leave people more scared than they should be, misapprehending the actual risk to them or people they care about, or the overall scale of the problem.

It seems this was not really such a case. I had no idea of the scale until this recent furore, and I feel a bit ashamed of having lobbed it into the "undoubtedly a fucking horrible situation, but probably just not something most people should be scaring themselves over, it's worth not fixating on this stuff" bucket. If anything it seems like public response was out of whack the other way.

A quick bit of messing about with the ONS population statistics suggests to me there are about 10k girls 11-16 in Rotherham. The gang there had 1500 victims. That isn't quite the 15% you'd immediately think because they operated over some period of years in which more than 10k girls will have passed through that age range, but then on the other hand they targeted white girls specifically, so the pool is a bit smaller than all girls, and the population was probably a bit lower back then. It'll be hard to nail down the exact number but it's on the order of a 1/10 risk to any given white teen girl in Rotherham during the relevant years, very roughly.

Even a risk of 1/100 would be totally out of whack with the risk from most of the sorts of grisly things that tend to snag headlines but which most people are probably best placed to just ignore because, horrible though they are, the risk to any one person is negligible. This genuinely looks to me to be in the 1/10 range.

There are active war zones that would have been better places to raise a white girl than Rotherham, and it was *far* from only Rotherham that was affected.

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