1,400 children in Rotherham UK sexually abused by "Asian" gangs...

[sibelian]

Police turn a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11057647/Rotherham-sex-abuse-scandal-1400-children-exploited-by-Asian-gangs-while-authorities-turned-a-blind-eye.html

Prof Jay said: “Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the police gave no priority to child sex exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.”

It emerged that there had been three previous reports into the problem which had been suppressed or ignored by officials, either because they did not like or did not believe the findings.

Yesterday’s report concluded that by far the majority of perpetrators were Asian men, and said council officials had been unwilling to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist.

Worth noting that in this story the ethnicity of the perpetrators appears to fluctuate between "Asian" and "Pakistani" depending on which paper you read.

[hifiguy]

1. That's a quirk of UK English.

I think it may have been Violet Crumble who pointed out to me that in the UK people of East Asian origin such as Chinese, Japanese and Koreans among others, prefer "Oriental" and do not like "Asian" and that is the standard usage for the most part. "Asian" on the other hand apparently is used to refer to people from the western and southern parts of the Asian continent. Rather like "gas" and "petrol" or "truck" and "lorry" it's different usage on different sides of the pond.

Trying to word this as delicately as possibie, and if I am wrong, please correct me. I know there is a linguistic difference here and hope I got it correct.

[lapislzi]

8. Correct.

IIRC, there is about an equal distribution of Muslims and Hindus among the south Asian communities in the UK. Remember, under the British, there was a single "India" that encompassed both Pakistan and Bangladesh (then called "East Pakistan&quot . The partition occurred in 1948, over Gandhi's strong objections.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. In the UK "Asian" means "from the Indian subcontinent", generally.

[Blue_Tires]

7. +1

[Wella]

3. If these Pakistanis are Muslim, the "Asian" label may be to avoid the appearance of discrimination

Of course "Asians" in the US usually refers to East Asians.

[T_i_B]

4. An old thread from the UK forum

About Rotherham politics. It may be of interest here.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10882533

[Baclava]

5. "Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual"

“There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.”

"Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

[T_i_B]

9. From what I'm seeing

I suspect that it may be more akin to the Jimmy Savile case, where people with the right connections may have been able to pull strings.

http://rotherhampolitics.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/akhtara-spider-at-the-centre-of-the-taxi-trade-web/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10886485#post14

[Seeking Serenity]

6. Kicking for exposure

This is bad. This is really bad.