Thomas Sowell often says that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.” What he means by that is that there is no perfect solution to any problem. There are always negative consequences to one degree or another.
Greater safety means less freedom. Greater transparency means less privacy. Greater knowledge shatters innocence.
The trade-offs required to solve one problem sometimes lead governments to do nothing, the status quo being the better alternative. This seems to be the course taken by governments all over the world when it comes to combatting child sexual exploitation. Do nothing.
In England recently, concern about the government’s failure to adequately address the problem of child sexual abuse was raised by Elon Musk. In early January, Musk on X criticized Kier Starmer, the UK Prime Minister, for failing to prosecute members of the “rape gangs,” euphemistically called “grooming gangs,” during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.
In a report issued in 2014, “An Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham,” it was revealed that between 1997 and 2013 groups of Pakistani men had systematically recruited local white girls and sexually exploited them. According to the report:
“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. 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. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”
Over the entire 16-year period, the local police did little to stop this abuse. The report goes on:
“Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham. This came from those working in residential care and from youth workers who knew the young people well.
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 CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover-up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.”
It was determined that the failure of officials to act was in part because the perpetrators were Pakistani muslims, and it might be perceived as racist and Islamophobic to investigate the allegations aggressively.
After this report came out, which covered the area of Rotherham, British authorities launched another, broader investigation into the problem. That inquiry lasted seven years and covered an examination of more than 6,000 cases of child sexual abuse across all of England and Wales.
“The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse,” found, like the earlier report, that there were serious failures across all institutional sectors of the government.
Members of the government didn’t do their jobs.
After Elon Musk drew global attention to the continuing failure of these officials to do their jobs three years later, the UK Telegraph reported that only 5 of the 20 recommendations made in the 2022 report had been implemented. None of the recommendations implemented did anything to stop the rape gangs, whose actions triggered the Rotherham investigation more than a decade ago.
There is nothing unusual about this.
When was the last time you saw any government anywhere do anything that has had a substantial impact on reducing child sexual abuse? I’ve been investigating this for over 50 years, and I have yet to see a reduction in the problem. Sexual exploitation is up and continues to get worse everywhere.
The same is true in the United States.
We have known since at least 2004 that vast numbers of children in our public schools become victims of sexual exploitation by an adult in the school system sometime between kindergarten and twelfth grade. According to a 2004 study by Charol Shakeshaft, 9.6 percent of them.
What has been done about it? Teachers and volunteers have been sent to classes to learn about the problem, learn how to report it, learn what to do when they see it. The result? A year and a half ago, a follow-up study led by researchers at John Jay College found that the number of children who experience educator sexual misconduct during their school years is 11.7 percent.
The problem has not gotten better. It’s become worse.
Why is that? It’s because what our officials are doing is not addressing the problem. The predators are the problem, and our government refuses to implement common-sense policies to keep them away from children. That would require them to implement moral standards on those who are hired to be involved with children. Judgments about their character would have to be made.
Investigations into their private lives would have to be conducted. Close supervision would have to be imposed.
We can’t have that. It would involve similar scrutiny of the bosses. We definitely can’t have that.
It’s easy to criticize England for its incessant investigations of, and little action to, reduce child sexual abuse. We are no better here.
One of the things we learned about child sexual predators during an investigation I directed in the 70s and 80s for the State of Illinois is that most predators seek relationships and act cooperatively with like-minded predators. Additionally, large-scale sexual exploitation of children most certainly involves multiple offenders. They operate in concert with each other.
Several years ago, there was a global sex ring that was identified by investigators in Europe. It operated on the web, boylover.net. Investigators determined that there were 70,000 members of the ring. Police departments all over the world became involved in the investigation. There were only 184 prosecutions that resulted from that investigation.
I wrote about three of the offenders involved with the ring in “The Unimaginable Twisting of Every Principle of Parenthood” who were arrested here.
There are thousands of such networks, yet governments do not have the resources or don’t assign the resources to investigate them all. So, they do little. Or nothing.
There have been three large-scale sexual exploitation operations that have become known publicly in the United States over the last few years: The Jerry Sandusky/Second Mile Scandal, The Jeffrey Epstein/Epstein Island case, and the P. Diddy Case, which is still developing.
Yet, there was only one prosecution for sexual exploitation in the Jerry Sandusky scandal—Jerry Sandusky. In the Epstein Case, there has been one prosecution for procuring children for Epstein—Ghislaine Maxwell. Only P. Diddy is being held for prosecution in his case so far.
You can be sure there were far more involved in the sexual exploitation of children in both the Sandusky case and the Epstein case. Where are the investigations? Where are the prosecutions? Where are the laws to stop that kind of exploitation in these cases from happening again?
Given the pattern we see, the same kind of inaction, no doubt, will be manifested in the Diddy case.
Then, there is the complicity of our churches in the exploitation of children. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the unaccompanied minors who are missing, three-quarters of them, 323,000 to be exact, over the last five years. Non-profit organizations, primarily church-affiliated non-profits, received about $42,500 per child to move them from the border to the interior, where they were placed in long-term care.
Now, nobody knows where they are, and authorities believe they are mostly likely being exploited for sex, labor, or both.
We have supposedly caring organizations that either turned a blind eye to questionable final destinations or were oblivious. These organizations might have delivered according to their contracts but did not do their job.
The bottom line is the government is not doing its job. The church isn’t either. And we’re letting it happen.
There is something we all can do about it. First, become active in a bible believing church. Second, learn the biblical worldview and live by it. Third, become informed on these issues. Fourth, become involved in local, state, and national elections—especially local ones. Fifth, find good people to run for every office and support them, or run yourself. And finally, hold every elected official accountable and let them know you are watching.
“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” James 4:17
Read more:
Victim of Mass Sexual Assault Doesn’t Want You to Get the Wrong Idea
(Front Page Magazine)
How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up
(The Telegraph)
Britain’s Long-Overdue Reckoning With ‘Grooming Gangs’
(The American Conservative)
The Grooming Gangs of the United Kingdom: An Explainer
(The Epoch Times)
Breitbart: Muslim Grooming Gangs
