The very real danger of political correctness

by Dan Lucas

England has recently been rocked by a child sexual exploitation scandal. A report released late last month revealed the horrific sexual exploitation of 1,400 children, some as young as 11, over a 16-year period. The report was from an independent inquiry commissioned by the town council of Rotherham, in the north of England. The report actually said the number of 1,400 children was a “conservative estimate.”

In summarizing the problem, the report said “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.”

The NY Times reported “The victims identified in the report were all white, while the perpetrators were mostly of Pakistani heritage.” Based on other research cited in the report, it is likely that children from within the Pakistani heritage community were also abused, but those cases don’t come to light due to cultural pressures from within their community. Those cases would be in excess of the 1,400.

The report documents complete incompetence, shameful callousness and institutional sexism on the part of Rotherham authorities — including their police force. One small example of the police incompetence in the report, “In two of the cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.” Police and other government authorities ignored a number of official reports and presentations over the years.  The NY Times reported on one case where the parents had to sell their business and move to Spain to get their daughter safely away from the perpetrators.

One troubling aspect of the issue brought out in the report was how political correctness played a role in hampering the investigation, due to concerns with the ethnicity of the majority of the perpetrators.

The report notes “several [town council] 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.” The report found at an organizational level there was “a widespread perception” by senior people in the town council and police to downplay the “ethnic dimensions,” which left frontline staff “confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as ‘racist’.”

The report also cites an earlier 2003 report that found “’it is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent child sexual exploitation being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators.”

Huffington Post UK reported that a government researcher who interviewed 270 underage girl victims was sent to diversity training and threatened with termination if she ever mentioned again that most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani descent.

Political correctness is a false construct that takes something good and then distorts it. It is then enforced by elites who use fear and intimidation in the culture. In the case of Rotherham, young children were gravely harmed by political correctness.

Political correctness concerns certainly didn’t cause the abuse, but it is clear from the report that concerns around political correctness hindered investigation and prosecution. How many young girls could have been spared the horrors they endured if police and officials had acted sooner? If officials hadn’t been constrained by concerns around political correctness?

To read more from Dan, visit www.dan-lucas.com