The cost of ignoring the girls involved in the Oxford case is too high. Why weren't they given this basic human respect?
The first question to ask about the Oxford child sex abuse ring has nothing to do with race or gender. To mire oneself, now, in an argument about whether Muslim men hate girls more than other men do or whether, conversely, all men hate women and, by extension, so does society, would be a diversion. Before anybody divides down conservative and liberal lines, first ask: why weren't these girls listened to? Why do they describe years of asking for help and being ignored? Why did seven years pass between the first complaint in 2004 and a major police investigation in 2011? Why is this the constant refrain, from Oxford to Rochdale to Edlington – that victims come forward and they are not heeded?
That is the only question of any urgency here. Some of the answers do lie in institutional misogyny, but clearly not all. Male victims of abuse aren't listened to either. If racial sensibilities were at play, that would be a horrifying indictment of our values; and yet it's hard to believe that these cases were ignored for fear of "culturally" offending the perpetrators, when very often the investigations never even got as far as asking the victim what the crime had been.
There are practical problems with disjointed systems, and services that are overstretched but also contemptuous. There are problems with the way we see older children, taking challenging behaviour as proof that they are no longer vulnerable in the way an infant is, when it is often proof of the opposite.
The orthodoxy around teenage sexuality – that it doesn't exist, that anybody under 16 is, by definition, pre-sexual – hamstrings proper interrogation. Distinctions are not drawn between underage sex with another teenager and groomed sex with a 38 year-old married man. The consequence of which is that all the screaming sirens of exploitation are ignored; girls who act out promiscuously in one situation are then considered to have flown the coop of legal protection when they say they've been gang-raped. Does that look like feminism? That is not feminism.
There is a problem of squeamishness; inhuman acts in your own society are hard to bear. When Girl C, in Oxford, tried to tell a care worker what was happening to her, she was told that the conversation was "inappropriate". What does that even mean? You see the same patterns emerging, that the more complaints a victim makes, the more her behaviour is characterised as "troublesome" or "inappropriate". It's very easy to blame the professional, but very difficult to conceive of this dilemma. Do I believe the girl and accept that the world is barbaric? Or write off the girl as histrionic and retain a sense of security?
It's come up repeatedly that the problem in Oxford was that "no one quite put the whole picture together". The subtext, here, echoed by Sara Thornton, chief constable of Thames Valley police, is that one of these girls' testimonies was not enough. To be taken seriously they didn't just have to be raped multiple times by multiple men, there also had to be a group of them to corroborate one another. It is interesting how much we criticise sharia law for holding a woman's testimony to be half that of a man's when our own legal system holds some women to be fractions of witnesses, and isn't even clear and consistent about what their fraction amounts to.
Victims were considered unreliable because they'd run away, because they were challenging, maybe they were drunk or on drugs when the rape occurred (by any reasonable measure this would strengthen their case that the rapist had drugged them, but if you're a girl in care or vulnerable in some other respect, this is yet another sign that you're beyond help).
The Howard League for Penal Reform has case studies of girls who'd ended up in prison for criminal damage before anyone had asked why they had caused the damage. (Bethany, 14, had smashed up a car; as it transpired, the car's owner, much older than her, had groomed her, had sex with her many times, then thrown her over for someone else. It takes an impunity bordering on sociopathy to then chase her for criminal damage, but it also shows how well-founded was the confidence this rapist had, that a court would find for him before they'd listen to his victim).
The National Bureau for Children has just published a report calling for an advocate to be a child's statutory right. Enver Solomon, their head of evidence and impact, explained: "What comes through in all these cases is that children are not listened to, services are not always putting children's experiences and voices at the heart of attempts to keep them safe. Children need a trained advocate who can build a relationship with them and represent their views to other professionals."
It's not a social worker's fault that a child might not confide in them. What looks to a professional like child protection, that is, being placed in care, might look to a child like punishment – being removed from their family. A child needs someone he or she can trust, and that costs money. Incidentally, nobody whose day job is hollowing out local authority budgets in the name of "localism" has any place to comment on this battleground except to apologise.
It will take new systems, and it will take more money, and it will take more sophisticated attitudes to childhood and vulnerability and sexuality, and it will take a lot more basic human respect for people who don't necessarily tick the boxes of respectability. But before we can do any of that we have to decide, collectively, to listen. The cost of not listening is too high; the crimes it allows are too repulsive.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
The first question to ask about the Oxford child sex abuse ring has nothing to do with race or gender. To mire oneself, now, in an argument about whether Muslim men hate girls more than other men do or whether, conversely, all men hate women and, by extension, so does society, would be a diversion. Before anybody divides down conservative and liberal lines, first ask: why weren't these girls listened to? Why do they describe years of asking for help and being ignored? Why did seven years pass between the first complaint in 2004 and a major police investigation in 2011? Why is this the constant refrain, from Oxford to Rochdale to Edlington – that victims come forward and they are not heeded?
That is the only question of any urgency here. Some of the answers do lie in institutional misogyny, but clearly not all. Male victims of abuse aren't listened to either. If racial sensibilities were at play, that would be a horrifying indictment of our values; and yet it's hard to believe that these cases were ignored for fear of "culturally" offending the perpetrators, when very often the investigations never even got as far as asking the victim what the crime had been.
There are practical problems with disjointed systems, and services that are overstretched but also contemptuous. There are problems with the way we see older children, taking challenging behaviour as proof that they are no longer vulnerable in the way an infant is, when it is often proof of the opposite.
The orthodoxy around teenage sexuality – that it doesn't exist, that anybody under 16 is, by definition, pre-sexual – hamstrings proper interrogation. Distinctions are not drawn between underage sex with another teenager and groomed sex with a 38 year-old married man. The consequence of which is that all the screaming sirens of exploitation are ignored; girls who act out promiscuously in one situation are then considered to have flown the coop of legal protection when they say they've been gang-raped. Does that look like feminism? That is not feminism.
There is a problem of squeamishness; inhuman acts in your own society are hard to bear. When Girl C, in Oxford, tried to tell a care worker what was happening to her, she was told that the conversation was "inappropriate". What does that even mean? You see the same patterns emerging, that the more complaints a victim makes, the more her behaviour is characterised as "troublesome" or "inappropriate". It's very easy to blame the professional, but very difficult to conceive of this dilemma. Do I believe the girl and accept that the world is barbaric? Or write off the girl as histrionic and retain a sense of security?
It's come up repeatedly that the problem in Oxford was that "no one quite put the whole picture together". The subtext, here, echoed by Sara Thornton, chief constable of Thames Valley police, is that one of these girls' testimonies was not enough. To be taken seriously they didn't just have to be raped multiple times by multiple men, there also had to be a group of them to corroborate one another. It is interesting how much we criticise sharia law for holding a woman's testimony to be half that of a man's when our own legal system holds some women to be fractions of witnesses, and isn't even clear and consistent about what their fraction amounts to.
Victims were considered unreliable because they'd run away, because they were challenging, maybe they were drunk or on drugs when the rape occurred (by any reasonable measure this would strengthen their case that the rapist had drugged them, but if you're a girl in care or vulnerable in some other respect, this is yet another sign that you're beyond help).
The Howard League for Penal Reform has case studies of girls who'd ended up in prison for criminal damage before anyone had asked why they had caused the damage. (Bethany, 14, had smashed up a car; as it transpired, the car's owner, much older than her, had groomed her, had sex with her many times, then thrown her over for someone else. It takes an impunity bordering on sociopathy to then chase her for criminal damage, but it also shows how well-founded was the confidence this rapist had, that a court would find for him before they'd listen to his victim).
The National Bureau for Children has just published a report calling for an advocate to be a child's statutory right. Enver Solomon, their head of evidence and impact, explained: "What comes through in all these cases is that children are not listened to, services are not always putting children's experiences and voices at the heart of attempts to keep them safe. Children need a trained advocate who can build a relationship with them and represent their views to other professionals."
It's not a social worker's fault that a child might not confide in them. What looks to a professional like child protection, that is, being placed in care, might look to a child like punishment – being removed from their family. A child needs someone he or she can trust, and that costs money. Incidentally, nobody whose day job is hollowing out local authority budgets in the name of "localism" has any place to comment on this battleground except to apologise.
It will take new systems, and it will take more money, and it will take more sophisticated attitudes to childhood and vulnerability and sexuality, and it will take a lot more basic human respect for people who don't necessarily tick the boxes of respectability. But before we can do any of that we have to decide, collectively, to listen. The cost of not listening is too high; the crimes it allows are too repulsive.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.