Brilliant. Careful, honest analysis. Very hard to simplify and summarise this in a debate. So probably the best form, and an antidote to other approaches. Although of course, it’s impossible not to feel angry and horrified by the subject, so maybe all the more need for a philosopher to tackle it.
Helen, I'm generally in agreement with you, but I think this attempts to be a bit too "balanced", thereby excusing some serious issues.
As a frog fortunately outside of your boiling pot, let me offer some external observations:
- the UK has an incredible "lawfare" problem, particularly in the area of freedom of speech. You state that Tommy Robinson is actually in jail for "contempt of court", not his political statements. Bear in mind the court he did not show up for is part of a British judiciary now infamous for handing out jail sentences for tweets. At the moments, your courts are in fact, absolutely contemptible, and, given their latest politically motivated decisions, they lack legitimacy.
- the UK also has an incredible "two-tier" justice problem, where, courtesy of Woke-like hysteria, immigrants have been significantly privileged over native Brits. The inevitable, wholly foreseeable consequences of allowing in a massive number of immigrants who not only do not share your culture, but have a number of beliefs absolutely antithetical to it, have been not just concealed, but occasionally celebrated by your current govt.
- Elon and Trump both rightly see the current state of one of our previously closest allies to be beyond precarious. Many Americans are simply aghast at what has become of the UK. I did a DPhil there, and I will no longer set foot in it. The people who gave the world the Magna Carta are now handing out slaps on the wrist to immigrants for rape while jailing Brits for tweets.
I encourage you to recognize the temperature and jump out of the pot. The skin you save might be your own.
I think you might be on to something. I think there is room for debate about the UK’s court reporting restrictions. (I have read they don’t even make it easy to find the restrictions on particular cases and there is no central database.)
18 months for contempt of court in relation to a civil case sounds...pretty extreme to a lot of people. That’s just a subjective impression, of course, but perhaps there is also room for debate surrounding sentencing.
I share your concerns about the judiciary handing out sentences for tweets.
None of that excuses Robinson’s actions, obviously.
You might be somewhat correct about "Tommy Robinson" on this occasion. I think the 'contempt of court' thing relates to a freedom of speech issue - albeit a non-trivial one, because he was accused of defamation. I do doubt that he would be in jail if the ethnicities invoved were reversed.
However, I think that most of his visits to jail have been richly deserved.
I think that's a sound assessment. We should not deny that some people are given more leeway to flout laws than others and, while defamation is not a free speech issue if we understand that as the freedom to express ideas and not the freedom to say things that are not established to be true of individuals, there is more sympathy for some targets of defamatory comments than others. I was pleased to see that the judge in the libel case said that it was also untrue to accuse the white boy who pinned the Syrian boy down & squirted water in his face of having racist motivations. If he wanted to sue those who claimed he did for saying so, I would hope that equally high standards would apply for demonstrating the truth of those claims and those who made them untruthfully be held to account.
We can acknowledge this to be the case and object to the double standards it produces, but also recognise that Tommy Robinson specifically has not been treated unjustly in this case. I have been very critical of some things said and positions held by Nigel Farage but his clarity on this issue shows integrity as he could likely have secured more support from Musk and his supporters if he had gone with the 'political prisoner' narrative.
Did you look into the case much? Or come across someone else who did? I heard Robinson's own description of it, on Peterson's podcast.
I find it completely plausible that any given case in the UK really could be as bad as he described, but also completely plausible that he's almost entirely misrepresenting the case in question. And I'm left with a guess of about 40% vs 60% respectively. (Obviously, highly simplified, and very low confidence.)
The link to a PDF? Of a judgement, dated 01/08/2018? (24 pages long?)
I may be getting mixed up but this was a "waterboarding"[1] incident from 25/10/2018. The Wikipedia article about it says, "after breaching that injunction, Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October 2024". So I'm assuming that's why he's currently in prison.
[1] - Incidentally, to call it "waterboarding" is ridiculous. Wikipedia can't be trusted for any topics that have any overlap with political matters. After reading the misleading claims by Wikipedia and the mainstream media, and then seeing the actual video, I'm now at more like 51% vs 49% respectively.
It's a poor quality video but there can only possibly be any any water pouring onto the boy's mouth area for at most a fraction of a second.
Out of the tens of thousands of bullying clips on social media, the fact that this one made the headlines, is extremely telling - even if everything Robinson says about the reason behind this "waterboarding" is false.
What an excellent, careful and detailed article. Thank you for not paywalling it: having pieces such as this “open access” is a great resource in trying to re-centre and calm the debate (whilst keeping the urge to address the issues fresh and urgent).
Excellent essay. Very clear on the problems we face as a society when confronted with unbelievable brutality against vulnerable girls and young women. I like the breakdown of the five pinch points and what we need to do about these criminals. I would add that political will must be at the core of how these issues are addressed. And that will must cascade down to the police, social workers and judiciary. And as a society we must be able to protect the brave souls of the Pakistani Muslim Communities who come forward with their suspicions. I think this will be the toughest nut to crack. Put simply, Muslim values do not align with Western values where equality of the sexes is concerned. And this is a problem. And saying this does not make me right wing or racist. I’m simply stating evidence-based facts.
Do you have a source for the claim that the gangs were reported to authorities by members of their own communities please? In all the coverage, I have never heard that mentioned.
One revealing aspect of this nightmare is how little interest there is in these gangs by academia.
This *should* be considered one of the most important phenomena in the post-war history of this country, in quite a few different fields, including Criminology, Gender Studies, Migration Studies, and even Whiteness Studies (yet I doubt that "Professor" Kehinde Andrews will be accurately updating his theories of "white privilege" based on these girls' experiences any time soon).
I would bet £1000 that the primary reason for this lack of interest is because many people in these fields have a very good idea of what any such research would find, and they consider it contrary to their political aims. If the ethnicities were reversed, there would be 1000s of researchers getting involved, 100s of papers, and vast sums of money spent. I'm not alleging a conspiracy here; it's just the result of 1000s of individuals making their individual decisions (in some cases entirely subconsciously) having been marinaded for years & decades in the extreme political quagmire of modern academia.
Likewise the arts. Where are all the small independent films about this? Why aren't taxpayer supported art galleries up & down the country exhibiting works about it?
Likewise the police. I think we all know where the College of Policing stands. Alexis Jay's report estimated 1400 victims in ONE SINGLE TOWN over a 13 period, and yet how many men have been charged? Or even just interviewed?
Here's a quote from your BBC link:
> It found there was limited research on
> offender identity and poor quality data,
> which made it difficult to draw conclusions,
> however "it is likely that no one community
> or culture is uniquely predisposed to
> offending".
Well, I think I have a good idea why there's "limited research" and "poor quality data".
And as for those weasel words about Muslim men not being "uniquely predisposed", whoever wrote that should be ashamed. I can only assume their Motte is the fact that not every single grooming gang ever, has been dominated by a Muslim ethnic group. The hoped-for Bailey is surely for many people who read it to assume that the there's no statistical disparity at all.
Maybe things will get better in the future, but an equally important possibility to consider is that they will get worse. Even, *much* worse. And with this country's Muslim demographics, I know what I'd bet on.
Well done Helen in a thoughtful analysis of the problem and some positive suggestions in how to tackle the issue.
I remember seeing that brave young woman on the triggernomitry podcast and being totally aghast.
In my own country it wasn't till the congregation of the catholic church started to rebel that the full scale horror was uncovered. The church sought and still seeks to cover up these abuses again aided by the state. People knew ,there were whispers for such a long time. It took many brave men and especially women to speak out and who were often ostricised.
It does take a lot of bravery, doesn't it? It feels like it shouldn't be difficult because the crimes are so egregious. But an Italian reader has commented that I might be underestimating the strength it takes using a comparison with going against organised crime in the mafia and you now raise the issue of going against the church. For people who are entirely embedded in a community and have little if any life outside it and may not, especially in the case of women, speak fluent English or know how to escape, find work and start again, building a new community away from all the good people who love them as well as the abusers and exploiters and abusers, it must be extremely hard.
We must support the Muslim Women's Network and other organisations and campaigners working on this and have systems to catch, support and appreciate whistleblowers and soften the impact this will have on them. If good people within Pakistani Muslim communities do not take these brave steps and instead turn a blind eye to what they suspect to be going on, the whole community will be held complicit and with good reason because the harm done to vulnerable girls (including Pakistani Muslim ones) is so devastating.
Deeply thought through and eloquently expressed. This is a microcosm for what is weakening so many liberal leaning democracies: the inability to have frank, moderate, secular, flexible, multiperspectival conversations. Thank you.
"the conflict between the need to think statistically and the need not to evaluate individuals by statistics" - that is indeed the core stumbling block!
To understand the world around us, we have to reduce its immense complexity to a model we can hold in our heads; for many people, though, that model has only one or two dimensions (which often results in reductio ad absurdum); some can handle three; and very few can venture beyond that.
this article is quite possibly the best that can be written about the subject👏🏼👏🏾🙌🏽🙌🏿🙌 Congrats Helen and thank you so much for this and everything else.
As an American learning about this, I’m struggling to understand the complication here. A nation refused to defend its most vulnerable from severe racial and sexual attacks, for generations. This cuts to the very heart of what the duty of organized society is supposed to address.
I despise gun culture here in the US. But for the very first time, I can see a justification for it in another country.
A highly motivating statement, thank you. A reminder that civic society needs to maintain its own ordinary, reasonable conversations while the new billionaire populist plutocracy - for reasons that are completely mysterious to most of us - stoke the fires of chaos and hatred which they apparently believe society needs in order to be truly free.
Brilliant. Careful, honest analysis. Very hard to simplify and summarise this in a debate. So probably the best form, and an antidote to other approaches. Although of course, it’s impossible not to feel angry and horrified by the subject, so maybe all the more need for a philosopher to tackle it.
Helen, I'm generally in agreement with you, but I think this attempts to be a bit too "balanced", thereby excusing some serious issues.
As a frog fortunately outside of your boiling pot, let me offer some external observations:
- the UK has an incredible "lawfare" problem, particularly in the area of freedom of speech. You state that Tommy Robinson is actually in jail for "contempt of court", not his political statements. Bear in mind the court he did not show up for is part of a British judiciary now infamous for handing out jail sentences for tweets. At the moments, your courts are in fact, absolutely contemptible, and, given their latest politically motivated decisions, they lack legitimacy.
- the UK also has an incredible "two-tier" justice problem, where, courtesy of Woke-like hysteria, immigrants have been significantly privileged over native Brits. The inevitable, wholly foreseeable consequences of allowing in a massive number of immigrants who not only do not share your culture, but have a number of beliefs absolutely antithetical to it, have been not just concealed, but occasionally celebrated by your current govt.
- Elon and Trump both rightly see the current state of one of our previously closest allies to be beyond precarious. Many Americans are simply aghast at what has become of the UK. I did a DPhil there, and I will no longer set foot in it. The people who gave the world the Magna Carta are now handing out slaps on the wrist to immigrants for rape while jailing Brits for tweets.
I encourage you to recognize the temperature and jump out of the pot. The skin you save might be your own.
I think you might be on to something. I think there is room for debate about the UK’s court reporting restrictions. (I have read they don’t even make it easy to find the restrictions on particular cases and there is no central database.)
18 months for contempt of court in relation to a civil case sounds...pretty extreme to a lot of people. That’s just a subjective impression, of course, but perhaps there is also room for debate surrounding sentencing.
I share your concerns about the judiciary handing out sentences for tweets.
None of that excuses Robinson’s actions, obviously.
You might be somewhat correct about "Tommy Robinson" on this occasion. I think the 'contempt of court' thing relates to a freedom of speech issue - albeit a non-trivial one, because he was accused of defamation. I do doubt that he would be in jail if the ethnicities invoved were reversed.
However, I think that most of his visits to jail have been richly deserved.
I think that's a sound assessment. We should not deny that some people are given more leeway to flout laws than others and, while defamation is not a free speech issue if we understand that as the freedom to express ideas and not the freedom to say things that are not established to be true of individuals, there is more sympathy for some targets of defamatory comments than others. I was pleased to see that the judge in the libel case said that it was also untrue to accuse the white boy who pinned the Syrian boy down & squirted water in his face of having racist motivations. If he wanted to sue those who claimed he did for saying so, I would hope that equally high standards would apply for demonstrating the truth of those claims and those who made them untruthfully be held to account.
We can acknowledge this to be the case and object to the double standards it produces, but also recognise that Tommy Robinson specifically has not been treated unjustly in this case. I have been very critical of some things said and positions held by Nigel Farage but his clarity on this issue shows integrity as he could likely have secured more support from Musk and his supporters if he had gone with the 'political prisoner' narrative.
Did you look into the case much? Or come across someone else who did? I heard Robinson's own description of it, on Peterson's podcast.
I find it completely plausible that any given case in the UK really could be as bad as he described, but also completely plausible that he's almost entirely misrepresenting the case in question. And I'm left with a guess of about 40% vs 60% respectively. (Obviously, highly simplified, and very low confidence.)
I read the 50 odd page investigation into the truth of his claims and it's quite exhaustive. It's linked.
The link to a PDF? Of a judgement, dated 01/08/2018? (24 pages long?)
I may be getting mixed up but this was a "waterboarding"[1] incident from 25/10/2018. The Wikipedia article about it says, "after breaching that injunction, Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October 2024". So I'm assuming that's why he's currently in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almondbury_Community_School_bullying_incident
[1] - Incidentally, to call it "waterboarding" is ridiculous. Wikipedia can't be trusted for any topics that have any overlap with political matters. After reading the misleading claims by Wikipedia and the mainstream media, and then seeing the actual video, I'm now at more like 51% vs 49% respectively.
It's a poor quality video but there can only possibly be any any water pouring onto the boy's mouth area for at most a fraction of a second.
Out of the tens of thousands of bullying clips on social media, the fact that this one made the headlines, is extremely telling - even if everything Robinson says about the reason behind this "waterboarding" is false.
What an excellent, careful and detailed article. Thank you for not paywalling it: having pieces such as this “open access” is a great resource in trying to re-centre and calm the debate (whilst keeping the urge to address the issues fresh and urgent).
Excellent essay. Very clear on the problems we face as a society when confronted with unbelievable brutality against vulnerable girls and young women. I like the breakdown of the five pinch points and what we need to do about these criminals. I would add that political will must be at the core of how these issues are addressed. And that will must cascade down to the police, social workers and judiciary. And as a society we must be able to protect the brave souls of the Pakistani Muslim Communities who come forward with their suspicions. I think this will be the toughest nut to crack. Put simply, Muslim values do not align with Western values where equality of the sexes is concerned. And this is a problem. And saying this does not make me right wing or racist. I’m simply stating evidence-based facts.
Do you have a source for the claim that the gangs were reported to authorities by members of their own communities please? In all the coverage, I have never heard that mentioned.
As usual, brilliantly considered and written. Long live true liberalism and what Hamilton might have called “the prudent mean.” (see: federalist 65).
One revealing aspect of this nightmare is how little interest there is in these gangs by academia.
This *should* be considered one of the most important phenomena in the post-war history of this country, in quite a few different fields, including Criminology, Gender Studies, Migration Studies, and even Whiteness Studies (yet I doubt that "Professor" Kehinde Andrews will be accurately updating his theories of "white privilege" based on these girls' experiences any time soon).
I would bet £1000 that the primary reason for this lack of interest is because many people in these fields have a very good idea of what any such research would find, and they consider it contrary to their political aims. If the ethnicities were reversed, there would be 1000s of researchers getting involved, 100s of papers, and vast sums of money spent. I'm not alleging a conspiracy here; it's just the result of 1000s of individuals making their individual decisions (in some cases entirely subconsciously) having been marinaded for years & decades in the extreme political quagmire of modern academia.
Likewise the arts. Where are all the small independent films about this? Why aren't taxpayer supported art galleries up & down the country exhibiting works about it?
Likewise the police. I think we all know where the College of Policing stands. Alexis Jay's report estimated 1400 victims in ONE SINGLE TOWN over a 13 period, and yet how many men have been charged? Or even just interviewed?
Here's a quote from your BBC link:
> It found there was limited research on
> offender identity and poor quality data,
> which made it difficult to draw conclusions,
> however "it is likely that no one community
> or culture is uniquely predisposed to
> offending".
Well, I think I have a good idea why there's "limited research" and "poor quality data".
And as for those weasel words about Muslim men not being "uniquely predisposed", whoever wrote that should be ashamed. I can only assume their Motte is the fact that not every single grooming gang ever, has been dominated by a Muslim ethnic group. The hoped-for Bailey is surely for many people who read it to assume that the there's no statistical disparity at all.
Maybe things will get better in the future, but an equally important possibility to consider is that they will get worse. Even, *much* worse. And with this country's Muslim demographics, I know what I'd bet on.
Well done Helen in a thoughtful analysis of the problem and some positive suggestions in how to tackle the issue.
I remember seeing that brave young woman on the triggernomitry podcast and being totally aghast.
In my own country it wasn't till the congregation of the catholic church started to rebel that the full scale horror was uncovered. The church sought and still seeks to cover up these abuses again aided by the state. People knew ,there were whispers for such a long time. It took many brave men and especially women to speak out and who were often ostricised.
It does take a lot of bravery, doesn't it? It feels like it shouldn't be difficult because the crimes are so egregious. But an Italian reader has commented that I might be underestimating the strength it takes using a comparison with going against organised crime in the mafia and you now raise the issue of going against the church. For people who are entirely embedded in a community and have little if any life outside it and may not, especially in the case of women, speak fluent English or know how to escape, find work and start again, building a new community away from all the good people who love them as well as the abusers and exploiters and abusers, it must be extremely hard.
We must support the Muslim Women's Network and other organisations and campaigners working on this and have systems to catch, support and appreciate whistleblowers and soften the impact this will have on them. If good people within Pakistani Muslim communities do not take these brave steps and instead turn a blind eye to what they suspect to be going on, the whole community will be held complicit and with good reason because the harm done to vulnerable girls (including Pakistani Muslim ones) is so devastating.
..and here we are, we conservative Liberals, left out in the cold again. Some day you'll all realise we have all the answers.
Excellent article.
Deeply thought through and eloquently expressed. This is a microcosm for what is weakening so many liberal leaning democracies: the inability to have frank, moderate, secular, flexible, multiperspectival conversations. Thank you.
"the conflict between the need to think statistically and the need not to evaluate individuals by statistics" - that is indeed the core stumbling block!
This whole family of issues is an example of what I called "multidimensional problems" in my inaugural Substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanblake/p/multi-dimensional-problems
To understand the world around us, we have to reduce its immense complexity to a model we can hold in our heads; for many people, though, that model has only one or two dimensions (which often results in reductio ad absurdum); some can handle three; and very few can venture beyond that.
this article is quite possibly the best that can be written about the subject👏🏼👏🏾🙌🏽🙌🏿🙌 Congrats Helen and thank you so much for this and everything else.
As an American learning about this, I’m struggling to understand the complication here. A nation refused to defend its most vulnerable from severe racial and sexual attacks, for generations. This cuts to the very heart of what the duty of organized society is supposed to address.
I despise gun culture here in the US. But for the very first time, I can see a justification for it in another country.
Very good. Thank you z
Super
A highly motivating statement, thank you. A reminder that civic society needs to maintain its own ordinary, reasonable conversations while the new billionaire populist plutocracy - for reasons that are completely mysterious to most of us - stoke the fires of chaos and hatred which they apparently believe society needs in order to be truly free.
What Anne T said. Exactly. Thanks again, Helen, for articulating all the difficulties with this discussion.