God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.
SOME MEN Are toxic where ever they are and whom ever they are They need to be rooted out
I reckon it's a reasonable hypothesis that when people and orgs don't respond to something because they don't want to be accused of racism, it may be because they *are* racist, and that just for starters.
Is anything about this "grooming gang" stuff? I never even bothered to open an article about it because it reaked of British tabloid press peddling racism and bald faced lies.
12 year olds are not "women", they are children.
As an American I am embarrassed and apologize that the word woke got exported across the Atlantic. We truly live in the Dumb Times
It has always seemed FAR more likely to me that they just didn’t give a shit about young working class girls than that they were so terribly worried about racism Now of course it comes out it’s even worse than that
Worst excesses of the British press AND POLITICIANS!
I'm not having it, South Yorkshire Police? The instigators of Orgreave and Hillsborough? Nah, surely not!!!
Woke = prosecute sexual abuse cases So what are they even saying
🧐
It is like in the US, where conservative institutions again, and again, are found to either operate or cover up sexual abuse rings, but conspiracy theorists on the right try to blame vulnerable communities, and imaginary satanic cabalist cults instead.
South Yorkshire Police have a long and troubled history with criminal conspiracy against the British public. Just ask any #LFC fan.
Very timely that the Red Riding Trilogy is on Netflix now. Plus ca change
AND it's South Yorkshire police - who infamously blamed Liverpool fans for the Hillsborough Disaster AND perpetrated the violence at 'The Battle of Orgreave' (trial for riot against 100 miners collapsed because of mass police perjury - but no cops were put on trial for lies)
A scouser and a socialist here who regularly wears an orgreave badge with a mounted police waving a baton at a miners head. So I never forget cover ups by the police.
My first thought when I saw South Yorkshire was, "Yeah, that figures." Not to prejudge any inquiry, but it wasn't a surprise.
I personally know someone who was sexually assaulted by West Yorkshire plod when she was 17 - I don't think South Yorks have the monopoly unfortunately.
I'm not surprised in the slightest.
I wouldn't put anything past Thatcher's army.
Dying to see how Allison Pearson twists that information into yet another grotesquerie.
Red Riding.
It's both.
It's not.
There are literal documents in which concerns about going after ethnic groups are discussed, they're all in the report.
And if you believe those concerns would have been expressed if nice middle class girls were being picked up off the streets, I have a bridge to sell you.
Uhhh, I don't. Are you somehow confused about what side you're taking? My understanding is you think the claim that the rapes were ignored/covered up because of woke concerns over ethnicity of perpetrators is false, and they were actually covered up because cops were using the victims too.
No. I think they were ignored because no-one in authority cared about girls in care and similar circumstances, and that the "race sensitivity" excuse would have taken a back seat if posh girls had been involved.
I don't think you understand where you are in this conversation. Do you understand what the OP is claiming?
Also the idea that the patriarchy is some kind of ‘backlash’ to ‘wokeness’ is insane. The patriarchy is the patriarchy! It’s all around us! It’s the air we breathe. That’s just another way to say, ‘look what you made me do.’
[It’s the air we breathe.] No it's not. It's not even in our genes, It's in the culture we were taught as children, and the society that surrounds us. Some societies in Africa have similar genes and similar air, yet are matriarchal.
Damn, what a description, so true….and built into our DNA through millions of years of hideous evolution. I despair the male gender will ever change 😨
Evolution isn't hideous. Most of it is neutral drift in random directions, while some is adaptive. Any hideous mutation rapidly goes extinct before it can contribute to evolution.
I know. I meant it in an emotional context, not scientific. Emotionally, it’s hideous, to me anyway.
I’m a survivor and they covered up in Manchester. It was a network across the north, neither party want a truly independent inquiry. I fear this will be looked at only through the lens of South Yorkshire and made an example of, when in reality,many women no longer with us due to this state torture
[many women no longer with us due to this state torture] Do you mean they died, or they got fed up with repeated torture and chose to relocate away from the region of abuse?
They killed themselves. Directly or indirectly (drug use)
Thank you very much for clarifying what you meant by that euphemism "no longer with us".
I got to know a homeless guy who said he’d been victim to a grooming gang in Rotherham in the 80s that involved police officers and other fairly ‘respectable’ people- councillors and doctors.
It’s all about power abusing the weak. Starting to wonder, Are all men this wicked?
Erm, Hillsborough, anyone? It's endemic. Even the Manics called them mass murderers in 1998. open.spotify.com/track/5q0kvN...
'Woke' is almost certainly the wrong word for it but I would be very surprised if 'not wanting to rock community relations' did not contribute to an unwillingness to investigate properly. It undoubtedly did in West Yorkshire. And that knowledge in turn enabled abusers within the SY Force itself.
['Woke' is almost certainly the wrong word for it] Woke is the past tense of the verb wake, not an adjective. I wake up each morning. I woke up today.
It is. It's also something else. Words can have more than one meaning - and in English, often do.
But I think that attitude ultimately does come out of sexism - the victims didn’t matter enough to the police to be worth risking trouble for.
And yet the reverse is usually true if a child goes missing. If a girl goes missing it's top headlines, but if a boy goes missing it's usually not on the news at all. Same if a girl or boy dies by a stray bullet in a war situation. Only girl deaths matter to mainstream news.
(And also racism, actually- the assumption that the Asian community is a monolith and will all react the same way)
There were many prejudices driving those decisions. I'd certainly agree with both your comments. But I'd also add in class. These were very vulnerable girls from the bottom of society. Had they been middle class ones with vocal, connected parents, I think SYP would have acted differently.
Yeah, absolutely you're right, I was just thinking I should have also said class!
Sometimes snr police officers have wanted to avoid the appearance of racism because they were aware the ranks of their officers included violent racist misogynist classists, but they didn't think it would be good for society if people realised.
Whenever people talk about trust in an institution they always seem to miss that you don't want blanket trust, you want a correlation between trust and trustworthiness. There are some things you can trust the police for other things you can't.
I've had some brief but interesting conversations with insiders who feel the police are under cynical attack - which they are. What they don't seem to hold in their mind is that fundamentally they're under attack because of massive cultural failures, papered over by their own cynicism.
Indeed. There will always be some who jump on a bandwagon for their own purposes. Their bad faith doesn't undermine the main case, which stands or falls on its own merits.
This is so very true! It is sickening beyond words.
It is heartbreaking, I cannot get the horror of it out of my head! 😢
You assume that because the media has been pushing that narrative for decades. But this is about the police being actively involved in committing these crimes. They were protecting themselves.
Not just the media. I was a councillor in Bradford from 1999-2003. Although I wasn't senior enough to have been directly involved in decisions influenced by perceptions of 'community feeling', I know enough from those who were that it was a factor.
It feels nicer to think that. That doesn't mean it's actually true.
I've had a lot of shit to deal with in life so it's hard to relate to people who are still so in denial of how much structural and systemic injustice there is in this nation.
Exactly, 'rocking the boat' in this situation meant digging into the collusion between police officers and criminal gangs, something multiple police forces have *never* been keen on doing.
It meant both. Political decisions can (and almost always do) have more than one reason behind them. But those links between corrupt and criminal coppers, and the gangs involved, would have been much less likely in the first place if the abuse had been dealt with properly.
You have your chronology backwards. They didn't start being corrupt because of the cover up. They covered it up because they were already corrupt.
That's not quite what I'm saying. Bent and abusive coppers look for opportunities, the same as abusers, cheats and defrauders anywhere. The cover-up - which went *far* wider and higher than just them - enabled them to join in the abuse because they knew (or expected) it wouldn't be exposed.
It's instructive to think a little about exactly *why* the cover-up had to go 'wider and higher'.
We're in danger of going down conspiracy rabbit holes here. The answer is straight-forward: moral cowardice.
Rejecting the analysis of structural and systemic factors is what leads people down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Moral failure is the issue. Not the answer to the issue.
It's like you're desperate to find a reason to locate the cause outside of existing systems and structures. It's weird.
The police being directly involved contributed to an unwillingness to investigate properly.
Good news they've been arrested and presumably charged. Next, will they get fair trial and be convicted and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole?
Given their part in Hillsborough and Orgreave, why am I not surprised…god, how awful.
[why am I not surprised] Probably because you're intelligent in a way that makes you skilled at predicting future actions based on trends in past actions. This type of intelligence has evolved very well in humans, other apes, crows, squirrels, octopuses and squids, wolves and dogs, many cat species.
Can we now expect gangs of bare-chested tattooed thugs wielding flags of St George protesting outside local police stations and threatening to burn them to the ground?
Oh so its even worse than the Lazerpig vid implied
It’s as if the brutal fiction of David Pearce’s Red Riding Quartet, itself based on Yorkshire police dismal handling of the Ripper, still represents that police force today. I struggle to understand it, so repulsive is this revelation.
It's like people forget or pretend not to know what "patriarchy" even MEANS
In 1969 I witnessed a plain clothes officer set fire to a guy's head. He had an afro haircut and was of course, not white. This was in Coventry and they wanted to know where his drugs were. Not that he had any but he was black therefore....nothing changes in the force
Terrifying and horrific
I thought Line of Duty was a bit far fetched, but turns out I'm just naive
It was because in real life Ted Hastings would have been pushed out far earlier than in the show
In the 1990s already this sort of conspiracy was every other season of Prime Suspect but somehow "woke" was a more plausible explanation.
Not plausible, but more likely to cause a rage bait reaction for certain media outlets.
I worked in child protection - meant teamwork with police Most were good, some were fantastic, but there were always those who gave you a bad feeling, either being creepy or making inappropriate “jokes” I’ve long suspected policemen abused these girls - seen as soiled goods/trash; so who cares?
South Yorkshire police's malice & incompetence caused Hillsborough; then they lied about it. They helped screw up the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, & led the assaults at Orgreave. Much of the leadership were early career officers at the time & imbibed the rotten culture from their mentors.
This abuse happened between the mid 1990s and early 2000s. In 1997 the South Yorkshire police had a case thrown out of court, after it transpired that they had made the Black male suspect stand in an identity parade alongside *eight white men in blackface*.
Jesus H. Christ!
Weren’t they also ‘not the good guys’ in much of the miners’ strike & Hillsborough stuff? They must be almost on a par with the Met by now
Eh, the only officer named is a Hasan Ali, as pictured below. Ethnicity of others accused is unknown
Presumably this is because they are still alive and may be prosecuted.
Indeed, but the implication in the original post was the girls were raped by white, racist cops, so I read the story with interest and found nothing to support that, with the only evidence being against that
Nothing in the original post implied "white, racist cops"
My mistake. It was the OP's second post that would lead people to believe the story in her first post was about white, racist cops If not, what was the point of sharing that story?
30 years in prison for the police captain who set up that blackface farce. What punishment did he actually get, if any?
It is hard to argue that a police force that was — according to their own testimony in this case! — regularly using a blackface policy as part of identity parades was overburdened by concerns of racial sensitivity.
'successfully' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there
Came here to say the same, it must be the strongest word in the English language.
let's not forget this is also the force that tried to hide its disastrous Hillsborough mistakes by blaming it on the victims
And were largely responsible for Orgreave, in the sense that there were also personnel from other forces involved, but it was SYP's operation & they used tactics to fake evidence that were repeated at Hillsborough. In fact, they seem to have genuinely shocked some of the officers from other forces.
The really wild part of that is, one of the guys in charge ended up being quite high up in West Yorkshire Police, suspended with pay... and basically left that force without a top-level manager until he retired. The level of boys-club corruption is staggering.
Clarifying, I'm referring to Norman Bettison, a man for whom the "controversies" section is most of his Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_...
And he doubtless doesn't give a f---. Sitting at home with his knighthood and a generous police pension. Bastard.
pseuds corner but racist af
Sexual violence has been both endemic and normalised within many British police forces — and sexual violence against girls from working class backgrounds has long been ignored by the wider British state. Sometimes the obvious answer is, in fact, the correct answer. Nobody cared about these girls.
I’ve known groomed LAC who’ve been ignored by the police as “troublemaking sluts.” It has nothing to do w police not wanting to be seen as racist & everything to do with how they view victims.
Too bad the 12-yr-old girls couldn't get on social media and tell what happened to them, and thereby find a lot of caring people worldwide. I care about victims. The event that hurt me most was a little girl playing a board game with a friend on front porch, man pretends to be looking for lost dog.
That last sentence seemed so obvious right from the start. But I suppose someone's need to stir up racist shit overrode their desire to "protect our children", and here we are.
Combined with the appalling stats on rape prosecutions throughout the British justice system.
The only agency that cared, who helped it come to light, were the youth service (whose funding subsequently got cut)
This is an horrific case, but I think racist, sexist, horrible police are in every police force in the world, unfortunately. It appears to be the result of too much power without checks and balances.
I say this all the time! No one cares/cared about working class girls! If they're in care you can at least double the amount no one gives a shit, and if they're awkward or 'naughty' you can times the amount by like fifty.
holy shit, a US ambassador did this in 1960s Congo but didn't realise it was an ongoing strategy in UK...
This is a country with a popular TV programme that was literally a minstrel show running for most of the 70's so yeah en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bla...
Holy shit that was a trip.
The original Minstrels were still doing shows at Butlins Holiday camps until 1989. A Scottish off-shoot ran until 2019, but only stopped wearing back-face in *2005*. www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/angu...
Wow. I was trying and failing to find out stats on TV repeats because I was pretty sure I saw some old episodes being run on the BBC in the early 80's.
Very unusual for South Yorkshire police, they had such a spotlessly clean record in the 80s, oh hang on....
That’s shocking. The only time I ever had to look at an identity parade, a few weeks after the event, they had made sure they used only people who looked extremely like each other, and none of us could make a positive identification. Perp walked free accordingly
One significant improvement since the 1990s is that they are conducted with video clips taken from a database via a system called VIPER. So the police don't have to find a number of similar people to carry it out. And also there is more scope for challenging the composition of the parades.
Yeah was on video. The time elapsed between it happening and the identity parade didn’t help though
I can imagine.
It is very funny to see people learning about the many crimes of Britain's most evil police force in real time. Couple of years ago 5 of them were sacked for sharing jerk off pictures of actual death scenes and mocking the victims. That's the tip of the iceberg.
'Most evil police force' seems like a bold claim, considering that North Yorkshire Police and West Yorkshire Police also exist.
The entire Yorkshire force are demons incarnate. Just rapists, thieves, psychopaths all the way down.
I really want to not believe you but sadly I do.
The fuck
Wot
Sorry WHATTTTT
The Red Riding Trilogy.
It made me feel sick to listen to the testimonies of the survivors. Who could they have turned to? Just dreadful.
Incoming barrage of articles about how many brown coppers there are incoming, then
it's almost as if the attitudes of too many in the police haven't really moved on much at all from the times of the Yorkshire Ripper cases, especially when they thought he only targeted sex workers
I can't fathom how the South Yorkshire Police Constabulary can possibly still exist after the Hillsborough and Rotherham scandals. One like this would be enough to sink most forces. The organisation must have friends in very high places.
As with the equally unsurprising news that about 40% of the men involved in the anti-migrant rioting last summer had form for beating and abusing their own wives and kids: the problem is men who think that women and children are a resource for men to enjoy. They will march and stamp and bellow about
'foreigners' (or 'queers') being a threat to young girls, but what they are frightened of is someone else getting to abuse the people they think are *theirs* to stick their dicks in. So the police decide that these kids don't matter and no one will believe them so they are available for use, too.
This is wretched and disgusting but also not surprising.
we were victim of a 70s child sex ring in the BBC, and it was for sure enabled by the metropolitan police (some of whom were likely participants) - as also one of Cyril Smith MP's victims (and we all know the cops & MI5 covered up for him until he died) - this stuff is endemic in people with power
and it goes without saying that these were all white and affluent men
Orgreave, Hillsborough, now this. SY police. No words.
Who are the team investigating allegations of police officers committing child rapes in Rotherham? Obviously an independent external force? No, in fact they're South Yorkshire Police. Since when does a police force investigating itself pass ANY sniff test? What an insult to the survivors.
See my quote-with-comment, done to make your bleet more visible to my followers.
I spent time in Rotherham around this era,the people from outside South Yorkshire running defence for Plod and trying to minimise how much hatred of poor,troubled kids from the wrong estates over rode ANY stated concerns about community cohesion in these comments are speaking out of their arses.
oh my god of course the police were in on it. this makes all the sense in the world.
It is an evil win win for them.
Anybody at Orgreave or Hillsborough can testify as to just how "woke" SYP are.
Those people clearly never watched or read 'Red Riding.'
Sadly, the many officers who did not tolerate such criminally, and internal investigators that did their job, were largely dispatched by Theresa May's swingeing cuts in 2011. Recruitment by Capita etc further corrupted forces.
The idea that the police would be worried about seeming racist never rang true with me. I mean it never bothered them much before or since
No, senior officers were very concerned about their Force seeming racist. That is distinct from policies or individuals *being* racist. Bear in mind this was the era of the 2001 riots, the BNP spike in popularity and the MacPherson Report. Commanders were very conscious of police image.
They were. What senior officers weren't very conscious of, as we saw via MacPherson and elsewhere, was what their own officers were actually doing on the street. The disconnect between what senior officers were saying, and what the people they led were actually doing, was deep and profound.
I remember a time when paedophiles were criminals. Not Presidents, Politicians and Police Officers.
I remember that too. It didn’t last long 😞
SY Police have a long, long history of being pretty dreadful.
Sounds like Florida.
Pretty much all of the Yorkshire plod - North, South, West - have a long history of being deeply shit. Which is why West Yorkshire ‘missed’ Peter Sutcliffe (not a priority, you know?) amongst other atrocities on their watch. North and South are no better.
Also jfc the Guardian "the women, some as young as 12" the word you're looking for is CHILD
Child would be pre-puberty, which for a girl is usually under 12. Adolescent would be past puberty but under age of consent. Woman or man would be over age of consent. Gal or guy would include any or all of the above. At least that's the usage I prefer.
Alright nonce 👍🏼
In English legalese 'man' and 'woman' are frequently used to mean a male or female of any age - for example in the Equality Act 2010 s.212. Might be the reason why it's used here?
It's being used here because The Guardian haven't got the balls to say what happened which is the cops raped children.
It's because they're women now, at the time they're making the allegations - it says 'the claims by the women, some of whom were as young as 12 at the time'. Not particularly well phrased, but it isn't saying they were women at the time.
I just figured institutional racism made them assume the victims were also Muslim and so they didnt give a shit. Goes to show, when it comes to police always assume the worst then find something even worse than that and you'll find the truth
Abolish the police
we're going to need a Scooby Doo unmasking meme. is this a problem due to wokeness? nope, it's the patriarchy again
Rewatched Line of Duty in the last few weeks. The ending of the last series got a lot of criticism at the time but it was spot on about police corruption
And Neil Morrissey’s character who was corrupt as hell but allowed to quietly retire. Thats standard practice across much of the civil service, “Just go and don’t make a fuss”
mid-90s and early 2000s Mighty white of them to address this 2025
What the hell is going on in this world? I feel truly sickened reading that 😭
The exact same thing that's always been going on. Cops have never been the "good guys"
I have never thought that the police force suffered from being "too woke" of all things!
You may not have encountered Sussex Police!
This sickens me to the core on every front.
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Bit like the Stephen Lawrence case. Not just racism - corruption too.
The impression I always had from that was that the Met preferred admitting to institutional racism rather than admit that many of the officers involved were corrupt and in the pay of a suspect’s drug lord uncle.
Quite. Links to the Brinks robbery.
Here we go: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-6737...
It was never about race. It was about a prevailing culture that throws young working class girls (especially those in care) on the scrapheap.
Really does tell you who has zero experience with the actual police that "They were afraid of being called racist" was being touted as a reason, versus the actual lived-experience of basically everyone in SY: i.e. the police are racist, classist, sexist, and ultimately frequently abusers themselves
I used to live near their Snig Hill station and 1000% this. Anyone who's ever had an interaction with SYP knows that they're bastards even by the standards of British cops.
Those that are afraid of being called racist, are usually racist.
Everybody knew this. The only people treating this seriously were GB News and that except in the case of a few more delusional and stupid contributors was a thing they said to push a line rather than because they believed it