For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
The Rochdale sexual abuse tragedy (in which a number of young girls on the fringes of social care were groomed and abused by gangs of older men) cruelly amalgamates two of the deeply felt concerns being given effective exposure through the campaigning pages of the Scottish Review.
Judith Orr (left-wing editor and commentator) has written a powerful piece in the journal International Socialism (June 2o12) in which she outlines many of the dire patterns of neglect and failure surrounding the Rochdale scandal, some of which are shared in context and callousness with Kenneth Roy’s insightful narrative of public heartlessness.
I will offer SR readers just three of her sharply observed conclusions.
1. The young women abused in Rochdale (often for a pizza or a poke a’ chips but more often because they believed they were being shown care, comfort, even love) felt empty and neglected and described by police as coming from ‘chaotic social environments’ or ‘council house backgrounds’. One girl aged 15, in 2008, on being arrested for causing trouble outside a kebab shop explained to the police that she had been having sex with a number of men in return for gifts of food and drink. She provided the police with an item of underwear in which was found the DNA of a 59-year-old man who later became one of the nine convicted men some four years later. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) felt that she would have been an ‘unreliable witness’ (sounds like a new TV series). But Orr points out that:
The CPS calculates that of the 17,000 reported cases of sexual offences involving children under 16, just under a quarter went on trial this year.
Adult female rape cases are ‘no-crimed’ four times more often than GBH cases: adult women too, it seems, make ‘unreliable witnesses’. Just last week, Strathclyde Police set up a specialist rape-crime team to try to bring some justice through more rape convictions. But with the younger victims such as the Rochdale girls, many were either simply too scared to go to the police or social services or they felt it was a ‘waste of time as they would not be believed’.
2. The culture of the glamour girl with the sexualisation of young girls has now become a currency:
3. But there is one statistic Orr provides that puts the personal suffering of the neglect and abuse tragedy in its political context.
Apparently the 15-year-old mentioned earlier was receiving ‘solo care’ from a company (called Green Corns) who, for this round-the- clock service corned £250,000 per year.
Green Corns is now owned by ACL:
It would appear that profit-driven multinationals owned by venture capitalists are put in charge of providing comfort and succour to young people damaged by the system, at least in England. The names and locations may change but the ‘omnishambles’ of a posh-down Westminster government imposing a fresh £10bn set of welfare cuts on top of the already gruesome £16bn-worth of cuts will not make the political/public care of troubled young people any better. More and more glaring gaps will occur in the public social life of the vulnerable. Falling through the holes of hell will continue, while millions will be made by the hellish providers.
Thom Cross is a writer and playwright
