The abuse of young white Oxford women by Asian men is horrifying and baffling. I had determined not to comment because my knowledge of this while I was Leader is not large. However, I am struck by the silence surrounding a question I have asked and which has generated a visible silence apart from an attack on my political leadership by a local left wing activist who said I had tried to play the race card to deflect my failure of political leadership.
He or (more likely) she has missed the point, whether deliberately or not, I do not know. Let me repeat my question one more time and see if anyone has the courage to give an honest answer.
If the abusers in this case had been white men, would the police and social workers have felt more able to intervene? I suspect the answer is YES but I do not know. Will anyone out there take their courage in their hands and give me an honest answer? I suspect I know the answer but would rather see some honesty.
I might get a lot of grief for saying this but I shall go ahead and say it anyway because I find the details of Oxford young girls abuse case so shocking that it literally makes me physically sick when I allow myself to think what ordeal those poor girls went through while residents of Oxford went about their ordinary lives. So,my answer is YES, I do believe that both police and social services would have been able to intervene much quicker had the abusers been white men.
In my opinion, these poor children have been failed by so many people in so many ways including the police, social services , local community, society as a whole. However, we must not forget that the fault lies first and foremost with the evil perpetrators of this devious abuse.
Nara Hodge
If social workers and police knew this was going on and didn’t intervene, they should be at the very least sacked, and in my view the cps should look to see what criminal charges should be brought if crimes were known about but not properly reported/investigated. I honestly cannot believe that they would have stayed their hand just because of the race of those committing the offenses, the crimes were so heinous I just cannot believe they would have ignored it just for that. I suspect it was more a case of incompetence, box ticking, mismanagement and poor leadership. Who is going to step up and take responsibility for the obvious catastrophic failings here? Should the leadership at OCC and TVP Sarah Thornton and Joanna Simons not be showing some leadership and actually stepping down? The arrogance that they think they are the best people to fix these issues that happened on their watch is breathtaking.They are hiding behind the forthcoming serious case review, those investigations never name names and point to individual failings so they should do the honorable thing and step down now. It went on under your political leadership but you say your knowledge of this is not large, why is that? Where are the checks and balances in local government then? Does cabinet not know what the officers are doing, do the scrutiny committees? Should they have not been asking questions?
Perhaps you should enlighten us as to why you think the local authority so badly failed these young girls? I don’t think the issue was race I think it was poor leadership, hiding behind the box ticking and incompetent unsackable senior staff.
Lessons will be learned isn’t going to cut it this time I’m afraid.
I would have thought that your perspective on this case was as good as we can have. However I know that such grooming and trafficking activity has hidden behind all sorts of secretive and unspoken ideas which will certainly include race issues (you don’t really mean PC do you) and also the Church, as well as the Scouts and Party Politics, the Police and the Judiciary the Forces and of course groups such as the Masons etc. Anywhere that allows secrets to go unchallenged will be compromised for evil reasons on occasions as well as good intent, hopefully most of the time.
Dear Keith,
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