Some actions of humans are so dark that we prefer to ignore them, avoiding the darkening of our own thoughts. When others assist us by denigrating truth-tellers or censoring news, we may be quietly grateful as life seems better when not intruded upon by the pain of victims or the abuse of their torturers.
We find it easier to acknowledge past abuse as a way of showing virtue in the present – such as recognizing the Holocaust or massacres under colonial powers. It is also easy to point fingers at foreign countries and condemn their abuses and their cover-ups. Such long-distance condemnation also enables a feeling of virtue. Thus, we can ignore abuses in our own countries, condemning their victims to continued trauma without feeling that we are part of the problem.
Selling Children’s Pain on the Web
In September 2019, the New York Times put out a long report on the abuse of children in the United States. The children were used to create violent pornographic images for the gratification of adults. It was (and is) harrowing reading. It explains the massive extent of the problem; the abduction, enslavement, and assault of little children to produce the images that some people enjoy watching. It is harrowing as it details the widespread torture of children in the United States and other countries for pleasure.
This problem was too big in 2019 for law enforcement to do more than scratch the surface, but it is rapidly increasing. US police departments interviewed by the New York Times explained that they had to prioritize by age and leave many children to their fate as the resources were simply not available – as few as 2% were investigated ten years earlier when Congress was supposed to address the problem. The Department of Justice did not even bother to issue the reports that Congress mandated on the matter. Very few in government and in society were sufficiently concerned to try to save children 15 years ago, and this has not changed.
The New York Times article noted that social media companies often protected the abusers and those sharing images of abuse (the media companies’ customers) from police investigations. A huge increase in trafficking of children over the border since the article was written has delivered over 300,000 unaccompanied children, released into the US with no follow-up, potentially into the hands of this particularly vile form of slavery.
Violent sexual abuse of children, though clearly prevalent in the United States and globally, is an extremely unpleasant subject. People really don’t like to talk about such obscene and repugnant subjects. So, these little children are pretty much on their own.
Britain’s Open Shame
In recent weeks, there has been a social media awakening of the decades-long practice of organized gang rape of early teenage girls in England. Interest was stoked in part because Elon Musk highlighted the subject, and his wide media reach undercut efforts by recent UK governments and the local media to keep the abuse and the perpetrators out of the public consciousness. The issue may be new to many, but it has been in the public domain for over two decades. People in positions of power decided that it was better to allow more girls (the girls of others) to be systematically abused and raped as they considered that addressing the problem might stoke social disorder.
The scale, like the problem the New York Times highlighted, is also vast. In the town of Rotherham where it was originally identified, it is thought that at least 1,400 young girls were systematically abused and raped, often for years on end. Across England, this is in the tens of thousands. Numbers are numbing, but individual testimonies speak of repeated torture, gang rape, and threats of death, and thousands of girls were left by those in authority to this fate.
While a particular ethnic group has been associated with these crimes, this does not in any way give the full picture. Police, social workers, and politicians from many ethnicities and walks of life chose to let it continue rather than speak out, and sometimes persecuted the victims. It is clear that people in authority made deliberate choices to protect the perpetrators, themselves, or the reputations of their group or party.
This meant that those in the Pakistani Muslim community who stood against this, some with great courage, were also unsupported and put at risk. They were left alone to fight powerful people in their own communities and in the wider British establishment.
Claiming that this is purely an ethnic or religious problem is disingenuous. Leadership and institutions – political parties, churches, mosques, schools, and foundations claiming to represent or ‘Save the children,’- actively chose to turn a blind eye to what they knew was happening. They made a choice to sacrifice more children to torture networks in the name of a façade of societal harmony.
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