If you heard Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour tiptoeing around the ‘Asian’ question when interviewing the actress Maxine Peake and the character she’s playing in the forthcoming “Three Girls” trilogy, Sara Rowbotham, you’d have noticed the care Garvey took to stress that white males were responsible for most of the cases of child sexual abuse before tentatively mentioning that in this particular instance the perpetrators were…. just happened to be……Asian.
It’s perfectly valid for the BBC to dramatise the authorities’ unforgivable and misguided attitude to the victims and their refusal to listen to the social workers who reported it, but if they fail to emphasise that the reason the powers that be behaved this way was their fear of being thought racist, then the writers and the BBC will look guilty of exactly the same thing.
Jane Garvey said that the programme "goes out of the way" to "make it very clear" that "most predatory sex offenders in this country are white men".
ReplyDeleteMaxine Peake and Sara Rowbotham both made it clear that they felt it was "class" that's the important element in the story, and that the authorities' (including the police's) failure to get involved was down to that rather than to all the offenders being "Asian men".
It's obvious what line this programme is going to take.
Give the proportion of non-BAME people in the UK is supposed to be 88% it would be odd would it not if most predatory offenders of that type were not "white"? Hardly something to be shouting about from the rooftops of Broadcasting House. The interesting issue would be whether certain groups were over-represented proportionally in this area.
ReplyDeleteIf you actually go to this document and do the math, you'll find BAME prisoners are about 16% of prisoners in this category, so over-represented by a third. Not that the BBC would ever want you to know that.
But this is typical agenda-bending mind manipulation by the BBC.
The BBC has been, and continues to be, a key player in covering-up the extent of Muslim Pakistani sex-grooming gangs across the UK. There's many examples of investigations and prosecutions not being reported, including Rotherham. If they are, they are buried in subsections on the website, or using the ridiculously broad term "asian" to describe the men.
ReplyDeleteSo no reason at all to expect this drama to suddenly reverse the well-established and in-grained BBC policy.
Garvey's comments are both racist (to white males) and dangerous (to young girls). The BBC with it's mission to inform (haha) is actually doing the opposite and ensuring that potential victims are not forewarned of what to look out for.
As with Brexit and Trump, BBC isn't going to change it's policy and views on Islam. Muslims can even go a rampage on Westminster bridge, kill and main and the BBC will do it's best to avoid mentioning Islam.
All these stances are damaging to Britain.
I know through my own experience, as a father, of some worrying examples of attempted "grooming" from this particular community. Free fizzy drinks handed out as a special favour to my daughter at takeway shops when she was a young teenager (not what you expect from a commercial enterprise), a middle aged driving instructor from BSM making inappropriate advances to my daughter and also asking to be introduced to me (clearly to "size up" how much of a threat to him I was) and over-friendliness in a hardware shop (intrusive questioning). That's just me and nothing bad happened to my daughter, but this must be replicated in tens of thousands of "initial grooming" approaches every day and millions in a year. Clearly it's not confined to that community but in my experience it appears to be rife within it and I think we know why (because of the prejudicial teachings about, and historical interactions, with non-followers of the religion).
DeleteThe BBC hasn't bothered to report on the Justice for Chelsey Wright march(es) in Sunderland.
ReplyDeleteWoman's Hour hasn't mentioned it. Maybe the BBC will make a drama about it a few years down the line and win a BAFTA.
I've heard of victimless crime, now the BBC brings us perpetratorless crime.
ReplyDeleteThe sad thing is it is that attitude that got us in this mess in the first place.