Yesterday, Jim Geraghty devoted his unmissable commentary to the topic of Britain’s rape gangs, and as usual it’s a powerful, well-documented, and this time terrifying report. It’s hard to read the vile tortures that were inflicted on young English girls at the hands of rape gangs with the practical connivance of local and national government, including the very social service institutions that were established to protect them. Jim also importantly dentifies some novel aspects of the latest upsurge of rape and torture stories such as the weaselly evasions from politicians. Keir Starmer and the progressive establishment is general are hinting strongly that “far right” exploitation of concerns over mass rape is reason to hold aloof from rash action in response, let alone hasty condemnation of official inaction. It’s not working. I shall return to some of these new and specific evasions in coming days.

But the main truth about what has become an international scandal — “Britain shamed before the world. etc.” — is that almost everything about it, including some of the most horrifying details, has been known for more than a decade. I haven’t lived in Britain since 1988, moving between the U.S., Australia, and Central Europe, but I visit home frequently and I’ve been astonished at how there’s been another Rotherham in the headlines week after week, with occasional trials and sentences to be sure, but no sense of a national emergency or a serious national response.

Hard to believe? To convince you, I’m presenting here excerpts from one of two NRO articles I wrote on this topic in 2014 and 2016. “Rotherham’s — and England’s — Shame,” appeared on August the 29, 2014, and focused on explaining the various social pathologies that persuaded an entire society to look the other way while it poorest, lowliest, and most helpless young women were brutally raped, tortured, and murdered in plain view.

We often read or hear from the media that a nation is “shocked” or “horrified” by the revelation of some crime or government scandal. It is almost never true. At best, most people are disapproving or mildly interested in the shocking news. Since Tuesday afternoon, however, Britain has felt real shock and horror over the report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this case are the local government authority, the police, and the child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them . . .

The 1,400 girls were all white and of Christian background and English ethnicity while all but one of their exploiters were Muslims of Pakistani heritage. (The report describes the men delicately as “Asians,” but so far no Hindus, Sikhs, or Hong Kong Chinese are among their number.) As in other recent cases, the men targeted the girls in large part because they were white Christians, culturally speaking, and thus “worthless.” They actually told the girls that this was so. Still worse, the police also treated the girls as worthless when they bravely ignored the physical threats against them (one man poured petrol over a girl and threatened to light it) and sought police help. As a result, some of the girls came to believe they were in fact worthless, which, of course, made them more tractable to the gang. Others committed suicide. Many of the survivors will experience, perhaps for the rest of their lives, prolonged bouts of depression, self-contempt, shame, and other psychological disorders. . .

The motives of the exploiters, though vile, are not hard to understand. They plainly include both racism and sexism alongside the lust and cruelty enabled by their misogynistic culture. But what explains the silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities? Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they were “racist.” Most people in the Muslim community were unaware of this criminal conspiracy (and, shocked and horrified like everyone else, they now condemn it). But when it was brought to the attention of “community leaders,” they too played the race card to suppress further investigation. To uncover such scandal would be not only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy . . .

The authorities’ contempt was ill deserved by any standard. Many of the young women victims have proven to be brave, decent, and articulate. All of them were bullied, deceived, and beaten into submission by their tormentors and betrayed by those legally obliged to protect them. But the moral character of the victims is irrelevant in any case. So-called sluts deserve the same police protections as the rest of us — arguably they deserve more since they are at greater risk. Instead, these girls were seen by officials not as children in need of protection but as powerless pieces of meat who scarcely deserved the rights of British citizens and who could be safely ignored to avoid embarrassment . . .

Ultimately, this mess is the result of progressive official policies. It will recur endlessly until the policies are changed. Ordinary citizens — especially working-class “Old Labour” voters — realize this. The only good aspect of this scandal is that this time they seem enraged enough to insist on real change.

But I was wrong about that.