Main Edition
US
FR
October 8, 2024 - 4:40pm
The title of the Wikipedia article about Muslim grooming gangs in Britain has this week been changed to include the phrase “moral panic”. Previously titled “Muslim grooming gangs in the United Kingdom”, the name was altered on 7 October to “Grooming gang moral panic in the United Kingdom”.
Every Wikipedia article has a “Talk” function which allows users to request and debate edits. The change was confirmed by a user named “Sceptre”, who wrote: “There is a consensus that, if the article is to be kept (and for the meanwhile, it is to be kept), that ‘moral panic’ should be included in the article title to reflect how the subject is dealt with in reliable sources.”
The grooming gangs scandal, which involved groups of mainly Pakistani-origin men sexually abusing young girls in many British towns and cities, often without facing prosecution, first came to public prominence in 2010 with the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal. This was quickly followed by reports of similar widespread networks of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale and Telford. In 2014, the landmark Jay report found that 1,400 girls were sexually abused by gangs of men, mainly of Pakistani heritage, in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
Almost 15 years since the scandal made national news, prosecutions are still ongoing. Last month, seven men of South Asian heritage who committed child sex abuse offences against two teenage girls in Rotherham were jailed for a total of 106 years.
The Wikipedia article states that “Right-wing and far-Right activists” popularised the term “Muslim grooming gangs”. Despite the majority of offenders being of Pakistani heritage, the article also refers to a 2020 Home Office report which found no links between ethnicity and child sexual abuse.
In the announcement of the article’s title change, the question of ethnicity is addressed. “There was a late discussion about the possible title of ‘Ethnicity and…’, but […] I cannot find a consensus for that inclusion yet,” writes the same user, Sceptre. “Nor can I find a consensus for the inclusion of the word ‘Muslim’. However, if after informal — and possible formal — discussion such a consensus emerges, that can easily be revisited.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIt’s about time for it to be renamed “Wokipedo”.
I’m not familiar with the protocol around editing on Wikipaedia, but could someone who is familiar with it expand on why it’s possible to edit an article using a pseudonym? Surely the point is that these articles at least attempt to be authoritative, yet if no-one can identify the credentials of those writing/editing, how can any article be taken seriously?
Almost all Wikipedia editors are anons – which is encouraged as there have been many cases of high profile editors being harassed in the real world. The articles are indeed supposed to authoritative – but as Wikipedians see it, the article derives its authority almost entirely from the “Reliable sources” (i.e. cites or references) on which it’s based. The credentials of the editor shouldn’t matter. They see things like books from Harvard or Oxford university press as among the most authoritative sources. ‘Broadsheet’ newspapers are sort of middle rank, and tabloids are among the least reliable. Not a terrible system, though far from perfect, e.g. they tend to be biased against conservative leaning sources, famously seeing Daily Mail as having no reliability at all.
Thanks Adam. The point you make about citations/references providing the context for authority, depending on how individuals might view the source, makes good sense.
I think it could be argued that Wikipedia itself, should rank lower than tabloids for accuracy/reliability.
I can appreciate that there maybe issues around the use of the words Asian or Muslim, not all Muslims come from Pakistan and Asia is a massive continent. However, the crimes are being prosecuted, they did happen so it’s more than a moral panic. The term “moral panic” sounds like the dismissive attitude that the authorities took to the complaints of the young people who came forward, something that was as much of a scandal than the grooming gangs themselves!
…
That’s the best thing you’ve written ever. Keep it up !
Today ?? I think you mean ever.
True. I’d best be more encouraging. Calls for an edit. Wouldn’t want to damn with faint praise.
It’s only The Herd’s love of censorship showing.
Oh, get out of here. As if they’d bother.
This is not the moral panic of interest here. Those who committed actual crimes should be prosecuted, and that is not a”moral panic”.
The UnHerd is definitely about promoting a moral panic though, just not that one.
I quote Paul Thompson from here:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/american-academy-of-pediatrics-faces-internal-split-over-gender-transitions/
There is no daylight between that and for example the claim all homosexual physicians must lose their licenses. Or for that matter that Jews must. That the “Whites Only” signals are a desperately needed bastion of civilization itself. All such opinions represent the impulse of the stupid evil lizard brain deciding some are not in the tribe and are to be massacred.
Examples of moral panics spawning from the weak febrile minds of Social Conservatives are the moral panic over sex in movies (Hays code), that over violent comic books, then Elvis’ pelvis, then rock & roll generally, then rock & roll lyrics played backwards, then over Dungeons and Dragons, then over violent video games, then over rock & roll lyrics played forwards, then satanic abuse in daycares (they actually took some innocent scalps on that one, and the associated shaken baby fraud), than another one about violent games, then about gay marriage, and now about transgedne people.
This is what facts and logic support to be said about transgender people.
No one here nor anyone who is “gender critical” who has ever found any facts to the contrary to relate here.
Nice bit of whataboutism. 0/10 however . . . this one isn’t going away, mate.
The way you state your bilious drivel as if it were incontrovertible fact is truly laughable. Ha ha charade you are.
Wikipaedia is free at the point of use and it is less likely to be accurate than paid research; with the latter you have to read the document and know who is providing the money. I have contributed to Wikipaedia and offered corrections in my field of Corrosion Science. It is a great system but is very open to manipulation. What else can you expect?
The objecting user is pointing out the very reason why these crimes were allowed to happen and continue to happen in the first place. And why things like this will continue to happen if we can’t call a spade a spade.
Good God, you can’t make this up.
The justification for the change is based, in part, on the Home Office whitewash report. The point about crime statistics is you have to choose between quoting absolure numbers of offences or quoting offending rates. The Home Office chose the former because they could conclude that only a minority of grooming offencss were committed by Pakistanis. Of course, the Home Office ignored the fact that only abot 5% of the population are of Pakistani heritage. If you look at offending rates, i.e offences committed per year per 1,000 in the group of interest, then a different picture emerges and this group has an offending rate an order of magnitude greater than the host population.
the ‘rape rate’ in Spain muslim immigrant V spanish heritage is about 7X as great. same re Denmark I think. as this gets more well known, there will be an organised muslim backlash against the facts. this article is the first of what will become many as history is re-written.
The HO report was definitely a whitewash. It looked at the total child sexual abuse stats, which of course involves abuse within families and white men grooming children online. This allowed the report to claim no ethnic trends in the total number of cases but ignored the cast-iron link in the case of Northern grooming gangs.
How more than 100 convictions can be dismissed as a moral panic is beyond me.
The Home office is infested with left leaning apologists who hate the British
Once the unshod musclebound and ignorant Islamists and Lefties take over Wikipedia, it is time to move on. I increasingly use Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Wiki is begging for money, again, claiming they need donations because they can’t be bought. The jury is out on that.
No, it’s not.
There are few things I find more infuriating than the ‘reframing’ of crimes and incidents to make it more palatable for advocates of multi culturalism.
Sickening.
Labour (of course it would be Labour) politician Naz Shah liked and retweeted: “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” She did take it down, but funnily enough neither her nor the originator of the quote are in jail for hate crimes.
From The Publica
The Wikipedia editor behind the change, known as div > p > a”>Spectre, has been exposed as former Liberal Democrat activist Sarah Noble, a man who identifies as a transgender “woman.”
In his Wikipedia bio, Noble describes himself as “increasingly involved in progressive political activism, mostly transgender, LGB and feminist activism as a lesbian trans person.” He continues that his editing “tends to fall into one of two areas” including “transgender issues and helping to reduce the amount of cisgender, heterosexual and male systemic bias on the encyclopaedia.”
https://www.thepublica.com/transgender-wikipedia-editor-labels-pakistani-grooming-gang-scandal-a-far-right-moral-panic/
Hence, the Reddit-ese term ‘Transatollahs’.
Wonder if Sarah Noble knows the Challenors, or other former Lib Dems with a strong interest in censorship?
Trans-phobiа does not help your argument
Racist anti-White paedophile apologism does not help your argument.
Don’t agree the point about this being a ‘moral panic’. The incidence and convictions show this was real. The issue is the use of Muslim/Asian.
Govt stats estimate c3million aged 18 to 74 years were victims of sexual abuse before 16. And of course many cases remain hidden. Around 227,500 child abuse offences recorded 2018-19 (couldn’t find more recent).
So a question might be – do we attach a an additional descriptor about all these? Perhaps something like ‘ vast majority of child abuse committed by white Men’? Probably likely isn’t it.
Now of course the point made is something about a religious or cultural background making the abuse and treatment of women more likely? There are serious questions for some cultures on the treatment of young women but we should be a bit more discerning too. Remember how many on the Right support likes of Andrew Tate. He of rape victims must ‘bear responsibility’ for their attacks and demonstrated in one video how he would physically assault a female partner if she ever accused him of cheating. In another video, he said: Why would you be with a woman who’s not a virgin anyway? She is used goods’. Interestingly of course he’s said he’s moving towards Islam as his religion, but he’s behaved like this for years so religion got nought to do with it.
I don’t think there’s harm in observing Islam has a closer affinity to a male-centric view of the world much as the Wokeist religion champions feminist view points.
Yet I think your observation is astute that vast majority of the abusers today must be white men, and we live in a society that has lived with child abuse at scale for a long time – I recall here how luminaries of the 70s (such as J-P Sartre and Foucault) tried to decriminalize sex with children in France.
So, I’d argue there’s indeed a case to be made here about a moral panic on this issue seeing the issue broadly doesn’t seem to bother people all that much unless it involves a disliked minority.
Spot on and put more succinctly than my own offering
Obviously-if the gangs are Muslim men from PAkistan the way to refer to them is EIther one of the two descriptors “Muslim” or “Pakistani”. Take your pick.
Political correctness rears its head yet again.
I refer to them as Pakistani paedophile rape gangs, because that’s exactly what they are and I enjoy baiting my woke friends with the truth.
I’ve noticed a conscious effort by middle-class Labour voters to push this historical incident – well, phenomenon – utterly out of mind. It reminds me a little of Holocaust denial but it’s more modern now because it’s sufficient for the whole left-liberal edifice to collapse.
And what then did the Labour voters do who live in the cities and towns of the grooming gangs? Some rioted last summer but a great many more voted Reform to highlight the disaster of mass immigration.
Wikipedia is a left-biased pile of crap. Do not contribute. They have been captured by the Woke.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2015/04/17/kill-all-men-lib-dem-activist-in-hate-speech-scandal/
more muslim activism. theyve already controlled the narrative re slavery, imperialism, ‘peace’, and colonialism, to pretend they havent been the biggest slaving, conquering, imperialist genocidists in history.
This is why I have a subscription to Britannica; wikipedia is a pop culture platform sold as a news/fact source.
It is far, far from that. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll send you a link to a wiki page that confirms that. 🙂
The question thus arising is why this “Sceptre” or anyone else wishes to obscure the truth about the predominantly pakistani muslim grooming gangs of working class Britain. I can’t find a consensus? He can’t, can’t he? It’s time to assert that there is a truth and the squalid little consensus referred to is beside the point. There is no moral panic. There should have been one, but vulnerable white working class girls were let down by an establishment in thrall to identity politics. It’s more a point that people like this seem to be in a panic to bury the truth. There is a truth: working class white girls were exploited by predominantly muslim men in an organised fashion.
This sadly is not surprising. My understanding is that Wikipedia accepts information based on Mirror sources, but not Daily Mail sources, and accepts information based on CNN output, but not Fox News output.
A troublesome issue. It could be used as a pretext to censor Wikipedia.
Let’s be clear, they weren’t grooming gangs, they were RAPE GANGS. Men of predominantly Pakistani Muslim background deliberately targeted vulnerable white working class girls, and (to a lessor extent) girls of other religions for rape. The Police & Councillors & Social Workers who deliberately ignored this, who covered it up, who `lost’ evidence before the trials are complicit in the rape and trafficking of these girls and young women. They should be tried as accomplices to this heinous crime.
Wikipedia needs to be taken down. By that I mean that a better competitor should take over their function. There’s nothing magical about their product; a large company with sufficient resources can easily collaborate with a good encyclopedia company and create a viable and BETTER alternative to the numerous biases in Wikipedia.