A recent report from the Sunday Mirror reveals the horrors of what can go wrong when political correctness supersedes the safety of even our own children.
A child-sex ring in Telford, U.K., was reportedly allowed to flourish for some 40 years, racking up an estimated 1,000 victims. Girls as young as age 11 were lured, drugged, beaten, raped, gang-raped, and forced to get abortions. No investigation was launched into the scandal until a decade after reports of abuse were made.
What slowed the probe into such savagery? The short answer is political correctness.
Police officers were frightened to be labeled as “racist” for acting on the matter since the suspects were men of “Asian” descent, the report claims. As is common knowledge, the British media generally label those of Pakistani or Indian descent as “Asian,” unlike the American press.
Here are five of the key-findings from the Mirror’s 18-month investigation:
Social workers knew of abuse in the 1990s but police took a decade to launch a probe
Council staff viewed abused and trafficked children as “prostitutes” instead of victims, according to previously unseen files
Authorities failed to keep details of abusers from Asian communities for fear of “racism”
Police failed to investigate one recent case five times until an MP intervened
One victim said cops tried to stop her finding out why her abusers had not been prosecuted because they feared she would talk to us
Victims of the child-sex ring speaking to the Mirror identified more than 70 abusers.
One mother of a child sex victim named Becky, told the Mirror, “Girls like Becky were treated like criminals. I was crying out for help but it felt like I had nowhere to turn. If Becky’s abuse had been properly investigated by the authorities more girls could have been saved from going through this hell.”
Becky was lured by an Asian grooming gang at just age 11; she was abused for two years.
As noted by National Review, one victim who went to police about the abuse, claims authorities “tried to prevent her from discovering why her abuser was not jailed because they feared she would share her story with the press.”
And the depravity continues.
“I hated what was happening and my abusers made my skin crawl but I was told that if I said a word to anyone they’d come for my little sisters and tell my mum I was a prostitute,” another victim recounted. “I fell pregnant twice and had two abortions. Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men. … The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.”
Sheila Taylor, of the NWG Network, says there are likely many more victims than realized who haven’t come forward. “There is probably a whole cohort of young people that are not identified,” she told the Mirror.
“We are good at identifying white girls,” she said, “but are less able to identify young men, young people from ethnic minority backgrounds, from travelling communities, or with learning or other disabilities.”
Telford’s MP Lucy Allan called the findings of the investigation into the child-sex ring “extremely serious and shocking.”
“There must now be an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Telford so that our community can have absolute confidence in the authorities,” she said.
Of course, this is not the first time we’ve seen political correctness play a key role in enabling violence.
As noted by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro back in 2015 after the fatal Islamic terror attack in San Bernardino: political correctness kills. “Fourteen people are dead because a normal American didn’t want to offend anybody by reporting his suspicions about a person of minority ethnicity and religion,” he wrote.
If we continue to quiet unpleasant realities out of fear of offending or being dubbed racist, we will surely continue to see tragic outcomes such as we’ve seen in Telford and elsewhere.