"Sometimes, [the men] would phone and they would pick up around the corner, but sometimes they would just turn up and pick up at the children's home.... It depended on how brazen they were or how much heat they thought was on at the time. They did genuinely think who was on shift, who would be likely to go outside the children's unit. I used to make a deliberate attempt to let them know that I had clocked their car, that I was taking their registration plate. They would laugh it off with a good smirk.... They would sometimes say that they would have you stabbed or shot by one of their associates."Despite the criticism of the police, Mr. Anonymous is blaming the parents: Their failure to provide love created the vulnerability of their daughters to strangers posing as boyfriends. Reading between the lines, I'm seeing the police regarding the girls as wild and debauched, running off with boyfriends and then telling stories of rape. What can the "corporate parent" do if the real parents fail? Is that to be the government's explanation for its failure to intervene and save these children?
Police were called each time a girl went missing, but officers usually only arrived when the child got back to the home, sometimes "high on drugs" or "incredibly drunk", our source said.
"They led us very much on a merry dance and there wasn't much we could do apart from keep documenting. And we documented every single night, and we spoke to social workers. The social workers were passing that on. Everything we passed on, nothing seemed to go further in any way shape or form."...
He said he eventually left the home over his frustrations he was failing the children in his care and said he was not surprised at recent revelations of widespread and long-running abuse in the town.
"These young people have already been sexually abused, in many cases," he said, but children who have been abused do not blame their attacker simply because they "are struggling for love. [But] you cannot provide love in a children's unit.... It's one thing that you can't provide, and as a corporate parent it's where we fail. And if [the abusers] are providing that, plus drugs, and alcohol and freedoms, or perceived freedoms, then we're never going to be able to keep them safe."
There's much talk about the government workers fear of being seen as racist: The accusations were made against men of Pakistani descent. Reading between the lines again, I'm inclined to speculate that instead of seeing a group of predators acting together in a criminal scheme, the government authorities saw the girls as attracted to these men as handsome, exciting strangers. If the police are not otherwise intervening in the sexual activities of adolescents, they might have indeed thought it would be racial profiling to go after these men and not men who share the ethnicity of girls who leave their homes at night.
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