Letters: We need an inquiry into sex abuse cases | Society | The Guardian
This letter from Anthony Stansfeld of Thames Valley police appeared in yesterday’s Guardian, and attributes the grooming and rape of girls in Oxford and elsewhere to the lack of supervision and safeguarding:
The problem is not only did people look the other way, but that the rules under which they operate can make safeguarding extremely difficult – that is what an inquiry needs to look into.
How can a pre-teenage girl in social care go missing 126 times? The answer is that her right to go to town and be groomed, then abused and raped, seems to have been regarded as more important than her being safeguarded. Until this is sorted out it is difficult for social services to do their job properly. Social care for pre-age-of-consent children must be looked into and proper rules established that makes their safeguarding easier.
The other day I learned that a former Muslim blogger, 
Last week seven men from Oxford were found guilty of various sexual offences, including rape, for ‘grooming’ young girls and ultimately raping and allowing other men to rape them. Many of them were in local authority care and others (as in Rochdale) were placed in care by their parents in an attempt to stop the abuse that they were complaining about, but carers refused to listen to the girls’ and their parents’ complaints, in one case telling one of the victims that it was ‘inappropriate’ to talk about the issue at that time. On Wednesday’s Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2, he had two guests: John Brown of the NSPCC’s sexual abuse programme, and Taj Hargey, an “imam” that the media commonly wheels out to issue sweeping negative generalisations about Muslims. The programme can be listened to 
Last week Professor Stephen Hawking pulled out of a conference in Israel, reportedly as part of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions on the grounds of it operating an Apartheid-type regime against its Palestinian subjects. The decision prompted a number of Israeli sympathisers to reassess their views of Hawking from being a genius who triumphed over adversity to being a “stupid cripple” who should hurry up and die, or similar, but one Israeli law firm recommended that Hawking 
I received a letter today from the Attorney General’s office, in response to 
Recently there has been a major outbreak of measles in South Wales, thought to be largely the result of large numbers of parents not getting their children vaccinated during the MMR scare of 1998. Despite the scare, and its author, having been utterly discredited in the years since, there remains an industry seeking to ‘cure’ autism through purging the body of mercury, supposedly the agent (delivered in the MMR vaccine) that caused the condition. It’s not only autism: chronic illnesses in general are held up as reasons not to vaccinate and anyone with a chronic illness apparently triggered by a vaccine is seen as an easy mark, as I saw a couple of weeks ago when a friend of mine, who has severe ME, sought the advice of an 
Margaret Jean “Jenny” Hatch is an American woman, aged 29, with Down’s syndrome. Until early last year, she lived independently in Newport News, Virginia, and had been working in her friends’ store. She had an active social life and according to the 
If you’re an adult male who hasn’t had any children yet, mumps can harm you particularly — it causes inflammation of the testicles and that can make you sterile. So if you didn’t get vaccinated when you were a child, you are well-advised to go and get it done now. If you don’t have strong counter-indications (i.e. medical reasons not to get vaccinated) and you are healthy, you should get vaccinated because others who can’t 
Only yesterday, someone tweeted that when asked where he was when he heard that Margaret Thatcher had died, the answer was he was on Twitter on all five occasions. Why people publish hoax death announcements on Twitter I don’t know, much as it’s a mystery why people post derogatory comments on teenagers’ Facebook memorials, but this time I did not quite believe it until I looked again at who was posting the announcement, among them Ed Fraser from Channel 4 News. Almost immediately, some of the people I follow said they might have to leave Twitter, because they could not tolerate a flurry of tweets celebrating her death, and others pointed out that this was an old lady who had dementia and died of a stroke (others have said we shouldn’t be “
This is the front page of tomorrow’s Daily Mail, one which cynically exploits the tragic death in 2011 of six children in a house fire started by their parents and their parents’ friend in a bid to get a bigger council house. The man, Mick Philpott, was a thorougly unpleasant character who, it now turns out, had previously been jailed for seven years in 1978 attempting to murder a previous girlfriend by stabbing her (and also wounding her mother). He had previously appeared in the media demanding a bigger council house because the one he occupied (with his children, wife and then girlfriend, whose departure appears to have triggered the Philpotts’ crime) was too cramped; he also appeared on the Jeremy Kyle show, in which a stream of seemingly inbred low-lifes shout at each other over petty disputes.