Rotherham:
I don’t have the stomach to go over this in detail, but there is a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
It’s a town in England where a gang of grown men, mostly of Pakistani extraction, abused some 1,600 children, mostly of English extraction.  The officials covered it up for about 16 years citing fears that they would be called racist.

Ever hear of it?

Well did you ever hear of the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001?  I imagine so.  On the heels of it the US government passed the “Patriot Act,” that significantly reduced American constitutional rights and commenced on a series of wars that seems to have no end. 

Now for a value judgment.  A man at work is in danger to some degree no matter the job.  You can’t make everyone perfectly safe.  And a woman is in similar danger; sorry but it goes with the territory.  If an adult is killed at work this is an unacceptable tragedy if there is any way to prevent a recurrence.  If a child is sexually abused, I say it is just as bad.  It certainly gets a bigger visceral reaction from me. 

I’m willing to debate some of our kiddy porn laws.  If an American who is in another country buys a bit of porn, tears out a page and stuffs it in pocket and comes back to the US, that person has committed a serious crime.  I’m not so sure who has been harmed.  Buying the porn originally was quite legal.  Keeping it secret can have affected nobody but the person.  So I am potentially more permissive than most.  But to actually carry out improper behavior with a child?  “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”  And that’s before you even add in the injury to the child.

Some 3,000 innocent people were killed at the world trade center out of a population not too far from 300 million or about 1 per hundred thousand.  England has about 53 million.  So the atrocity struck 1 per million Americans and not too far from three times as many English proportionately. 

Where is the outrage?  Where is the concerted government plan to assure that nothing remotely resembling this happens ever again?  Most people haven’t even heard of it.  I don’t know for sure what kind of pusillanimous fools our leaders think we are, but it seems pretty clear they are right; they do as they will, and we accept it.

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