January 19, 2004

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A Virginia Reader Suspects Sierra Club Not Worth Saving; Brenda Walker Reassures Him

A Reader Reports “Group Rape” (And Political Decadence) in London

From:  David Rolfe

As a footnote to “A British Reader’s” letter, further evidence of the spread of PC in the U.K. is given by an editorial in Friday's Daily Telegraph, which I have pasted below. (I cannot provide a link as the site requires registration). I think that it is self-explanatory.

[VDARE.COM note: orthography British, decadence universal.]

The Daily Telegraph

.. telling it how it is (Filed: 16/01/2004)

“Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, wrote to this newspaper yesterday to take issue with our coverage of an epidemic of gang rapes in London (Letters, Jan 15), which are running at an average of one a day. In this space on Wednesday, we had suggested that the police may have played down the problem because the perpetrators were disproportionately black and Asian, though we made clear we thought the racial issue was irrelevant.

“In his letter, Sir John lifted liberally from New Labour's lexicon to promise a ‘Step Change’ initiative in the spring to tackle the epidemic, while emphasising what progress had been made ‘in the provision of 'havens’, offering ‘integrated care for victims of rape and sexual offences’.

“Displaying an urgency that might baffle many people who have recently been victims of crime, Commander John Yates simultaneously appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning to stress his officers' determination to ‘tackle the underlying causes of these issues’. He criticised The Daily Telegraph for referring to ‘gang rape’, which he described as ‘an extremely emotive term’. For some reason we cannot fathom, the commander wants us all to use the term group rape. Commander Yates implied, though did not quite say, that we were being racist in referring to gang rape.

“What is depressing here is the view the police take of their own responsibilities in the face of a wave of criminal activity. The police are sensitive to the charge that historically they have been unsympathetic to rape victims, and it is right that they should seek ways to correct this. But when Commander Yates says 'it is not ethnicity that counts here, it is the way we treat the victim", he is only half-right. The public do not expect the police to be principally concerned with counselling rape victims; they want to see the police on the streets, catching offenders and preventing crime before it happens.