There will doubtless be plenty of people who find this subject very disturbing.
To those people, I say too damn bad.
Prepare yourselves for some uncomfortable truths.
The second most liked question this week was from Maddy Howard, who asks, who says, since approximately 85,000 women are raped on average in England and Wales every year, when will we blame the perpetrators and help end sexual violence?
Maddy Howard's approximations are roughly four times greater than they should be.
Indeed, there is no need to approximate the number of recorded rapes.
We know exactly how many.
22,116 in England and Wales.
And this is including a 29% rise since 2013 from 17,096.
Even if we include all other sexual offences in the same category as rape, the total is still only 67,805, making sexual offences the second least common form of crime in England and Wales, with only the murder rate being lower.
Okay, so when will we blame the first person when we start victim blaming?
Nobody is ever blaming the victim.
What they are doing when they try to assess what the situation was leading up to the rape is provide useful information for people who have not yet been raped.
Because believe it or not, prevention is still better than cure.
Lisa.
But I think quite simply when we've got a culture change and when we face up to the fact that we have problems with attitudes across society, but most importantly, in positions of responsibilities.
This is incredibly accurate, but not for the reasons she intends.
More on that later.
So this year we've seen, for example, a 13-year-old girl who'd been groomed and then raped by a number of men in court being accused by a prosecution lawyer of being a predator.
We've seen women repeatedly blamed for their sexual, allegedly sexual behaviour in situations like that.
Girls in Rochdale, for example, blamed by the people who were supposed to protect them.
The list of names of one Asian grooming gang are as follows.
Abdul Khayyim, Mohammed Amin, Abdul Aziz, Mohammed Sajid, Hamid Saifi, Adil Khan, Kabir Hassan, and Abdul Ralph.
For the moment, I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why the authorities are floundering to find an adequate reason to explain these rapes, which incidentally are probably the Rochdale rapes she's talking about.
For making a lifestyle choice, and we see it over and over and over again.
And actually, I think we need to do a couple of things.
The first is that I think we need to accept that we've got a problem.
Done.
And we need to put much more money into supporting people to come forward, to make their voices heard and to get that support when they do.
Which is precisely what is actually happening.
Quote, John Flatley, head of crime statistics at the ONS, told the BBC that an increase in recorded rapes was driven by two main factors.
He said, We have seen over the last few years a notable rise in victims coming forward to report historical offences.
But this recent set of figures shows quite a change in that pattern, with 73% of the rise due to current offences.
So victims are coming forward now to report recent occurrences rather than historical ones, and it's certainly the case that the police are taking action to improve their recording and handling of the rape investigations.
You know, what we've seen in the last few years is we've seen charities who help rape survivors being cut back.
This is a map of rape crisis centers in England and Wales.
This is a map of Muslim immigration into the United Kingdom.
This is uncanny.
Especially if you look at, say, Kent or Bristol or in Devon.
There is a rape crisis centre almost exactly on each area.
We've seen the schemes in courts that are supposed to help witnesses and protect them from that sort of aggressive questioning, stalling.
But I think we also really need to take a long, hard look at the sort of leadership that we're showing in this country.
You know, when you've got footballers like Ched Evans who doesn't accept that he's committed a crime.
Which is no great surprise given her enthusiastic consent during the act itself.
The verdict was that the 19-year-old woman was deemed too drunk to consent.
This was not a violent act of rape.
Walking back into your job where the entirely played role model in this community, and you don't have leadership from public figures, including politicians, saying this is absolutely wrong and something needs to change.
Yes, they were probably both drunk and now Ched has paid the price.
I don't know Ched, I don't care about Ched, but there is no doubt that this girl went with him willingly.
That's when you create a vacuum and these are the sort of attitudes that are allowed to flourish and that's the end result.
And the fun.
I completely agree with everything you're saying there.
And to add to that, you've got people like Deppa laughs making it funny.
It's funny to laugh at a woman getting raped.
Do you know the trick to get in the bra quickly?
She's yours.
Turn around and lift up your fucking shirt.
Make a girl laugh.
You make her moist.
I was going to tell you a joke about me, Cook, but it's too long.
Like that, did you get gash out of him?
She's looking at me and playing with her hair.
By the end of the night, she'll need a wheelchair.
But how do you know if she's interested?
It's easy.
There's one thing you've got to do.
Show her your penis.
If she cries, she's just playing hard to get.
He is not laughing at a girl getting raped.
He is laughing at the fictional scenario.
Tasteless, I'm more than happy to agree, but laughing at an individual rape, he is not.
Obviously, though, you are clearly a feminist and have clearly made it your mission to be a massive killjoy.
I'm sure he's very sorry that he was having a laugh.
Hilarious to think about either stabbing her or her having sex with you.
It's not often that I have to explain comedy to someone who's born without a sense of humour, but it is funny because it is so absurd.
Not that I would expect you to understand.
And it's sometimes as a British Muslim, I stand in the kind of a lot of people who'll understand that.
I stand at a crossroads and I think you look at Muslim women in a hijab and you say oppressed, don't have a voice, can't do what you want under a man's thumb, and then you kind of sometimes look at Western world and say, oh no, that woman has everything.
She works, she does this, she does that.
Well, actually, it's not as clear-cut as that.
This is nothing to do with anything.
This is you projecting your own bloody insecurities and problems on everyone.
And in Britain, where we are today, in fact, a national survey found that a lot of police forces in our country are under-reporting some of the most serious crimes.
Given that you look like you've just pulled that out of your ass, I'm going to say prove it.
How much is a lot, exactly?
And how exactly do you know this?
Including rape and sexual rights.
It's easy to go over and say the other, that's stigmatized, that other, you know, the hijabi, whatever, is the one who's oppressed.
We're free.
We've got to sort it.
We haven't.
What are you fucking talking about?
We are talking about rape statistics.
Are you suggesting that crime is oppressive?
And the first bit of solving this is actually having a police force, of having a government, of having policies that support the victim.
We absolutely do, you fucking lunatic.
Rather than perpetrators, that's the first.
And I would say that one of the most important things around that is about what we do in schools.
So we don't have sexual and relationships education in most schools at the moment.
It's not compulsory on the curriculum.
And there's a real problem actually, because what we know is that a significant minority of boys at school don't understand concepts like consent.
Really?
Maybe we should address the single mothers then.
Because most children are raised by single mothers in the UK.
It sounds absurd, doesn't it?
But that is honestly the position the United Kingdom is in right now.
These mothers are clearly failing to educate their children.
So we keep saying to girls you need to protect yourself and you need to keep yourself safe.
But actually we're not looking at boys too.
Just very quickly, it's all well and good to know what a fallopian chief is when you're in year six or year nine or whatever.
And most people here have done sexual education and sexual education understand that.
But consent, geez, the very basics of it, we don't understand.
Total fucking hogwash.
At best, you may be able to get away with the young boys who are being raised by their single mothers are not being taught consent.
You and I both know that the average man on the street is well aware of what consent is and how it should be treated.
What you are doing is dishonest fear-mongering.
James, so is this a cultural problem in this country?
I don't think that there is a so-called rape culture.
I think it's a very emotive phrase.
I think most men.
Did you listen to the crowd there?
I think most men have allowed themselves to be swept up in the emotive rhetoric of that woman who purports to be a journalist.
I think most men know that no means no.
I don't think that we've become more of a rapey society.
Which is more than likely to be true, even given an increase in the number of rapes reported.
Because, as we have already covered, there have been so many drives to get victims of crimes to come forward and report them.
It would obviously be seen as a failure if extra crimes were not reported.
And either way, there is clearly no public tolerance for the crime of rape at all.
So little, in fact, that a man merely joking about rape gets fired from his television programme.
But I think one of the points you made, you referred, I think, to the grooming gangs in Rochdale and in Rotherham.
And it's not just in the north, it's in Telford, in Norfolk, it's happened.
We've got these organised gangs, mostly of Muslim origin.
I think we need to.
It's a fact!
Boo all you want, you ignorant savages, but it is indeed a fact.
And such a reaction to said fact is why it continues to happen.
But more on that later.
It is also a fact.
I'm in trouble.
Let me finish.
Thank you very much.
Alright, Hermione, we'll see if your outrage is any match for Google.
Let me see.
Christian rape gangs.
And oh, um, hmm.
Um, um, hmm.
Um, next page.
Um okay, all right, okay, how about we just get to the page three?
Oh shit.
Oh my.
Oh dear.
Oh dear Hermione, honestly it seems like you're talking shit.
Oh just four pages in now.
God damn it.
I just I mean that there was there was um oh god.
Oh Hermione this is looking bad.
It it's looking like you're full of shit.
Oh fuck.
There was one in India.
That might have been that might have been a Hindu.
That might not have been Muslim.
That might not have been Muslim.
Brilliant.
Ah fuck's sake.
Damn it Islam.
You're making Hamini look like a dick.
Okay, let him finish and then come back.
Why do you scream at you?
Why dreaming?
Listen, Hermione, that's a fallacy known as argument from popularity.
Just because everyone is screaming it, just because some woman feels it, doesn't make it true.
If you look at the names that have come up in the court cases, you will find that most of them are of Kashmiri.
Which I am dreadfully sorry to say is absolutely fucking true.
Can I ask?
Is that bad?
You talk about rape culture.
It's a very pretty pretty state of affairs when the police and the social workers would not deal with this problem because they were too embarrassed about being called racist.
Which unfortunately is again true.
You're turning a question about sexual violence into one about religion.
First point.
Right, well that's a fucking stupid point, Hermione, because he's not making it about religion, he's making it about demographics.
And it actually is about demographics, but go on.
You're clearly not done making a fool out of yourself.
Second point.
Can I just finish?
Second point.
You and I know, James, that a majority of rapes and sexual violence perpetrated in this country is done by white Capital people.
If you actually look at the statistics, you'll find that yes, what you have said is correct.
Barely.
In fact, this statistic is so close to not being true, it appears the government lied on its own study when it claims that the research it used did not find any consistent patterns connected to culture or ethnicity.
It's rather fortunate for this government paper that the study was only able to ascertain the ethnicity of 38% of the offenders because we have become so politically correct in this country and we are so afraid of being called a certain word that due to the sources from which the data has been drawn, it has not been possible to identify or distinguish the nationality as opposed to the ethnicity that has been given for the offenders.
I think this is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the data because they're afraid of being called racists.
But even with the information we have, we know that out of the 38% that could be identified, 30% of them are white and 28% of them were Asian.
28%.
The Muslim population of England and Wales is 4.8%.
And they account for 28% of the number of rapes that we know of.
What's more, his point was grooming and gang rapes.
You said that we know that in Britain, most individual rapes are caused by white men.
Not only is your statement barely true anyway, it's also not a refutation of what he said, you self-righteous tosser.
If you don't think that when 4.8% of the population accounts for 28% of the rapes, I have to wonder how long you will go on lying to yourself.
I want to finish!
Do you know what?
A lot of the time, as someone who works in the news, I get a bad rap, right?
I can completely believe that.
And evidently for good reason.
For kind of skewing opinions and going, oh, Muslims done it, Muslims done it.
And you know, fair play to that.
Sometimes that does happen in the media.
Why are you admitting to wrongdoing?
Why don't you just stop trying to misrepresent the truth to fit your fucking agenda?
But what's worse is when someone speaks the truth, do you agree or disagree?
So what are you saying?
Because the majority of the population is white, so inevitably, statistically, you're going to get that problem.
Why is that a surprise?
Why is anyone booing or just acting shocked?
Of course, in a country where most of the population is white, most of the crime, regardless of any kind of crime, is going to be committed by the greater demographic.
Move away from me too now, I think.
Yes, gentlemen here.
Does it really, really matter if the black, white, orange, yellow?
At the end of the day, rape is rape and the subject.
Yes, well done for making a point that everyone agrees with because you can't possibly disagree with it.
The problem is that the people who are committing the rapes aren't being brought to justice because of their ethnicity.
But again, we'll get to that.
I think James' attitude is symptomatic of the whole Islamophobia discussion.
Bringing up the phrase Islamophobia is literally just a means to end conversation.
It is a way of saying that these rape gangs suddenly are not Muslim.
It is intellectually dishonest and I do not buy it.
Because bringing religion into emotional matters unnecessarily does not help anyone.
One, no one is bringing religion into it.
Muslims are a demographic.
Two, this isn't an emotional matter or at least it shouldn't be.
This should be a criminal matter.
Only antagonizes things.
And I think that as far as the rape culture goes, there is a problem.
It's, you know, it was in 1991 that marital rape was finally made illegal.
Oh, he's a male feminist, isn't he?
Wouldn't marital rape have been adequately covered under the laws governing rape?
Was it consensual sex or not?
What difference does it make if it was between a husband and wife?
That's not that long ago.
I was seven years old at that time.
I think that part of the problem is that too many people now just see rape as something which, oh, the woman was asking for it.
You know, women, as you were saying before, cannot win.
They either are wearing Islamic dress and they're called oppressed or they're slut-shamed.
Right, I'm skipping the rest of this guy's incoherent blithering nonsense.
No one's talking about anyone being oppressed.
No one cares about wearing the hijab or whatever they call it.
No one cares if women want to walk around with their tits out.
This is not relevant to the discussion at hand.
Can I just go back to what that gentleman said over there?
When I prosecuted cases and I dealt with cases, what I found is that you had people who committed rape were from all different backgrounds because we have evil people in society for all different backgrounds.
That is it.
There are people from all different backgrounds who commit evil acts.
Agreed.
Let's get to the crux of the issue.
Yeah, lots of people are reacting to James's comments before.
That generalization is abhorrent.
Ched Evans isn't Muslim.
This from Bridget: there's no such thing as rape culture, says the man.
Shocking.
Maddie, who asked the question in the first place, says violence against women is an epidemic fueled by the undercurrent of misogyny.
And this one from Dr. CDF: we need to take a good, long, hard look at how sexist our society still is.
The truth is, there'll be no freedom without.
Okay.
Well, I never.
No freedom without truth.
Our society is deeply sexist.
The undercurrent of misogyny.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Fucking blah.
Yeah, lady here, please.
There's a lot of cases that go undiscovered because women feel too scared to come forward because they feel that they may be judged because how they dress, how they look and how they behave.
Maybe they may have drunk too much and maybe they may not have been in the right frame of mind, but that should never ever ever be an excuse.
Yeah, okay, that's fine.
Are we gonna say that then women are banned from having sex while intoxicated?
How are we gonna enforce this?
Okay, yeah, a lady in the back here.
I know it's probably an unpopular view, but I completely agree that it is in some areas largely rape is committed by Muslims because no, I grew up in Bradford, alright?
And in that kind of environment, it is mainly Asian men, not because it's something about their culture, but because they're not getting caught.
Like I've had friends who've been raped and the police have told them, no, because it's an Asian man that's done it, probably not going to catch them.
The silence in the room is deafening, isn't it?
It happens all the time.
I don't know.
Because they're not inclusive, because the police are scared of being called racist to do anything, like there's just such a divide between...
So the police are scared of being called racist is your point?
Do you lend any credence to that idea, maybe?
I wonder why you ask this guy in the green trousers.
Is he some sort of legal expert?
What does he know about this?
Because I'm pretty sure that it's fuck all, isn't it?
Planet these police are living on, if they're actually saying to people, yeah, um, you know, I'm just gonna put the phone down now because it's an Asian person, so don't do it.
That's what that is.
I don't think they're gonna have a robbery in this country.
Oh, well, if you don't think that they do that, then that must be wrong.
All that woman's friends who have been raped by Muslim rape gangs and Muslim rapists didn't get raped.
Those guys didn't get off the hook because the police were afraid of being called racist.
How about, you stupid tosser in your stupid green fucking trousers with your stupid fucking haircut, we look at the evidence for once, you tit.
I'm sorry, I know how angry this is making me.
I know I should just re-record this and be like, look, okay, these are the facts, blah, blah, blah.
But I am so fucking furious at this argument from disbelief.
It boggles my mind how the BBC can allow this to go on completely unsupported by facts and then somehow conflate it with feminist issues, right?
So let's get down to some brass fucking tax here.
Derby rape gang targeted children.
Abdul Sadiq and Mohammed Laikat victimized 27 teenage girls.
This case came after the others in Rochdale, Preston and Rotherham, where groups of Asian men had been found guilty of grooming and raping girls.
But for some reason, the officer declined to draw conclusions from the ethnicity of the group, saying, Look at the sexual offenders list, it's mainly white men.
Because yes, in a country made up mainly of white people and men being the majority of sexual offenders, you are obviously going to get mainly white men on the sexual offenders list.
But these men were acting as individuals.
And the police even agree that these cases suggest a willingness for abusers with shared ethnic backgrounds to work in gangs.
Let's go on though.
This isn't enough.
I really want to hammer this point home.
The Rotherham Child Abuse Inquiry.
1400 children raped and trafficked by men of Pakistani heritage.
How was that able to go on for over a thousand children?
Because, quote, there was evidence that senior people in the council and police wanted to play down the ethnic dimensions of sexual exploitation for fear of being labeled as racist.
This is corroborated in multiple sources.
The report described how social workers and council chiefs were quick to dismiss the concerns of parents who were attempting to protect their children.
Despite showing signs that this girl had been sexually exploited from the age of 11, the case was closed and the social workers' assessment was that the mother was unable to accept the fact that her daughter was growing up.
In fact, the fathers themselves were actually arrested trying to rescue their own children from these houses where they are being plied with alcohol and raped.
But not only that, the perpetrators smashed all the windows at her parents' home and then attacked her brother and broke his legs.
The majority of the known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, which led police and council workers tiptoeing around the problem.
In the council and the police, there was a perception among staff that they should downplay the ethnic dimensions of child sexual exploitation.
And they were confused at what they were supposed to say and do and that it would be interpreted as racist.
How about an Oxford grooming gang?
Apparently, these pimps will teach their victims that their parents are racist towards Asians, which is apparently why they disapprove of the relationships.
They exploit the fact that police, newly trained in cultural sensitivity, are terrified of being accused of racism.
And Rochdale again.
Hundreds of young girls allowed to fall into the hands of Asian grooming gangs because police and social workers have been scared of seeming racist.
An official report says Muslim rape gangs targeted girls in Sheffield.
Care worker kept silent, fearing being called racist.
Again, people trying to call attention to this have been smeared as racists.
Are we getting the fucking picture yet?
I think there needs to be an adult debate about these issues.
Just going back to the original question and to some of the feedback as well, you know, there is a wider debate.
And I mean this really seriously.
I think in Britain, as a culture, we are scared of female sexuality.
We really are.
Fucking hell, man.
scared of female sexuality just that is just why would you say that why would you say that What has female sexuality got to do with gangs of Asian men grooming 11-year-old girls?
What has that got to do with anything?
And so there's a massive debate to have around that.
We need a culture shift because this whole idea that if a woman is a bit tipsy or if she's wearing a short skirt, then you know maybe, you know, the song blurred lines.
There are no blurred lines, actually.
Like, no means no.
And, you know, rape is completely unacceptable in any context.
And I think that's what we should really be talking about.
And women, you know, should not be afraid in any way to express their sexuality.
I think that's a really important point.
I think we can all agree that rape is totally unacceptable.
Yes, thank you so much, brilliant host.
Listen, the problem isn't that Muslim men are inherently bad.
The problem is not that Muslims are inherently bad.
I'm willing to agree that there is absolutely nothing about Islam that encourages rape or molestation.
The problem is that because Muslims are people just like everyone else, there will be members in those communities who are prone to do this, who want to do it, who are frankly bad people.
And they are being protected and allowed to carry on by the word racist.
By the absolute fear of being branded a racist because people are so quick to jump to it.
There is no doubt that in Britain there is a problem within the Muslim community with rape gangs.
You would have to be fucking blind if you think that there is no such problem.
But that doesn't make all Muslims bad.
The problem is that these men are being protected from justice.
And that is a massive, massive injustice to the poor, the thousands, thousands of poor children who are being molested and abused by them.
We need to get past it.
And BBC, this has been a disgusting debacle.
So mishandled and so poorly presented by people who are so flagrantly uneducated on the subject.
I don't give a fuck that you have put Muslims on your program.
I give a fuck that you have put idiots on your program.
You have done nothing here to further the discussion.
If anything, you have put it back.
You should be ashamed.
It is laughable, quote-unquote, debates like these that are pushing people who can see the problem towards racist organisations like Britain first.
It is this kind of thing that is causing these organizations to grow.
I do not want to see Britain first strongly supported.
But the problem is that they are the only ones talking honestly about what's going on.
You have to stop this.
You, BBC, are doing damage.
You are pushing people towards Britain First by making sure that the only white people up the only white people in that debate who were actually telling the truth were shouted down and booed out.