The main allegation in the cases of 'Asian grooming gangs' was never that they were the main or sole perpetrators, but rather that police forces and social services were slow to take action due to fears of being accused of racial bias. https://twitter.com/sassemach/status/1338880580029730817

Having followed these cases for a while, I think the bigger issue is a highly disturbing willingness to treat adults sleeping with underage girls, and plying them with drugs and alcohol, as 'normal' and not a criminal matter.

That said in cases like Rotherham there is no question that gangs of Asian men preyed almost exclusively on white girls and this reflected cultural perceptions that such girls were sexual objects, essentially prostitutes.

What has been understated in all this has been the class aspect - the girls being victimised were almost all from working class families, and the dehumanisation of them was as much class-based as it was racial.

The stark truth is that liberalising attitudes about sex have made authorities far more tolerant of sexual abuse, as was seen in the case of a mentally disabled girl being effectively pimped out by her social workers to older men.

We often talk about 'speaking out' as the issue for victims, but this is in my mind, and with a full sense of compassion to all victims of abuse, a problem especially of middle class and professionally employed victims.

But for many victims who are poor, disabled and unemployed it is not that their abuse is in doubt, its that it is considered acceptable, read as consensual and even facilitated by police, social services and carers.

In the infamous grooming gang cases multiple branches of public servants were FULLY AWARE that statutory rape at a minimum was occurring systematically and did nothing to stop it, and considered the extremely young victims being passed around as willing participants.

On the one hand we have a world of hyper-sensitivity about power imbalances, age differences and workplace sex amongst well off professionals, yet at the same time professionals in policing and care treat children being raped as normal because they are poor and marginalised.

The hardest thing perhaps to acknowledge in all of this is that it is the working classes who have most suffered form liberalising attitudes about sex - it is they who experience more broken homes, more births outside of marriage, more prostitution and abuse of every kind.

Whilst middle class people vote for sexual liberalisation, they practice sexual conservatism - more likely to marry, more likely to stay married, more likely to have children within marriage exclusively. Less likely to engage in sex work, or to be sexually active at a young age.

#MeToo had the potential to be a transformative moment, a day of reckoning for the sexual revolution - but perhaps from the start a movement driven by Hollywood actresses and fuelled by the social media of successful liberal women was not going to address the plight of the poor.

None of that is to say middle class women do not suffer terribly from abuse and harassment - they absolutely do - but they also suffer from the limitations of a movement against abuse that neglects the full picture of dysfunction and failure in sexual ethics.

It was a movement that sought to bring solidarity to victims, but it could never fully do so because it focused on the individuals subjective truth, and occasional witch hunts against celebrity abusers - there was never any real sense that we might deal with sex differently.