Child Sacrifice and Our Desire to Ignore It

 Some actions of humans are so dark that we prefer to ignore them, avoiding the darkening our own thoughts. When others assist us by denigrating truthtellers or censoring news, we may be quietly grateful as life seems better when not intruded on by the pain of victims or the abuse of their torturers. We find it easier to acknowledge past abuse as a way of showing virtue in the present – such as recognising the Holocaust or massacres under colonial powers. It is also easy to point fingers at foreign countries and condemn abuses and their cover-up. Such long-distance condemnation also enables a feeling of virtue. Thus, we can ignore abuses in our own countries, condemning its victims to continued trauma without feeling we are part of the problem.

In recent weeks organised gang rape there has been a social media awakening of the decades-long practice of rape of early teenage and pre-teen girls in England. Interest was stoked in part because Elon Musk highlighted the subject, and his wide media reach undercut efforts by recent U.K. Governments and the local media to keep the abuse and the perpetrators out of the public consciousness. The issue may be new to many, but it has been in the public domain for over two decades. People in positions of power decided that it was better to allow more girls (the girls of others) to be systematically abused and raped as they considered that addressing the problem might stoke social disorder.

The scale, like the problem the NY Times highlighted, is also vast. In the town of Rotherham where it was originally identified, it is thought at least 1,400 young girls were systematically abused and raped, often for years on end. Across England, this is in the tens of thousands. Numbers are numbing, but individual testimonies speak of repeated torture, gang rape and threats of death, and thousands of girls were left by those in authority to this fate....<<<Read More>>>...