What a Wasted Opportunity.

Apart from the Queens Speech the other big news in the UK today (9/5/12) is the culmination of the Rochadale child sex ring trial. This long running trial centres around 9 men accused of grooming through bribery, blackmail and rape under-age girls (some as young as 13) to work as prostitutes/sex slaves and then trafficking the girls between different groups.

As all nine of the men who were convicted are of Pakistani or Afghani origin and the majority of their victims were white the whole trial has been a pernicious anti-Muslim circus. Both the fascist British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) have staged protests outside the Court most days and the EDL led a mob through the streets of Rochdale to smashing up Asian owned businesses including one that used to be owned by one of the accused. Two barristers defending the men were forced to step down after receiving death threats and the remaining defence team have already mounted an appeal on the grounds of apparent Jury tampering on the part of the BNP.

With the 2014 Football World Cup coming up in Brazil it all could have been so different though. Now Brazil is a country that has a significant child prostitution problem and rather then trying to hide this fact away the Brazilian government have recently been telling anyone who'll listen about it. This is because in preparation for the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games Brazil is working very hard to solve this problem by introducing new age of consent laws to stem the supply of child prostitutes. They were hoping that nations like England would also help by tackling demand by cracking down on the football fans who are likely to descend on the country in order to use child prostitutes.

So the Rochdale trial could have formed the basis for an intelligent discussion about the best way to tackle the global problem of child prostitution but instead Britain decided to use it to boost the EDL by turning it into yet another paki-bashing witch hunt.