International spotlight has arrived…
Finland’s Grooming Gangs
- Much of the coverage of the same problem in Great Britain said that Jay had accused the Rotherham council and police of failing to tackle sexual exploitation because of misplaced “political correctness.” Yet Jay says those are not the words she would use: “I have an aversion to phrases like that,” she said. Instead, she believes the Labour-dominated council turned a blind eye to the problem because of “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.”
- What hits hardest in the little town of Oulu in Finland is a disturbing sense that history is repeating itself here and nothing has been learned from the well-documented lessons of the past. Instead there seems to be a hope that with a few overdue statements this problem will go back underground and the noise will go away.
- Despite bold assertions that action would be taken and the laws regarding asylum seekers would be tightened, in recent conversations regarding the numbers of migrants to be accepted from the EU quota system, politicians such as the interior minister were still campaigning to increase the refugee quota tenfold.
- In January, the Andalus Islamic Center of Kastelholm in Helsinki’s Puolinharju area, published a message to its followers on Facebook. It featured a picture of two lollipops. One was unwrapped, dirty and covered with insects; the other was not. “This is why the Hijab plays an important role in Islam,” it said.
Finland is a curious place. Tucked up under the arm of its celebrity sister Sweden and with Russia as a neighbour, it is one of the world’s most northern and geographically remote countries. It takes a hardy kind of European to withstand the severe climate. The Finns in Oulu, the most populous city in northern Finland, go about their lives as normal in -25 degrees Fahrenheit.
With a national population of just over 5.5 million, trees easily outnumber people; two-thirds of this country is blanketed in thick woodland, making it the most densely forested country in Europe.
Yet, this strange, seemingly forgotten land has a hideously metropolitan problem: Finland’s daughters are the target of grooming gangs.
In December 2018, Oulu police reported the arrest of seven men accused of repeatedly raping a ten-year-old girl. The police say the girl has allegedly been subjected to multiple sexual assaults over several months in the suspects’ homes.
The men, aged 20 to 40, all arrived in Finland as migrants or refugees in recent years (32,000 sought asylum here during the migrant wave in 2015) and are thought to have made contact with the victim on social media.
Locals in Oulu told Gatestone that many have observed the majority-Muslim migrant gangs in action in the local shopping mall; they send out their best-looking, nicely-scented friends to hook in young Finnish girls. Parents here are fearful for their children.
Finland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipilä took to Twitter to express his shock and anger, writing that “a sexual offence against a child is an inhumane act, and its wickedness cannot be comprehended.”
His naïveté seems startling. Internationally acknowledged studies on grooming gangs in the UK clearly evidence that this is a “wickedness” well-documented and well understood. There is no reason for it to come as a surprise.
His country’s official statistics from 2017 reveal that — nationally — Iraqi and Afghan migrants were represented up to 40 times more amongst sexual assault suspects than native Finns.
