Sarah Ryan: Why nobody cares about the Rapes in Ceuta

The Grievance Ladder.

On the 1^st of September the BBC reported that in a hospital in Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave on the north African coast, which you likely never thought about until recently, doctors treated a ten-year-old girl for rape. Ten years old. Raped.

She is a migrant child, who had arrived in Ceuta in the last days of July. She was one of tens of thousands of people who crossed the border over the course of two days, and one of over a thousand children now living there, while someone tries to figure out where to put them.

Ceuta’s chief prosecutor, Silvia Rojas, has said the enclave has recorded twenty-three sexual assaults since the influx, nine of them against children. As the BBC notes, by September 1st, that is close to a rate of one a day. The victims are both migrants and local Cueta women.

The scale of this crisis for Cueta and its residents is extreme. More than seventy thousand Africans illegally crossed into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July, which effectively doubled the population. At least a hundred died in the attempt. Around five thousand illegal migrants remain. Locals are afraid to walk the streets day or night.

Had the report not been released by the BBC, or had the claim of child rape been false, you can just imagine that all the right-thinking smug folk who live to lecture us would have discounted this rape spree as fake news and subjected us to lessons on the dangers of believing fake news. But this was the BBC. And so, I have waited patiently to see what they would say, these people in the NGOs and the media and lefty politics. Can you guess?

Yes you can. To paraphrase myself, they’ve said nuttin.

But why haven’t the arch feminists in the Dail been hopping mad, you ask? Where are the press releases from the National Women’s Council? Where are the marches of enraged blue haired students and the catchy hashtags on social media? Are we not to #believewomen in Cueta?

Let’s talk about something I call the grievance ladder: In order for politicians and NGOs and their allied media to report and comment on certain crimes, the victim and perpetrator have to be assessed by their position on this ladder. The victim has to be correctly a victim, and the perpetrator must be from a villainous class. Were White Middle Class men raping child migrants, we know what would be said, and by whom. We would, rightly, hear of little else.

This is because we all occupy our little spot on the victim/oppressor grievance ladder before we do, or have anything done to us at all. Roughly speaking, migrants are at the bottom, travellers above them, women above them, and white men at the very top.

Thus if a traveller attacks a migrant, it is more notable and newsy than the reverse. If a white woman is rude to a traveller, that is a crime worth chatting about, but a middle class woman raped by a migrant is simply a misfortune. Could happen to anyone.

Think of it like a secular Original Sin. That means, that regardless of the actual facts of the case, the individuals must be assigned to rungs on the Grievance Ladder before you even start talking about the unfortunate ‘incident’. Are they white or ‘of colour’? Gay, straight? Cis or non binary? Migrant or indigenous?

It must all seem quite mad to someone who is unaware that the Grievance Ladder exists. And of course it is mad, but it is a very serious and real thing to some of our politicians, NGOs and their media pals. So, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if some women are being raped by illegal migrants, or indeed murdered by them- 8 out of 9 women murdered in Ireland this year were killed by men not born in Ireland.

But I digress: the women of Cueta are sadly on lower rungs of the Grievance Ladder, so their rapists can’t be condemned. See? Its really very simple and oh, so just. Socially Just.

If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, you will note that in the UK, this is now an official finding. Baroness Casey’s national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation (The Rape Gang Report) concluded that the Pakistani muslim ethnicity of the perpetrators had been, in her words, shied away from — by police forces, by local authorities, by people whose job it was to protect the children in question. That reluctance was not a rumour circulated online. It was documented, in a government-commissioned audit, after decades of girls being disbelieved because the girls were white, or on the wrong rung, you see.

And so, ten year old migrant girls raped in Ceuta - by other migrants - get about as much attention as the girls in Rotherham did. They had the wrong kind of attackers for them to get anything else.

SR