Loudoun County Blues

Also Known As: Rotheram 2: Electric Boogaloo

“Rotherham” should have changed it’s name to “Pedorapeville”, and Fuck Everyone Who Was Involved.

Between the late 90’s and early 10’s, an estimated minimum of 1400 girls in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England were subjected to abuse, sexual abuse and rape by several gangs of men primarily originating from Pakistan who had immigrated to England. The abuse included gang rape, dousing the girls with gasoline and threatening to set them on fire, threatening to rape their mothers and younger sisters, and trafficking them to other towns. There were pregnancies in girls as young as 12, abortions, miscarriages, babies raised by their teen mothers, and babies abducted by their rapist fathers.

This is especially egregious when you consider that the population of Rotherham is about 110,000 people, and taking into consideration the normal age and sex demographics of the area, that means that in any given year, approximately 1% of Rotherham’s girls were raped for the first time. And over the 20 years of operation, about 25% of the age cohort was. Do you have a daughter? Does she have three friends? One, and maybe her.

To add insult to injury, and facilitating the practice to the extent that it existed for as long as it did and to the extent that it did, the authorities were complicit in one of the most egregious, top-down failures of government I have ever seen in my life. Social workers, policemen, and council members were actively trying to silence the victims out of an overt and stated concern of the implication that they would be deemed racist were they to act on stopping British-Pakistani men from raping teenage girls. Finally, in 2012, The Times UK Published an article blowing the lid off the practice, and the rest is history.

Why Bring This Up Now?

Because the Daily Wire has hired an investigative reporter, and that reporter found a story about a girl who has been allegedly raped in Loudoun County by a “genderfluid” boy in the girl’s bathroom.

Now… There are some people using this as an excuse to oppose rules allowing trans kids into whatever bathroom they want. I’m not going to make that case, I don’t think gendered bathrooms make a whole lot of sense, trans kids have a hard enough time navigating through life, worrying about where to lose water shouldn’t be on the list. Don’t get me wrong, I kind of like gendered bathrooms because the men’s always seems to be less busy and we don’t have used tampoons (spelling error intentional) hanging from the waste bins, but if we did away with them, I don’t think it would be a safety issue. And if a rapist is going to rape you in a bathroom, the sign on the door isn’t going to stop them.

That said… This case is ten tonnes of bullshit. A student raping a student at school is a scandal, it’s a safety issue for the school, it’s a concern for the parents, and it’s a criminal matter for the police. What it isn’t is common, or cause for alarm. But just like in Rotherham, the story is mainly in the response.

This story broke as a result of the father of the victim, Steve Smith, being arrested when he rose to express anger and concern over the policies of the Loudoun County School Board. Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler has just said that “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” Smith, perhaps understandably, was upset by this, which led to an outburst that quickly became heated, and Smith was arrested and removed from the building.

The story according to the Wire was that;

On May 28, Stone Bridge High School called Smith to come to the school, where they told him that his 15-year-old daughter had just been in a physical altercation in a bathroom with a male, Smith says. When he arrived, he determined that what had happened was not a case of his daughter being beaten up – it was far more serious.

The school said it was handling the incident in-house. Smith was dumbfounded.

Deputies from the sheriff’s office ultimately responded to the school – not to investigate the alleged rape of a child – Smith said, but because school administrators called them on him for making a scene about it.

Smith acknowledges he did make a scene and says any father would have done the same in the situation. “I went nuts. I called the principal a pussy,” he said. “Six cop cars showed up like a fucking SWAT team” to respond to the school’s complaint about an assertive parent, he said.

The police department declined to provide records from that day to The Daily Wire. 

“Thank God that I drew enough attention to it, without getting arrested, that we got an escort to the hospital and they administered a rape kit that night,” Smith said. A SANE exam and buccal swab, his lawyer said, later came back favorable to the prosecution’s case.

At 4:48 pm on the day of the incident, the principal sent out an email to the community that claimed nothing jeopardizing student safety had occurred, painting Smith as the villain, and offering counseling services for witnesses of Smith’s blowup:

Good evening Stone Bridge families this is Stone Bridge Principal Tim Flynn. There was an incident in the main office area today that required the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office to dispatch deputies to Stone Bridge. The incident was confined to the main office and the entrance area to the school. There was no threat to the safety of the student body. The incident was witnessed by a small number of students who were meeting with staff adjacent to the main office. Counseling services and the services of our Unified Mental Health Team are available for any student who may need to talk about today’s incident. Students might have noticed Sheriff’s Office personnel on campus and I wanted to let you know that something out of the ordinary happened at school today. The safety of our students and staff is the top priority of Loudoun County Public Schools.

“LCPS washed their hands of this,” Smith said, and it was taken seriously only because of the sheriff’s office.

All juvenile court records are sealed. The sheriff’s office declined to release records relating to Smith to The Daily Wire but, in response to a public records request, confirmed that a report with “Offense: Forcible Sodomy [and] Sexual Battery” matching that date and location exists.

So regardless of what you think of the Daily Wire, they have the receipts, and this probably happened. In fact, since then, the accused student was quietly transferred out of the school where he continued to receive an education in a public school until October 6th, where he cornered and raped another girl. It was in a classroom this time, so apparently the lesson he’s learned is that bathroom rapes carry too much baggage.

Since then, the Daily Wire noticed that the LCPS hadn’t reported the rapes in their facilities as per state law safety report requirements. The Principal is required to report to the superintendent, who is required to make an annual report to the state. This was newsworthy in and of itself, because it meant that either Scott Ziegler directly lied about knowledge of sexual assaults in bathrooms or that Tim Flynn did not report it, and that has implications I’ll get into below. It also led the Daily Wire Reporter to dig and he found that LCPS had hidden multiple sexual assaults in their division from public record.

In October 2018, in a case that was widely reported by the media at the time, three football players at Tuscorara High were arrested and charged with sexual assault. A source told local media that it’s believed a younger player was “held down by teammates who inserted objects into the victim” in a locker room. A spokesperson for LCPS said at the time that “the case will be subject to disciplinary action.” The annual report for Tuscorara that year reported zero instances of sexual offenses against students.

The applicable law is:

A division superintendent who knowingly fails to comply or secure compliance with the reporting requirements of this subsection shall be subject to the sanctions authorized in § 22.1-65. A principal who knowingly fails to comply or secure compliance with the reporting requirements of this section shall be subject to sanctions prescribed by the local school board, which may include, but need not be limited to, demotion or dismissal.

So the likelihood is that this isn’t going away, seeing as there are some very excited parents on this beat, and heads are likely to roll. Good. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

Tie It Up.

Sure. The lesson here isn’t that trans people or Pakistanis are predators, it’s that some people are predators, and predators should not be treated differently based on their group characteristics, they should be treated like predators. That all it takes for evil to thrive is for well-intentioned people to stand by, and that well-intentioned people are in short supply. This is the story of a massive amount of tragedy; from the unnamed Smith girl to Kitty Genovese, to Rotherham, to the Rwandan Genocide, to what China is currently doing to the Uighurs.

I subtitled this Rotherham 2: Electric Boogaloo because what happened in Loudoun County is a relatively small and low-impact thing in relation to Rotherham, but Rotherham happened, and we need to be realistic and open-eyed about it.

Administrators do not have your children’s best interests at heart. It is foolish to assume that they do. If shit like this happens, do not let it fade gently into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

***Update***

The Daily Wire is continuing to dig into this, and they were given emails obtained by a local news outlet, which included this:

So Zeigler obviously lied. And more, he’d said this lie multiple times, and was called on it more than once, via the Daily Wire:

Three weeks later at a June 22 board meeting focused on a transgender policy that affects bathrooms, school board member Beth Barts asked if there were sexual assaults in the bathrooms regularly, and Ziegler responded that he didn’t have record of any occurring.

Barts noted that Ziegler’s comment failed to reflect a 2018 locker room assault, which she pointed out involved all male players, thus highlighting that assaults can occur whether or not transgender students are present.

After The Daily Wire reported this month that the suspect had been transferred to another school where he allegedly sexually assaulted another girl in a classroom, Ziegler apologized for what he acknowledged was a “misleading” remark, claiming he thought the question was whether there had been any bathroom assaults involving transgender students. That apology only raised more questions, since the May assailant was allegedly wearing a skirt, and since Barts’ follow-up question had made clear in the moment that the question was not limited to transgender incidents.

Board members, including Barts and Vice Chair Atoosa Reaser, put out statements following The Daily Wire’s October 11 story that said that “members of the Loudoun County School Board were not aware of the specific details of the incident until earlier this week.” But the email shows that they seemingly would have had reason to know that Ziegler’s assertion of no record of sexual assaults in bathrooms was false.

They. Knew.

I haven’t been this outraged in years. Sometimes people are stupid, stupidity is bad, but it’s not evil. These people are evil. Barts has since resigned from the School Board. They all should. Every single one of them. Replace them with lamp posts until elections can be done, they’ll be more useful and do less harm.