The first trial since last year’s official report on the raping and pimping of underage English girls in Rotherham is underway, with 5 Muslim pimps and two white madams charged. Some of the crimes go all the way back to the 1980s.

It’s important to keep a few things in mind:

First, there’s not much evidence that Rotherham is unusual, other than that it was the first city in England to publish an honest inquiry into what has been going on all over England for decades. Indeed, I spent a few days in 2013 researching the general topic of Pakistani grooming of English adolescent girls for a Taki’s column. But when the Rotherham report came out in 2014, I had literally never heard of Rotherham. I actually thought my readers emailing me must be confused about how to spell Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Second, the general topic of Muslim sexual exploitation of English adolescent girls was covered up for more than a decade for reasons of anti-racist ideology. In practice, it often turns out that:

Political Correctness = Rape

Third, journalists are highly dependent upon government reports and legal records. When I looked into Pakistani grooming in 2013, it was obvious what was going on. But most people aren’t very good at pattern recognition, especially when they are told over and over that noticing is evil.

But give journalists an official document to quote and they’re a lot more likely to be good to go. If you pay careful attention to Tom McCarthy’s pretty good new movie Spotlight about some Boston Globe reporters investigating sexual abuse by gay Catholic priests in the Boston archdiocese, you’ll notice the same thing as in Britain with the Pakistani pimps. I won’t say more because I’ll possibly write a longer review at some point, especially if Spotlight gets a lot of Oscar nominations. But, for now, let me just say: to make sense of what’s really happening, don’t get too intrigued by the journalists’ Sailer-like statistical analysis. Instead, keep an eye on the plaintiff’s lawyer character who is played by Stanley Tucci in a wig.