The incompetence of government authority in Britain’s now infamous Rotherham is, alas, not a thing of the past. A 28-year-old woman who claims she was groomed and abused when she was 15 spotted her abuser walking through the town last Friday. She confronted — and, according to police, apparently tackled — the man. Then South Yorkshire Police pounced. Via the Daily Mail:

A witness accused the police of ‘acting like insensitive thugs’, telling the paper: ‘A police van came and six male officers piled out.
’Two of them dragged her away, handcuffed her, put her against a wall and then shoved her into the back of the van.’
South Yorkshire Police told today how they had been hoping to interview the woman in the weeks before the arrest, after they were told of the historic allegations by another organisation.
But they only realised that she was the woman they had been trying to speak to after her arrest, and have now released her on bail.

Perhaps we can excuse the arrest, if indeed the woman tackled the man during the confrontation; that would certainly be a disruption of law and order.

But law and order has been continually violated by child sexual abusers for two decades in Rotherham, and local leaders, social-services workers, and law enforcement at best ignored it, and at worst aided and abetted it. The fact that the South Yorkshire Police did not recognize the woman in their custody as the alleged victim they had been “hoping” to interview for weeks suggests that they were not pursuing the case with any particular zeal.

The result — public confrontation — is predictable, when victims feel helpless. As victims of abuse in Rotherham told the Independent Inquiry and have told the press in recent weeks: When law enforcement is no longer interested in enforcing the law, what are victims to do?