Ross Douthat’s new column on the systematic rape culture in Rotherham, carried out under the protective shelter of what appears to have been not just police looking the other way, but an active criminal conspiracy by the authorities to destroy evidence and intimidate witnesses, is required reading:

Show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I’ll tell you who is likely to get away with rape.

In Catholic Boston or Catholic Ireland, that meant men robed in the vestments of the church.

In Joe Paterno’s pigskin-mad Happy Valley, it meant a beloved football coach.

In status-conscious, education-obsessed Manhattan, it meant charismatic teachers at an elite private school.

In Hollywood and the wider culture industry — still the great undiscovered country of sexual exploitation, I suspect — it has often meant the famous and talented, from Roman Polanski to the BBC’s Jimmy Savile, robed in the authority of their celebrity and art.

And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.

Douthat suggests that in each case, the really deadly moment comes during the transition between an older period of settled certainties and a new period of overturned morals. After the moral revolution, the old authorities lose their presumed aura of respectability, their untouchability, and crimes will be exposed and punished. People can leave those institutions behind or reform them. It is during the revolution, when the old authorities are still untouchable but those who wield their power begin to sense that all things are permissible, that the great horrors occur.

An implication he does not explicitly draw from this would be that the exposure of the Rotherham crimes is a sign that multiculturalism’s aura is on the wane in England. Let us hope so, and let us hope the next abuses are caught and punished sooner.