by Brendan O’Neill, Spectator
I look forward to Keir Starmer hosting a special summit on the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed. And to hearing him gush about it every time a reporter puts a mic anywhere near his mouth. And to seeing his proposals for showing it to teens in schools across the land in order that we might prise open their innocent eyes to the dangers of so-called grooming gangs.
After all, he did all that for Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a made-up crime against a fictional working-class girl. So surely he’ll do it for a documentary that lays out in grim, eye-watering detail the industrial-scale horrors that were inflicted on real working-class girls by gangs of mostly Muslim men in towns across England.
Groomed: A National Scandal aired on Channel 4 last night. It is a searing piece of journalism, a fearless document of the barbarism of the rape gangs and the unforgivable nonchalance of officials who looked the other way. Director Anna Hall deserves every accolade for getting this film out there, in the face of a cultural elite that would rather talk about anything else on earth than the brutalisation of white working-class girls by Muslim men.
Watching Groomed is an enraging experience. I think Hall intends it to be. It focuses on five young women who survived the gangs. We learn they were passed around like pieces of meat. Chantelle, 32, recounts being groomed from the age of 11, when she was in a children’s home. Sometimes she was kept in a hotel room for days on end and ‘passed about’ between Pakistani men in their 20s and 30s. This went on for years.