The tragedy of Telford’s girls
by Ed West, Wrong Side of History:
[…] Telford is not going on the UNESCO list any time soon. Like most town planning from the late 20th century, it was designed around the car, and its centre consists of a modernist railway station, a motorway and a shopping centre with acres of parking spaces. It’s anti-urbanism.
I was there earlier this month with a team making a documentary for GB News, led and presented by journalist Charlie Peters, on a phenomenon so horrific and so widespread one would hardly conceive of it. Here, in a town of 140,000 or so people, some 1,000 young girls were systematically raped and sexually abused by gangs of men over a number of years — and this figure has been described as ‘tame’ by a witness to a recent inquiry.
The perpetrators were mostly Pakistani men, the victims were overwhelming poor, white and English. The girls, as young as 11 or 12, were given drink and drugs, gang raped and passed around, and threatened if they told the police. Countless such testimonies were confirmed by the authorities, and investigations here reported quite extreme and unprintable forms of sexual abuse. In this town seven men went to jail, although five were given relatively short sentences and are most likely out again.
The strangest thing about this story is that this was happening in dozens of cities across England over the course of two decades before it became a national story. As many as 10,000 girls were raped in this way, and countless people in positions of authority, in children’s services and police, knew about it.
There is simply no crime or horror like this in modern English history, not even from the most grizzly period of the industrial revolution; Dickens couldn’t have conceived of anything so squalid or criminal. Yet it was happening across England, and in small towns like Telford a huge proportion of the community would have been in some way connected to someone affected. While we were there, the first three people Peters spoke to knew people who were involved, either as victims or perpetrators.
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