Why don’t we hear more about the gang ‘grooming’ of girls?
by Julie Bindel, UnHerd:
Barely a week goes by without there being more stories about #MeToo and Time’s Up in the news. It’s good news, though, that this sexual violence against women is finally being called out so ceaselessly.
But what is appalling, is when you compare this coverage with the intermittent attention given to the scandal of organised child rape, which is endemic across Britain. While it’s certainly to be welcomed that some focus has finally been shone on what is curiously known as ‘grooming’, we rarely hear about these poor victims.
When they do make it to the news, the majority of these British cases – which are far removed from the #MeToo glamour of Hollywood – are reported in a way that sanitises the reality of what happens to these vulnerable teenagers. Not least by the use of the term ‘grooming’. So let’s be clear. We are talking about the sexual abuse, rape, and pimping of children. Young girls are drugged, forced to drink alcohol, tortured and violated in sadistic and violent fashion by man after man. Some become pregnant and are forced to abort; all are routinely beaten by pimps if they “step out of line”.
The continued reluctance to cover the scandal is nothing new. I first began researching this issue in the early 2000s, but it took me almost seven years to persuade an editor to publish the very first investigation into the phenomenon. The cases I had looked at were all based in the north of England, where parents, and in some cases, the victims, had been desperately trying to get police to follow-up their complaints about gangs of men, primarily of Pakistani Muslim heritage, targeting teenage girls.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
