Groomed: A National Scandal
“Five young women who survived unimaginable abuse and rape tell their stories of a gang grooming spanning 20 years. Failures of police and social services continue to this day.”
Channel 4’s new documentary on the grooming and rape gang scandal – which has seen victims used as political footballs in the UK – is far from an easy watch.
It follows the experiences of 5 victims of grooming, indecent assault, exploitation, and rape at the hands of groups of men of almost exclusively Pakistani origin.
In some cases individual victims – one of the survivors featured was 11 when her abuse started – were raped by “hundreds” of men.
The film covers stories of abuse that span over decades as “thousands upon thousands upon thousands” of children were subjected to offences ranging from countless incidents of indecent assault to manslaughter.
Although her story does not feature in this new documentary, grooming gangs victim Lucy Lowe was murdered by her tormentor Azhar Ali Mehmood after he set fire to her family home.
These accounts are endless, they are sickening, and to add insult to injury, they are ongoing.
Although there can be little doubt that great efforts have been made over decades to hide what has been referred to as “the rape of Britian” the swelling tide of voices calling for justice is now reaching fever pitch yet again.
Why do I say ‘again’? This is because in the past, when this swell of voices from both victims and their – albeit few – advocates has risen up, it has often simply been ignored in part for fear of stirring up unrest or appearing ‘racist’.
But the truth is not ‘racist’. Truth sees no colour, no religion, no culture.
Part of the deeply upsetting reality of how these victims were received by the very people who were being paid to look after them is that the children were often branded as “child prostitutes”.
In some cases the rapists were serving police officers.
Notes taken in respect of one of the survivors featured in the documentary, Chantelle, says she was “a very promiscuous girl”, while others were tagged as ‘putting themselves at risk’.
The topic of grooming gangs was covered up for so long and at such great cost because it is something that completely destroys the narrative that ‘diversity is a strength’ or that all cultures operate off the same baseline of morality.
Sadly this is not the case, and those who continue to deny this do so at the risk of indirectly causing irreparable damage to so many women, girls, and in some cases, boys.
The callously well planned actions of grooming gangs – which were compared to the operations of “terrorist” networks by one survivor – is a festering wound on the kind of societies we in the west are being all but forced to accept as the ‘new normal’ or as an inevitable act of nature that governments are powerless to curtail.
The level of stone-faced denial among many Pakistanis over what members of that community have – and are – doing to predominantly disadvantaged white children is enough to turn your blood cold: a topic that this documentary does not shy away from.
As a journalist with Pakistani heritage, I have been accused by blood relatives of being taken in by “bigoted myths” and spreading “hate” for simply drawing attention to these crimes. I remain unphased.
Chillingly, the overwhelming majority of these child rapists are still walking free, having received little to no reprimand for their horrific crimes.