History > 2014 > UK > Violence (I)

Illustration: Ben Jones

 Britain’s Crime of Complicity

NYT

30.7.2014

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/
opinion/Britains-Crime-of-Complicity-With-the-Savile-Sex-Abuse-Scandal.html 

Years of Rape

and ‘Utter Contempt’ in Britain

Life in an English Town
Where Abuse of Young Girls Flourished

 

SEPT. 1, 2014

The New York Times

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

ROTHERHAM, England — It started on the bumper cars in the children’s arcade of the local shopping mall. Lucy was 12, and a group of teenage boys, handsome and flirtatious, treated her and her friends to free rides and ice cream after school.

Over time, older men were introduced to the girls, while the boys faded away. Soon they were getting rides in real cars, and were offered vodka and marijuana. One man in particular, a Pakistani twice her age and the leader of the group, flattered her and bought her drinks and even a mobile phone. Lucy liked him.

The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.

She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.

At night, she would come home and hide her soiled clothes at the back of her closet. When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.

But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.

“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed.

Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way. One girl told investigators that gang rape was part of growing up in her neighborhood.

Between 1997 and 2013, despite numerous reports of sexual abuse, only one case, involving three teenage girls, was prosecuted, and five men were sent to jail, according to an official report into the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham published last week.

Even now, the official reaction has been dominated by partisan finger-pointing and politics. The leader of the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has resigned, and the police chief is under pressure to follow suit. But criminal investigations continue, and more than a dozen victims are suing the police and the Council for negligence.

The scale and brutality of the abuse in Rotherham have shocked a country already shaken by a series of child abuse scandals involving celebrities, public officials, clerics and teachers at expensive private schools. The Rotherham report suggests that it continues unchecked among the most vulnerable in British society.

It has highlighted another uncomfortable dimension of the issue, that of race relations in Britain. The victims identified in the report were all white, while the perpetrators were mostly of Pakistani heritage, many of them working in nighttime industries like taxi driving and takeout restaurants. The same was true in recent prosecutions in Oxford, in southern England, and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale, where nine men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin were given long prison sentences in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls. Investigators in Scotland have reportedly uncovered a similar pattern of abuse.

Sexual abuse of children takes many forms, and the majority of convicted abusers in Britain are white. But as Nazir Afzal, the chief crown prosecutor in charge of sexual violence and himself of Pakistani heritage, put it, “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”

The grooming tends to follow a similar pattern, according to Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work who was commissioned by the Rotherham Council to carry out an independent investigation following a series of reports in The Times of London: a period of courting with young men in public places like town centers, bus stations or shopping malls; the gradual introduction of cigarettes, alcohol and sometimes harder drugs; a sexual relationship with one man, who becomes the “boyfriend” and later demands that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends; then the threats, blackmail and violence that have deterred so many girls from coming forward.

But the report also outlined how those victims and parents who did ask for help were mostly let down by the police and social services, despite a great deal of detail known to them for more than a decade, including, in some cases, the names of possible offenders and their license plate numbers.

“Nobody can pretend they didn’t know,” Ms. Jay said in an interview.

Unimpeded, the abuse mushroomed. Over time, investigators found, it evolved from personal gratification to a business opportunity for the men.

Increasingly, the girls were shared not just among groups of men locally, but sold, or bartered for drugs or guns. They were driven to cities like Sheffield, Manchester and London, where groups of men raped them, sometimes overnight.

When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up, Ms. Jay said. Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time.

Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”

In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12.

“These girls were often treated with utter contempt,” Ms. Jay said.

Lucy, now 25 but too scared to give her last name because, she said, the men who brutalized her still live nearby, knows about contempt. During an interview at her home outside Rotherham, she recalled being questioned about her abuse by police officers who repeatedly referred to the main rapist as her “boyfriend.”

The first time she was raped, there were nine men, she said, one on top of her, another to pin her down and force himself into her mouth. Two others restrained a friend of hers, holding open her eyelids to make her watch. The rest of the men, all in their 20s, stood over her, cheering and jeering, and blinding her with the flash of their cameras.

When she went to bed that night, she found a text message from the man who had groomed her for months: “Did you get home all right?”

She hesitated, then texted back: “Yes, I’m fine.”

At that moment, she said, rape became normality. “I thought, ‘This must be my fault, I must have given them a signal,’ ” she said.

Unlike other victims, Lucy came from a stable family. Her parents owned a convenience store and post office. They lived in a middle-class neighborhood. “I had been brought up in a nice world,” she said. “I thought rapists were people hiding in bushes, and pedophiles were people who drive white vans and park outside schools.”

After that first rape, she said, she began to think she had overreacted, and told her friend that she had been upset because she had lost her virginity. After school, they went back to the town center. The leader of the group took her to McDonald’s and rolled her a marijuana cigarette, she said. For a week, it was as if nothing had happened.

Then he raped her again, and soon the rules changed. The girls were to speak only when spoken to. They had to sit quietly in town and wait. Taxis would come by and pick them up. They were raped by different men in different places, mostly outdoors.

There seemed to be no way out. “They threatened to gang-rape my mother, to kill my brother and to firebomb my house,” Lucy said.

Once, she said, when they thought she might go to the police, a man with gold teeth whom she had never seen before dragged her into his car, a dark-green Honda with left-side drive, and put a gun to her head: “On the count of three you’re dead,” she said he told her. He pulled the trigger on three, but nothing happened. “Keep your mouth shut,” he said. “Next time there will be a bullet inside.”

Eventually, Lucy’s parents sold their business and moved to Spain for 18 months. “It became quite clear that leaving the country was the only way we could save Lucy,” said her mother, who participated in parts of the interview.

Lucy experienced years of depression and anorexia, her mother said. She now works as a consultant on child sexual exploitation issues for police departments and charities.

“They say it’s vulnerable girls these people are after,” her mother said. “Well, of course they’re vulnerable. They’re innocent. They’re children.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Years of Rape and ‘Utter Contempt’ in Britain.

    Years of Rape and ‘Utter Contempt’ in Britain, NYT, 1.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/world/europe/
    reckoning-starts-in-britain-on-abuse-of-girls.html

Abuse Cases in British City

Long Ignored, Report Says

1,400 Children in Rotherham, England,
Were Sexually Abused, Report Says

 

AUG. 26, 2014

The New York Times

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

LONDON — A report released on Tuesday on accusations of widespread sexual abuse in the northern England city of Rotherham found that about 1,400 minors — some as young as 11 years old — were beaten, raped and trafficked from 1997 to 2013 as the local authorities ignored a series of red flags.

Some children were doused in gasoline and threatened with being set on fire if they reported their abusers, the report said, and others were forced to watch rapes and threatened with the same fate. In more than a third of the cases, the victims appear to have been known to child protection agencies, but the police and local government officials failed to act.

Within hours of the report’s publication, the leader of the local government council resigned.

“Having considered the report, I believe it is only right that I, as leader, take responsibility on behalf of the council for the historic failings that are described so clearly in the report, and it is my intention to do so,” said Roger Stone, the leader of the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council since 2003.

The vast majority of perpetrators have been identified as South Asian and most victims were young white girls, adding to the complexity of the case. Some officials appeared to believe that social workers pointing to a pattern of sexual exploitation were exaggerating, while others reportedly worried about being accused of racism if they spoke out. The report accused officials of ignoring “a politically inconvenient truth” in turning a blind eye to men of Pakistani heritage grooming vulnerable white girls for sex.

It was not until 2010 that the first case of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, a South Yorkshire city of about 250,000 people, made it to court. Five men received long prison sentences for grooming three teenage girls for sex. It was one of several high-profile prosecutions over the past four years that revealed sexual exploitation in cities including Oxford, Rochdale and Derby.

The Times of London later published a series of articles claiming that the local authorities had been aware of several instances of sexual abuse that were not prosecuted. The Rotherham Council eventually commissioned an independent inquiry that led to Tuesday’s report.

Alexis Jay, the author of the report and a former chief inspector of social work, said that vulnerable girls as young as 11 and largely from disadvantaged backgrounds had been brutalized by groups of men.

“They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated,” she wrote.

The report described the failures of the political and police leadership as blatant. Even as social workers reported that the sexual exploitation of children was becoming a serious problem in Rotherham, senior managers in the local authority and South Yorkshire police ignored them. When victims came forward, Ms. Jay said, the police often regarded them “with contempt.”

Three earlier reports, published from 2002 to 2006, detailed the abuse, and according to Ms. Jay, “could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham.” But the first one was “effectively suppressed” and the other two “ignored,” she said.

Some officials were apparently ordered by their managers to withhold information on the ethnic origin of the abusers, the report said. As a result, no contact was made with local Pakistani leaders for help in identifying gangs that continued to assault and abduct teenagers.
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says.

    Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says, NYT, 26.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/europe/
    children-in-rotherham-england-were-sexually-abused-report-says.html

Britain’s Crime of Complicity

Britain’s Crime of Complicity
With the Savile Sex Abuse Scandal

 

JULY 30, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By LAURIE PENNY

LONDON — THERE is something almost reassuring about the enduring ability of the British establishment to place itself beyond parody. This month, as the government announced an inquiry into historical allegations of child sex abuse by leading political figures, Parliament pushed through a broad surveillance bill with the justification that tapping everybody’s cellphones would, among other things, help the state catch pedophiles.

The Westminster inquiry will investigate not just the rape and assault of children at group homes going back decades but also accusations that child abuse by politicians and other public figures was deliberately covered up or even facilitated by members of the elite. The same Parliament has, it seems, spent 30 years failing to catch the pedophiles in its own house. Before the inquiry was even announced, it emerged that 114 files concerning allegations of abuse against children involving senior political figures had mysteriously disappeared.

The tradition of the British establishment’s looking after its own is only now understood to its full and chilling extent.

In Britain in 2014, it is no longer a shock to see the face of a once beloved celebrity or well-known politician on the news in connection with pedophilia. During the past two years, the press has been peppered with reports of allegations and prosecutions of all manner of public figures, from politicians and pop stars to television hosts and senior staff members at exclusive private schools.

The saga began in 2012 when it was revealed that Jimmy Savile, a former children’s television host and charity campaigner who died in 2011, had raped and sexually assaulted hundreds of children. This was a seismic event: A BBC staple, Mr. Savile was an entertainer with the household currency and cultural centrality of Johnny Carson or Oprah Winfrey.

Worse, it became clear that a large number of people in show business knew about this abuse and did nothing because of Mr. Savile’s power and prestige. The entertainer, who was a friend of Margaret Thatcher, used his status to gain access to vulnerable young people in schools and even hospitals.

The posthumous disgrace of Jimmy Savile was just the beginning. A series of other public figures have now been accused or convicted of sexual offenses involving children. Among them was a once respected Liberal member of Parliament who died in 2010, Cyril Smith, who abused boys in a children’s home in his constituency. Those boys grew up into traumatized men who told the police about the “fat man” they were forced to sexually service before they were 10 years old.

What links all these convicted or alleged predators of children is not background or upbringing. Mr. Smith started out as a clerk in a tax office, while Mr. Savile first worked as a miner. Paul Gadd, previously convicted but now facing fresh charges, found fame as the singer Gary Glitter, but was brought up by an unmarried mother who worked as a cleaner. Rolf Harris, recently jailed, was an Australian animator who became a successful performer in Britain. What united them was power and access — and a sense of entitlement, acquired from Britain’s traditional elite, that came from the knowledge that their reputations were too great for them to be held accountable.

During the 1970s and ’80s, the political establishment increasingly sought to bolster its legitimacy by cultivating the rising ranks of radio D.J.s, TV celebrities and popular entertainers, co-opting their appeal at photo opportunities and charity galas. All the while, the rumors about Mr. Savile, Mr. Harris and others were suppressed or dismissed, their libertinism privately excused as privileged eccentricity — as if fondling 9-year-olds were no different than a fondness for Napoleon brandy. The culture of secrecy remains in place, as does a climate of fear.

In many cases, investigation by the authorities was deliberately deflected. Nowhere is this truer than at Britain’s top “public schools,” as the private secondary, usually boarding, schools are known. In these, a culture of bullying and sexualized violence has been understood for more than a century as part of the process of training young men to be leaders. Teachers at 130 of these schools have been implicated; several schools are under criminal investigation by the police.

“Nobody said anything about it, for the same reason that people were mercilessly bullied and that wasn’t dealt with,” one former St. Paul’s student told me, on the condition of anonymity. “Public schools are built on the idea that it’s good for you to be abused while you’re young, so that you toughen up for when you go out and run the empire. That’s the point.”

The author Edward St. Aubyn has written scathingly about how child rape and a culture of emotional sadism were tolerated, even enabled, within aristocratic families like his own. The journalist Alex Renton told me, “That’s how you get the elite we’ve ended up with,” in discussing his own experience of sexual abuse in what he calls the “platonic forcing house of great Englishmen.”

“Hurt people hurt people” is not supposed to be a political program. That victims of child abuse often grow up to replicate that abuse, to become bullies or tyrants or covert sexual predators, has long been understood as a human tragedy. Only in Britain does it seem to have been the intrinsic psychology at the dark heart of the governing elite.

Britain’s child sex abuse scandal is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy, even an organized cover-up, could be exposed as a one-off criminal disgrace. What’s happened in Britain — and has for generations — is bigger than a conspiracy.

It is a culture of complicity that cuts across every major institution in public life: from Parliament to the police, from broadcasters to charities, from public schools to children’s homes. It operates on the tacit understanding that the rich, the powerful and the famous are permitted to exploit and hurt young people, sure in the knowledge that the elite will look after its own. Thus the scandal cuts to the bone of what sort of society Britain understands itself to be.

There are more revelations to come. Whether an honest accounting and atonement can be made for these crimes will depend on the price the British establishment places on its integrity.
 

Laurie Penny is a contributing editor at The New Statesman and the author, most recently, of “Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 31, 2014,
on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Britain’s Crime of Complicity.

    Britain’s Crime of Complicity, NYT, 30.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/opinion/
    Britains-Crime-of-Complicity-With-the-Savile-Sex-Abuse-Scandal.html

Ann Maguire murder accused remanded

as second teenager arrested

Boy arrested at Corpus Christi college
but later released as 15-year-old
is remanded in custody
over teacher's stabbing

Friday 2 May 2014
10.27 BST
Theguardian.com
Press Association
This article was published on the Guardian website
at 10.27 BST on Friday 2 May 2014.
It was last modified at 11.06 BST
on Friday 2 May 2014.

A second teenager has been arrested in connection with the fatal stabbing of teacher Ann Maguire in her classroom.

West Yorkshire police confirmed on Thursday that the boy was arrested at Corpus Christi Catholic college and later released without charge.

The force would not say what offence he was arrested on suspicion of, but said it was not murder. The arrest is understood to be related to online "banter" dating back to some time before the attack, but the boy had claimed it related to a computer game and not the murder.

Meanwhile, the 15-year-old boy charged with murder has been remanded in custody after appearing before Judge Geoffrey Marson QC on Friday. The judge set a provisional trial date of 3 November.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, appeared via videolink at Leeds crown court a day after he appeared at the city's youth court accused of murdering 61-year-old Maguire as she taught a class on Monday morning.

On Thursday, her husband stared intently at the boy during the two-minute hearing. Donald Maguire, 62, sat between his daughters, Kerry and Emma, at the back of the courtroom and clutched their hands as the boy stood in the glass-fronted dock flanked by security guards.

The family released a tribute to the long-serving Spanish teacher, describing her as "our shining light".

A few hours after they attended court, the family visited the school to lay flowers at the gate and attend church, where they were told they were supported by a "sea of love".

The family spent about 10 minutes in the drizzling rain inspecting the hundreds of messages and flowers, which stretch from the school's entrance for about 100 metres to the gates of the neighbouring Corpus Christi church.

Maguire's death is the first time a teacher has been stabbed to death in a British classroom, and the first killing of a teacher in a school since the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

She went to Corpus Christi as a student teacher and last year the school held a celebration of her 40 years' service. This year, she moved to working four days a week before her planned retirement in five months.

Maguire, who was head of year 11 at the school for more than 10 years, lived in the Moortown area of Leeds with her husband, who is a retired maths teacher and landscape gardener.

    Ann Maguire murder accused remanded as second teenager arrested,
    G, 2.5.2014,
    http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/02/
    ann-maguire-murder-accused-remanded-second-teenager-arrested

Hackney shooting victim

named as schoolgirl Shereka Marsh

15-year-old boy charged with murder
and two others arrested
after shooting of 'popular' 15-year-old
at house in east London

Monday 24 March 2014
The Guardian
Robert Booth

A 15-year-old girl shot dead in a house in Hackney, east London, on Saturday afternoon has been named as Shereka Fab-Ann Marsh.

Three boys, one aged 15, and two aged 16, were being held in a nearby police station after they were arrested on suspicion of murder near the scene of the fatal shooting on Eastway, close to the Olympic Park. The 15-year-old was charged with murder late on Sunday night.

Police sources said one line of investigation was that the shooting may have been an accident. Scotland Yard said "enquiries continue to establish the full circumstances of the incident". A post-mortem examination at Poplar mortuary on Sunday revealed Shereka died from a gunshot wound to her neck.

Friends gathered close to the terraced house where the incident took place and laid flowers while forensic crime officers continued their investigation behind a cordon. Some friends told reporters that Shereka, a pupil at Urswick School, a Church of England secondary in Hackney, had gone round to the home of one of the arrested boys with a pair of trainers as a present for his 15th birthday. "Shereka only went to drop off his birthday present, and somehow she got shot," one said. "Nobody knows how yet. It's awful."

Another friend said: "I don't know why there was a gun there when [he] was celebrating his 15th birthday, but this is Hackney."

Ambulances were called shortly before 4pm on Saturday, but Shereka was pronounced dead at the scene. Police confirmed the house was not her home and a firearm had been recovered from it.

On Sunday night her headmaster, Richard Brown, said the school was "stunned by the completely unexpected and tragic death" of the year 11 student who on Friday had been helping raise money for Sport Relief. "It is absolutely out of the blue," he said. "You couldn't have a more innocent victim … Shereka was a bright able student and was on track to be really successful in her GCSEs. She was a great role model for other younger students. She would not knowingly be involved with anything that would have contributed to her death."

Chainelle Jennings, 16, said her friend was "a nice bubbly girl and she loved to party, loved shopping". She said Shereka enjoyed studying history, was good at sports and planned to study business. She added Shereka was an only child who lived with a "very protective" mother while her father lives in Jamaica.

Drew Percival, 16, said teachers from the school were at the nearby Homerton hospital on Saturday night where pupils gathered "trying to calm everyone else".

Krista Brown, an ambassador for the national apprenticeship service, whose son Shad Brown knew Shereka and the boys who were being questioned, described it as "a tragic situation for both sides of the coin". "This is a local community," she said. "They're our kids. What people fail to realise is that this is our kids' reality."

Shereka had led tours of her school this month for visitors including the Jamaican high commissioner, Aloun Ndombet-Assamba and local Labour councillor, Patrick Vernon. Vernon said she told him she planned to study business management and set up her own business.

"She was intelligent, articulate and had her whole future ahead of her," he said. "Whether she was killed by accident or deliberately it is a tragic loss of talent. I really feel for the family but also for the pupils and teachers at the school which has turned itself around. This will be an emotional body blow for the school because she was popular and well known."

An "RIP Shereka" Facebook page created to host tributes to the schoolgirl referenced suggestions that she was accidentally shot. Loopylou Olliffe wrote: "RIP sweet princess. These evil people need to be stopped. Thinking praying and sending my love to you family in these sad times god bless you all xxx". Elaine Pearson, an NHS nurse, added: "OMG …How do they get these guns?"

    Hackney shooting victim named as schoolgirl Shereka Marsh,
    NYT, 24.3.2014,
    http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/23/
    east-london-shooting-death-schoolgirl-named-shereka-marsh