Lost Generations - The Telford Child Grooming Scandal

WARNING: This post is not easy to write, nor I think to read. Inside you learn about some truly horrific crimes that have been mostly ignored and brushed under the rug by authorities because....reasons.

Murdered by 'grooming gangs'   Source

Twenty five miles north west from where I live in England is a town called Telford. The town recently made headline news, although curiously it was ignored by the BBC until pressure mounted, but more on this later.

Source

As many as 1000 girls - mostly white or Sikh - some as young as 11 years old, have been abused, drugged, prostituted, raped, beaten, tortured and, in a few cases, even killed - over the last forty years. Yes, you read that right - FORTY YEARS! To put the scale of this into context, Telford's population is only 170,000.

This most recent scandal is eerily similar to the cases in Rotherham and Rochdale and, although you won't hear about it much in the mainstream media, those are just the tip of the iceberg: there have been cases in Newcastle, Keighley, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Oxford and Bristol too.

One of the Telford victims says she was abused from the age of 14 and threatened by the paedophiles that they would target her younger sisters if she spoke to anyone about it. Forced to have sex with multiple men time after time, she twice fell pregnant and had two abortions. A few hours after her second termination she was taken to be raped by more men.

The girl on the left of the top picture was Lucy Lowe. Aged 16, she was pregnant for the second time when her house was set alight, killing her, her mother and sister Sarah Lowe - also in the photo.

Becky Watson

Becky Watson, 13, was killed in a car crash which was reported as a 'prank'. It was later learned that she had suffered sexual abuse by a grooming gang since she was 11 and her diary revealed that she was being forced to sleep around. Her mother had gone to the police with a list of suspects, but she was ignored and nothing was done. Vicky Round was a friend of Becky's and she too was abused by the same gang who got her addicted to crack cocaine aged just 12. She later died of an overdose, aged 20.

Victim Blaming At It's Worst   Source

Social services and the police have been accused of blaming the victims of these awful crimes, treating them as willing prostitutes. An internal memo by officers investigating the abuse even went as far as to say that in the majority of cases, the sex was consensual. Yes, by girls as young as 11! In British law a child under the age of 16 CANNOT be deemed to consent to sex.

To date only a small proportion of the offenders have been jailed.

Biased Bribery Corruption   Source

Initially, the BBC didn't deem the story worthy to be mentioned in Telford's local news - let alone nationally - even those it was front page news in many national newspapers.

So why the silence from the BBC, police and social workers? All of these crimes were perpetrated by what the BBC like to call 'Asian' men.

Let's have a geography lesson, shall we?   Source

Could these men have been Japanese? Maybe some Chinese and Mongolians thrown in too? Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese perhaps? Indians or Thais? Asia is a pretty damn big place BBC, covering some 17.21 million square miles. Could you not be a little bit more specific?

The reason they are so vague, and why the authorities want to ignore the issue, is that they don't want to be accused of being called racist, god forbid. You see, the majority of these criminals are Pakistani Muslims, preying on young white and Sikh girls. Of course, it would be racist to point out the truth of the matter, but the crime of targeting white and Sikh girls for abuse is definitely not racist...oh no.

Is there something in the culture of Pakistan or in Islam that makes it acceptable to offend in this way? Why can we not have an honest discussion about the undeniable truth of the matter without being silenced with the threat of being accused of being racist? Do our sisters, daughters and granddaughters not deserve protecting?

I have a young daughter and a granddaughter, I genuinely fear for their futures. When even the police turn a blind eye to such crimes, who do we turn to?