Latest news with #rapeGangs
The Sun
a day ago
- The Sun
Long-awaited Casey grooming gang review links illegal migration with exploitation of British girls
A DAMNING review into rape gangs will directly link illegal migration with the exploitation of British girls, The Sun can reveal. The Home Office is expected to publish the long-awaited National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse next week. 1 A source familiar with the report said its author, Baroness Louise Casey, specifically links illegal migration with the violence perpetrated against vulnerable girls. The Sun understands there are fears in the Home Office that knowledge of the link between undocumented arrivals and grooming gangs could trigger more civil unrest. The Home Office today refused to deny the involvement of illegal migration in the Casey report. A government spokesperson said: 'Nothing is more important than protecting vulnerable children, and we are determined to crack down on vile grooming gangs once and for all. 'That's why we ordered a rapid national audit to uncover the true scale of this horrific abuse. 'This report – alongside our response – will be published shortly.' The Casey review was tasked with building a 'national picture of what is known about current group-based child sexual exploitation' and to 'identify local and national trends'. It will also 'provide an assessment of what is known about the demographics of grooming gangs and their victims, including ethnicity'. It comes as a grooming gang have been found guilty of raping and abusing two teen girls in Rochdale in a five-year reign of terror. The seven men "passed" the victims around for sex and preyed on them in squalid flats and car parks in the town. They groomed the girls from the age of 13 and made them their "sex slaves" by plying them with gifts, including alcohol and drugs. The victims both had "deeply troubled home lives", which meant they were easy prey for the fiends. During a five-year horror ordeal, the girls were expected to have sex "whenever and wherever" the defendants and other men wanted. As well as flats and car parks, the predators abused the teens on rancid mattresses, in cars, alleyways and disused warehouses. Mohammed Zahid, 64, Kasir Bashir, 50, Mushtaq Ahmed, 66, Roheez Khan, 39, Mohammed Shahzad, 43, Nisar Hussain, 43, and Naheem Akram, 48, were today convicted. Three of the abusers, Zahid, Ahmed and Bashir were born in Pakistan and worked as stallholders on Rochdale's indoor market. Father-of-three Zahid - known as Boss Man - gave free underwear from his lingerie stall to both victims. He was previously jailed for five years after he engaged in sexual activity in 2006 with a 15-year-old girl who he met when she visited his stall to buy tights for school.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Watch: Lucy Powell apologises for dismissing rape gangs as ‘dog whistle' issue
Lucy Powell has finally apologised for dismissing the rape gangs scandal as a 'dog whistle' issue. The Leader of the Commons was condemned by grooming gang victims after she appeared to downplay the topic during a radio debate last week. In an episode of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions on May 2, Ms Powell interrupted Tim Montgomerie, a Reform backer, when he raised a Channel 4 documentary 'about rape gangs'. The MP for Manchester Central replied: 'Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let's get that dog whistle out.' During business questions in the Commons, Ms Powell was asked by Jesse Norman, the shadow Commons leader, to 'put aside party politics' and apologise. She replied: 'Can I actually thank him for raising with me what I said in an episode of Any Questions last week, so I can be absolutely clear with the House today, especially to the victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and grooming gangs, that I am very sorry for those remarks. 'As I made clear over the weekend, I and every member of this Government want your truth to be heard, wherever that truth leads. Their truly appalling experiences need to be acted on for those responsible to be accountable and face the full force of the law and for justice to be served. 'I would never want Mr Speaker to leave the impression that these very serious profound and far-reaching issues which I have campaigned on for many years should be shied away from and not aired – far from it. 'No stone will be left unturned and what the victims want first and foremost is for action to be taken and for the many many recommendations from the previous inquiries to be implemented in full including mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse something I have called for for nearly a decade.' Ms Powell's apology comes six days after her initial remarks and five days after a statement issued on Saturday in which she sought to clarify her remarks but did not say sorry. In a later exchange with Katie Lam, a shadow Home Office minister, the Cabinet minister went on to attack the Tories' record on grooming gangs. Referring to 18 recommendations made by a broader report into child sexual abuse, Ms Powell said: 'Shockingly these recommendations remained sitting on the shelf until we came into government last year. 'Baroness Louise Casey, who conducted the no-holds-barred inquiry into Rotherham, is carrying out an audit on the scale, nature and characteristics of grooming gangs that she will be reporting soon and this will include the questions of ethnicity as well. 'Every police force in England Wales has been asked to look again at historic grooming gangs cases and they will be reopened where it is appropriate to get perpetrators behind bars... I hope the House is left in no doubt of my commitment to these issues, and my apology to those victims for any distress I have caused.' Sir Keir Starmer has continued to resist calls by the Conservatives and Reform UK calls for a statutory inquiry into the historical sexual abuse of thousands of children by gangs of men, predominantly of Pakistani heritage. Sarah Wilson, a Rochdale grooming gang survivor, said last week that Ms Powell's remarks summed up 'what victims and survivors have been up against all these years '. Marlon West, the father of 20-year-old grooming gang victim Scarlett, also criticised the comments. Mr West and Scarlett both appeared in the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed: A National Scandal, which had been referenced by Mr Montgomerie. Ms Powell's apology came as a Labour MP called for Sir Keir to dismiss her from his Cabinet in the wake of the scandal. The MP said: 'Why is she still there? I honestly don't know how kept her job. I'm largely happy with the Cabinet as it is, but Lucy needs to be sacked.'
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Lucy Powell's dismissal of the rape gangs horror was an admission of Labour's monstrous cover-up
Why in the name of God is Lucy Powell still not sacked? You will probably have heard that the Leader of the Commons interrupted Tim Montgomerie, a Reform UK commentator, when both were panellists on Radio 4's Any Questions last week. Talking about the rape gangs, Montgomerie raised a powerful Channel 4 documentary which had just been broadcast, ' Groomed: A National Scandal ', and Lucy Powell quickly jumped in. 'Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, let's get that dog whistle out,' she sneered. In a bitter irony, Powell was repeating the same appalling pattern of deflection and denial that the documentary had just exposed. For more than 40 years, young girls in the UK have suffered rape and sexual torture at the hands of depraved men, mostly of Pakistani origin, who pimped them out to their relatives, mates and paying customers. When the girls or their parents complained to the police, the council or social workers, their stories were usually dismissed, swiftly buried or 'investigated' (yeah, right). Often, the authorities, most of them Labour-leaning like Powell, feared giving offence to the Muslim community or being perceived as racist. That was seen as far more important than safeguarding children. Don't forget it was – and is – politically embarrassing to upset Muslims who tend to vote en masse for Labour candidates. Many Leftist politicians, including serving Cabinet ministers (Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Jess Phillips, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper), depend hugely on their votes. The Government recently rejected a national inquiry into the Pakistani rape gangs, the biggest scandal in our country's history, preferring to give a paltry few million quid to several Labour councils to investigate themselves with all the vigour one might expect. For some reason, the chosen councils did not include the towns and cities (like Bradford) where the worst abuse is believed to have taken place. If you had to give a name to this strategy it would be: Raped Girls for Votes. Thousands of poor, white children, some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society, have cynically been sacrificed for the sake of the Left's electoral survival. The Faustian pact involved is so horrifying that all Labour ministers can do is accuse those who call them out of being racist. That is what Lucy Powell tried to do to the extremely decent and thoughtful Tim Montgomerie. When she was taken to task on social media by people like me for her despicable comments, Powell initially insisted that she had been taken out of 'context'. She was merely rebuffing a line of political attack, you see. Soon after, with criticism mounting, Powell apologised if her remarks were 'unclear'. She tweeted: 'In the heat of a discussion on AQ, I would like to clarify that I regard issues of child exploitation & grooming with the utmost seriousness. I'm sorry if this was unclear. I was challenging the political point scoring around it, not the issue itself. As a constituency MP I've dealt with horrendous cases. This Gvt is acting to get to the truth, and deliver justice.' Unfortunately for Powell, she had been perfectly clear. The mask had slipped, that was all, and for a few seconds we glimpsed the ugly face behind the self-righteous, butter-wouldn't melt facade. Those like Montgomerie, who refuse to genuflect to the multicultural religion (Christianity being a tad judgmental for Starmer's Marxists), have to be gagged and silenced in order to create the 'fairer' Britain the Government wants to usher in. Those who are guilty of 'wrongthink' and ask awkward questions – like why are Pakistani-origin men so disproportionately responsible for child sexual 'exploitation' (not abuse, 'exploitation')? – can be safely exiled outside the ideological bubble and, therefore, beyond the bounds of acceptable discussion. Talking about grooming gangs equals 'hate speech', which is illegal (or soon will be if Labour smuggles in its Islamophobia definition). That is why Lucy Powell felt so confident that by uttering the phrase 'dog whistle' (guaranteed to get a Pavlovian reaction; dog whistle = racist bad) she would ensure Montgomerie was a pariah fit only for cancellation. Exactly what happened to the actor Laurence Fox when he insisted on another BBC current affairs show, Question Time, that Britain was not a racist country, actually it was a rather nice, tolerant place. Most of us privately agreed, of course, but Fox had put himself outside the ideological bubble and was therefore guilty of 'hate speech' so his career was over. In fact, it was Lucy Powell, not Tim Montgomerie, who was guilty of political point scoring. Her timing could not have been worse, poor dear. The massive success of Reform in Thursday's elections made it very difficult to paint the party's passionate concern about the rape gangs as simply a vile preoccupation of the 'far-Right'. If it was, at least a third of the population were now far-Right and very angry about the industrial-scale abuse of white, working class girls by Muslim men who saw them as 'easy meat'. Suddenly, there were an awful lot of Reform voters holding forth on radio and TV and they seemed not just sensible but (whisper it) rather nice. As a result, the smug, holier-than-thou cabal on the mainstream media found themselves having to discuss topics which, only 24 hours earlier, they had ruled unacceptable. This is the first time I have listened to Any Answers in many years without fearing an immediate brain haemorrhage. Well done to all those who rang in to tell the startled presenter what the citizens of Planet Normal feel. Our Prime Minister is delighted to recommend Adolescence, a Netflix drama which comfortingly, if unstatistically, suggests that the knife-crime epidemic arises in white boys from stable homes with two loving parents. How I wish we could sit the entire Labour Parliamentary Party down and oblige them to watch ' Groomed: A National Scandal.' Twenty-one years ago, producer Anna Hall was the first person to expose the pattern, now familiar as gang grooming, in her groundbreaking, Edge of the City. In this new film, Hall focusses on five women who survived unimaginable abuse and trauma over 20 years. Jade had a lovely mother, but her alcoholic dad turned to heroin and started leaving his young daughter with the men who sold him drugs. Jade was taken into care and met a Pakistani man, an abuser she thought of as her boyfriend. After the initial blandishments, Jade was passed around like a ragdoll. Seven of the abuser's relatives took turns with her in a toilet when the child was so drunk she could barely stand up. She was trafficked to so many towns, she couldn't remember all the names. Finally, in 2009, in High Wycombe, police and social workers became concerned about Jade and put a protection order on her. One night, Jade left the home to go and meet her abuser and took another girl with her. Police arrested Jade for inciting sexual activity on a minor. 'I didn't even know what those words meant.' Jade, who was supposed to be under police protection, was the one who was arrested under grooming charges, while the foul fiend who groomed her got off scot free. Jade ended up with a five-year jail sentence and was put on the Sex Offenders' Register if you can imagine such a thing. Miraculously, now in her early thirties Jade has turned her life around. She is a devoted mother to her children, although it upsets her she is not allowed to accompany them on school trips because a CRB check still brings her up as a sex offender. Jade comes across as a strong, warm, thoughtful woman. But when Anna Hall asked her how many men she thought had abused her, Jade's face sort of collapsed and her mouth became a gash of grief. She looked like a little girl howling. 'It's in the hundreds, but I try not to go there.' All five – Jade, Chantelle, Erin, Scarlett and Steph – told essentially the same story. Innocent, trusting girls fallen among a pack of wolves, and judged by the authorities who were supposed to protect them. In the early 2000s, in West Yorkshire, Erin was being controlled by one man who pimped her out. On one occasion, he and his cousin used her to have vaginal and anal sex at the same time. 'It really hurt. When they was done with me, I was crying and screaming. He said he'd kill me if I spoke about it.' Erin's desperate mum took her to the police station with a pair of her daughter's knickers covered in semen. Erin's mum pointed out her child was covered in bite marks from head to toe. Police did nothing. Social services said: 'Erin who had been raped frequently puts herself at risk.' Erin had made a 'lifestyle choice', police said. The Children's Services Assessment Board wrote: 'Erin is a very promiscuous girl'. Erin was 13 years old. Chantelle, who looks like a Botticelli painting of an angel who has spent a thousand years in hell, was only 12 when it started. Eleven men taking turns. Like thousands of others, she was called a child prostitute, even though the police knew full well sex with a child is illegal. Anna Hall produced a chilling video of young Pakistani males who were asked why the girls they groomed were so young and one explained, 'It's 'cos the younger girls you can take advantage. They can never get out.' In 2002, when Jayne Senior, a wonderful youth worker in Rotherham, helped with a Home Office report which found that 268 girls known to Jayne and her team were definitely being raped, with a further 63 possibles, no charges were brought. 'They didn't want to hear what we had found,' Senior recalls. 'I was told I needed to stop rocking the multicultural boat.' Dog whistle, see? Must be racist. Maggie Oliver, today a formidable champion for the abused girls, then a Greater Manchester police officer working on Operation Augusta, reported 'dozens of men – Pakistani men – sending younger boys to pick up girls from the care homes. Just like cannon fodder.' Asked about reports that things are better today, Maggie snapped, 'Bulls---. It's happening now.' Jade agrees: 'Probably some other little girl today.' Steph recalls that one of her abusers worked for Greater Manchester Police. She identified him, but he was never investigated because they said he'd left the force. Don't want to open that can of worms, do we, Lucy? The Augusta report ('The perpetrators are almost exclusively Asian males') never saw the light of day. Countless reports, apologies from the police and social services, politicians promising inquiries they'd rather didn't happen. Back in January, when Elon Musk intervened, hardly able to believe the epidemic of depravity which had been allowed to flourish in the UK and accusing Keir Starmer and other senior Labour figures of covering up the scandal, a coldly furious PM made a statement. 'Those who spread lies and misinformation, they're not interested in the truth; they're interested in themselves.' How dare he. How dare Labour accuse others of lies and disinformation when they are so desperate to avoid a national inquiry which risks getting to the truth. Lucy Powell inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. Disgracefully, Downing Street has accepted her apology. Health Secretary Wes Streeting also defended Powell saying politicians sometimes say things 'in the heat of debate' that 'come across badly... We all make mistakes'. It wasn't a mistake. It was an admission. A dismissive, degrading comment that belittled all the terrified girls who suffered multiple gang rapes while giving covering fire to their rapists. (It's only racists who bang on about grooming gangs, isn't it?) And Lucy Powell, a mother with a daughter of her own, put defending her party's indefensible policy above defending children from those devils. Just listen to what Scarlett had to say, Lucy. 'They kept me in a flat for two days where they took turns with me.' Is that a dog whistle? A blow on that little trumpet about the Pakistani brutes who tortured and raped because the English girl was not human to them? And that's the awful truth you don't want exposed. Labour will not be able to postpone a national inquiry which will upset their Muslim client group forever: their obfuscation over the rape gangs has been infamous. In centuries to come, historians will still be writing about the monstrous injustice and cover-up. Resign, Lucy Powell, resign if you have any shred of feeling for all those mothers' daughters.
