For the rape victims’ sake, have mercy on Tommy Robinson

We publish Lizzie Webb’s heartfelt plea for justice for victims of the Muslim grooming gangs ahead of tomorrow’s preliminary hearing in the High Court for a judicial review of Tommy’s Robinson’s treatment at Woodhill HMP, a ‘cat B’ high security prison, where he is held in isolation because of his ‘high profile’ and ‘political ideology’. His legal team are seeking this review following an independent negative assessment of his mental health state. His ‘terrorism’ trial, scheduled for the same date, has been adjourned. It is ironic that it is Robinson who, more than anyone else, has consistently investigated and championed these ignored girls, as Lizzie explains.

LAST year the international media flocked to a village in France to report on a horrendous and heinous crime.

During a four-month court case, we learnt how Gisèle Pelicot had been repeatedly raped by 51 men in her local community. For nine years, her husband Dominique had organised rape sessions in the marital home, drugging her before offering the men her unconscious body.

Many of us reacted with revulsion and indignation that such a degrading crime could be committed in a civilised society. Yet for more than two decades, not in a French village but in English towns up and down the country, gangs of men have been systematically raping young girls, plying them with drugs and alcohol. It is estimated that thousands of girls have been raped, and are still being raped, by unquantifiable numbers of perpetrators.

In this country, it is a criminal offence to have sex with a person under the age of sixteen. Many of these girls were as young as ten. For the last two decades, Tommy Robinson has been trying to defend these thousands of English ‘working-class girls’ from the gangs of men who abhorrently abuse them because they espouse different cultural beliefs. Tommy has been seeking justice, equality of prosecution and sentencing, regardless of their ethnic background. He has consistently done so having witnessed what this is doing to his own community. The media, however, continue to brand him a racist and his supporters ‘far right’. 

In his first interview as chair of the BBC, Samir Shah told the Sunday Times this monththat it was time for the Corporation to admit its mistakes. Its ‘metropolitan liberal bias’ means, he said, that news stories ‘lack balance’. Citing migration, he said that the BBC ‘has not taken up the concerns of the communities receiving these people’.

Indeed. Tommy Robinson’s views and concerns have been inadequately reflected not just by BBC News. They have been all but ignored and when not ignored, treated as racist or extreme.

When did we hear about this in the media? When were we first made aware of it? Who knew? In 2011, Andrew Norfolk published his first investigative piece in the Times, but there was no follow-up, no outcry from the rest of the media.

After years of repeated requests and cries for help to the police, the social services and to individuals whose moral judgment and duty it was to protect these girls, one man decided it was time for direct action.

In 2009, with pent-up frustration, he galvanised a group of men to publicise what was happening. His purpose was to try to prevent the untold damage he was witnessing and protect the victims. Why?Because he was living in one of the scores of communities that were being forced to accept these ongoing atrocities.   

He was not alone in his outrage. Both Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley, who raised the problem as early as 2002, and later Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, had evidence this was happening in their constituencies. Incredibly, instead of being encouraged to further investigate these appalling issues, these two MPs were smeared, ostracised and both ended up resigning: Ann Cryer in 2010 and Sarah Chapman in 2017.*

The ongoing pleas and cries for help from the abused girls, their parents and various individuals, including Maggie Oliver who left the police force to care for them, were unashamedly and deliberately ignored. The English Defence League that Tommy Robinson started in 2009 to force the authorities to take control of the abuse was hijacked from its original cause and disbanded in 2013: it had become politically motivated.

When a public inquiry was set up by Theresa May to investigate institutionalised child sex abuse, it was in response to historical Anglican, Catholic and BBC sex abuse. Muslim grooming gangs were barely an afterthought. When the police and the justice system finally made moves to arrest and successfully prosecute some of the gangs, the national media responded by naming and reporting the court findings, with several in the media simultaneously quoting statistics for the raping of young girls in their own homes and by some of their family members as if deliberately to underplay the horror.

Does that in any way excuse or diminish the severity and depravity endured by the young vulnerable girls from grooming gangs up and down the country, men who in their hundreds have been preying on them for years? 

What has been the mental and physical cost of this denial to the thousands of children in England who are so often from socially deprived and challenging backgrounds, who are impressionable and insecure? 

We’ve heard some of the tragic consequences of ‘turning a blind eye’ in these communities. One girl committed suicide, another was murdered, several had abortions or gave birth, others have courageously related how they cope with still seeing their abusers on their local streets, men who have tortured them with broken bottles thrust in their vagina, or screwed a wooden pole in their anus so several men at the same time could repeatedly rape them. One girl has an everlasting reminder of her fate that she’s their property: they burnt it into her buttocks.

How, as a country, have we lost sight of the values we used to uphold, our culture of tolerance and fairness, of equality, the pride we have in looking after the most vulnerable in our society, and the right of free speech, the right to voice an opinion, to agree and to disagree without the fear of violence and retribution from those in power?

And what has happened to the men and women who cared so much about the rights of these innocent children, when they could no longer tolerate them being tortured and abused; these adults who may not have had the necessary language skills that are considered ‘acceptable’ when they chose to speak out, or hold banners with strident phrases and accusations scrawled on their placards? Should we not be applauding them for having the immense courage to do what clearly others could or would not do?

I and thousands of others admire their courage. The sacrifices they made have resulted in prison sentences as a consequence of their common decency and community concern, men like Peter Lynch, who with no previous convictions, was sentenced to two years and eight months; he hanged himself at the beginning of this year when he could no longer cope with all the prison world entails.

Unlike the authorities, who for years chose to do absolutely nothing, and instead turned against these caring adults who weren’t afraid to be seen voicing how these rapes are not only a criminal offence, but ruining the lives of countless innocent young girls, and with it, destroying their communities. 

They were also concerned for the safety of the next generation who will have little alternative but to continue living in these blighted towns and cities. I am fortunate: I don’t have to live in them.

And let us not forget too, the courageous Gisèle Pelicot who decided to forgo her anonymity and chose to speak the truth for the sake of others. Imagine though if each of Rotherham’s 1,400 raped and tortured girls had been given that attention and airtime?  Heaven help us if we all stop caring.   

*In 2014, the Jay Report stated in Rotherham there were 1,400 victims of sexual child exploitation between 1997 and 2013.