Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The BBC’s shameful silence on the Telford sex scandal

Last month, I wrote here about the BBC and ‘grooming gangs’. In particular, I speculated that it was unlikely that having once (after more than a decade) dramatized the mass gang-rape of British girls (and a man from Wales having partly been fired-up by it then ploughing a van into a crowd outside a mosque) that the BBC might not venture into such territory again. As I said, ‘nobody should be surprised if the BBC reverts to ignoring crimes like Rochdale in the future.

As so often the situation is worse than I imagined. While I could see that the BBC drama department might be unlikely to again commission a programme looking at the most serious and widespread child-abuse to have occurred in Britain in modern times I thought that they might at least still report the news. No such luck.

The front page of yesterday’s Sunday Mirror read ‘Britain’s ‘worst ever’ child grooming scandal exposed: Hundreds of young girls raped, beaten, sold for sex and some even KILLED.’ Like the scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxfordshire and a growing list of other places, it seems that the victims are, once again, white British girls and the perpetrators men of ‘Asian’ background. Of course while in most other situations the word ‘Asian’ means ‘Asian’, for these purposes ‘Asian’ means ‘men of Muslim background, mainly Pakistani’.

The details of the Sunday Mirror’s investigation once again make for exceptionally difficult reading. The paper describes how girls as young as 11 were drugged, beaten and gang-raped in Telford. It describes how:

‘One 14-year-old, groomed and abused after her phone number was sold to paedophiles, said: “I hated what was happening and my abusers made my skin crawl but I was told that if I said a word to anyone they’d come for my little sisters and tell my mum I was a prostitute.

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