Wednesday marked twenty years since the fateful day that a fourteen-year-old girl in the seaside English resort town of Blackpool went missing; Charlene Downes was never seen again, and authorities believe she was murdered. As the ghastly story of what happened to her unfolded, it became appallingly clear that she was only one of thousands of British girls who had suffered a least some of the terrible ordeal she went through before she was killed. Yet even now that two decades have passed, Britain still hasn’t fully faced what happened to Charlene and the other victims or taken any serious steps to prevent what happened to them from happening to any young girl ever again.
The National Pulse reported Wednesday that Charlene Downes “disappeared after falling victim to Muslim groomers in the seaside resort of Blackpool.” Two owners of a Blackpool kebab shop, Iyad Albattikhi and Mohammed Raveshi, were put on trial for her murder, but Charlene’s grieving family would receive no justice: neither Albattikhi nor Raveshi nor anyone else was ever convicted of murdering Charlene. Her brother was the only person ever convicted in connection with the case: he assaulted Albattikhi after recordings surfaced showing him “saying she had been ‘chopped up’ and her body had ‘gone in the kebabs.’”
As if all that weren’t bad enough, on Thursday, The Publica added more piquant details: “the cases against them were dropped after police were accused of having handled the investigation ‘unprofessionally.’ The men were ultimately paid over $420,000 USD each in compensation.”
Yet as horrific as it was in every detail, Charlene’s case was only one of many similar cases. The Publica added that “during the investigation into Downes’ murder, it was discovered that up to 60 girls in their early teens had been groomed and sexually abused by men in the town.”
That was just in Blackpool; investigators have found that gangs made up overwhelmingly of Pakistani Muslim men victimized over a thousand girls in the town of Telford, and 1,400 in the town of Rotherham. And this “grooming gang” activity, as it came to be known, went on all over Britain; there could be tens of thousands of victims — or even more than that.
Yet hardly any of the perpetrators were prosecuted: “Earlier this year, GB News reporter Charlie Peters released a documentary on the grooming gang phenomenon, revealing that in the years between 1997 and 2017, 1 in every 1,700 Pakistani men in the country were prosecuted for their participation in such gangs. In some cities, the figure was as high as 1 in 73.”
Why did so many of these suspected pedophile rapists escape prosecution? Because British police and other authorities were terrified of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic.”
The author of one report on the activity of these rape gangs noted that there was “a great deal of evidence that there was a nervousness about race in Telford and Wellington in particular, bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community.” In Rotherham, “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
In 2017, Sarah Champion, a Labour MP from Rotherham and Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, wrote: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.” For stating that obvious fact, Labour expelled her from the Shadow Cabinet, and she faced a firestorm of criticism.
Few in Britain have dared state the truth as forthrightly as she did, yet she actually only got closer to the problem. This is not and never was fundamentally a racial problem; it was and is a religious one. Sexual assault occurs in all cultures, but only in Islam does it have divine sanction.
One English survivor of a rape gang has said that her rapists would quote the Qur’an to her and believed that Islam justified their actions. The Qur’an teaches that Infidel women can be lawfully taken for sexual use (cf. its allowance for a man to take “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30).
The Qur’an says: “O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful” (33:59). The implication there is that if women do not cover themselves adequately with their outer garments, they may be abused and that such abuse would be justified.
Related: LGBTQ Public School Groomer: ‘You Have to Catch Kids When They’re Starting Puberty’
But no one, and I mean no one, wants to face those facts in the UK today. The Publica notes that this year, “a number of Brits banded together to call on the Government to mark November 1 as a date to remember all the victims of grooming gangs across the country.”
But British authorities will never do justice to those victims until they fully discuss what happened and why. They’re not even close to doing that because it would involve confronting many within the Muslim community, and British officials are clearly intimidated by that community. So the same fear of “racism” that consigned tens of thousands of British girls to their fate is still very much in play.
Charlene Downes deserves better. So do all the other victims, living and dead. It’s long past time for British authorities to recover some spine. Stiff upper lip, lads. Get to work.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member