Julie Bindel
speaker
73 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Julie Bindel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, it's a bit of a difficult question to answer about when did it start because we've had...
child sexual abuse organized individual in the home in public places for as long as records go back and as long as feminists and others have been campaigning against it but this particular phenomenon we can locate right back to the 90s or even earlier where we know that in northern cities and towns and villages And of course elsewhere across the UK, but we first heard about them in the North.
there were gangs of men and they were predominantly Pakistani Muslim men in some of those particular towns, because that was the demographic of young out of work men, more likely to be involved in criminality, who had previously been selling heroin. And when heroin became too hot for them to handle, because of course the war on drugs, girls became their merchandise. And how it worked was this.
There would be young, all young girls are vulnerable, obviously, but particularly vulnerable girls were targeted. These girls may well have had a family history of abuse or neglect themselves. They may have been in care. There were also some middle-class girls, and not all of the girls were white, but they were predominantly so.
And they would be targeted by boys pretty much of their age, in shopping malls, and parks and the like. And they got to know them and then said that they would introduce them to older, handsome men who had cars and they had alcohol and they had cigarettes and maybe marijuana. And these girls were having a great time. They were being given attention. They'd perhaps been bullied at school.
Maybe school wasn't a factor in their lives. And soon they were passed up to
older men some of whom worked in takeaway outlets or other traditional jobs for migrants to those towns and then of course the sexual abuse started full-on and the reason why I really try not to call them grooming gangs although often it's just simpler because it's it's a known term I mean grooming is something that I do for about a minute and a half every morning in front of the mirror and
It's meaningless. And these girls were targeted and these girls were raped and pimped. And what often gets missed out is that these girls were for profit. There were also sexual playthings for the men that were then going to be selling them from apartments and houses and even parks around the UK. They were trafficked around the UK, but they were merchandise.
And then what happened was in the late 1990s, in a city called Leeds in West Yorkshire, a mother called Irene Iverson, whose daughter Fiona, aged 14, had been targeted by an older man. And this was a white middle-class, very respectable family. And Irene Iverson decided that she wanted to set up an organisation, which she did, and she called it Coalition for the Removal of Pimping Crop.
Because she knew that her daughter was being sold. She knew that the daughters of many other women, many other parents were also being sold. And she couldn't get social services or the police to deal with the perpetrator. They weren't interested. They more or less said, well, if she's over 13 and it's a consensual relationship with this man, then why should we worry?
And Irene was saying to them that he's much older, she's smoking cannabis, she's staying at his house, they're obviously having sex. Nobody wanted to know. So through the organisation that she set up, that I then found out about very early on, the parents started putting together intelligence about the abusers.
And this is where they discovered, when they talked together, and none of these parents, I mean, certainly none of the ones I met, were focusing on this as a problem because of the men's ethnicity. It was because the men were abusing their daughters. So they put together information such as number plates from cars, from vehicles that picked the girls up,
names of these men, all other kind of information, the addresses, they sometimes followed their daughters to the takeaway outlets or the flats that they were being taken to, and then passed this information, which was quite an extensive bundle of information, to the police, to social services, and nothing was done. And there is a myth, and obviously we'll talk about this, but
I'm sure we don't all agree. There is a myth that the police inaction was solely because of the men's ethnicity, that they didn't want a race riot, because the far right and some racist agitators in the neighbourhoods would have gone berserk when they discovered that these men were predominantly Pakistani Muslim. But a big factor in this was what I'd seen...
right the way through the 80s and early 90s, which was the girls were seen as troublesome slags, which is a phrase that one of the police officers used about the girl, that the girls were worthless, that they were scum, that any girl that had sex with older men for cigarettes and vodka was bringing it on herself. But also there was a racist undertone to this, which is any white girl
that has sex with a Pakistani is worse than scum. And so they really weren't interested because as time immemorial, girls are disbelieved and they're blamed for their own abuse. And then of course we go further on to the early 2000s when This became too big for the police to ignore.
There were too many campaigners, too many child protection experts, too many sexual health clinic representatives saying we've got 14-year-old girls presenting with sexually transmitted infections, pregnancies and asking for abortions. So then it got too big for them to ignore and then some action occurred.
It does check out and if you give perpetrators a message that If they rape a child, the child is the one more likely to be criminalized than him.
And if you give society a message that you can buy a child for sex, paid rape, and nothing will ever happen to you because it's so normalized through pornography and through other cultural signifiers, then it's not surprising that this is happening and happening increasingly where men are emboldened to do this. And of course, this isn't something that stands alone.
away from other child abuse, gangs, patterns, incidents. It is specific, and it was happening in these particular towns with these particular gangs, and it was monetised. But it really was nothing new. It was just becoming so obvious that the police wanted nothing to do with it. And once, of course, the threat of rioting race rioting, as the police referred to it, popped up.
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