Groomed for our rooms

I remember, when the grooming gangs scandal was prominent in the news several years ago, watching the BBC production, 'Three Girls'. a dramatisation of the very real horrors that had happened in Rochdale, where extremely young working-class white girls were brutally abused and exploited by British-Pakistani child rape rings.

Unlike more recent dramatisations surrounding other prominent news stories, this portrayal had the acute, stomach-churning ring of total authenticity to it. It actually made me cry (not an affliction that often troubles me, as an icy cool Aquarian who, according to that meme that does the rounds, either has a cold heart or none at all...).

I grew up within the wider conurbation of Stoke-on-Trent, a very underprivileged and working-class town, with many social and economic parallels to Rochdale, and so I recognised many of the cultural themes in Three Girls. I knew the depiction of the girls and their vulnerabilities as depicted in the drama was accurate. While I personally didn't know anyone who was targeted by a grooming gang, memoirs released by survivors have mentioned being trafficked to men in Stoke, so it was definitely happening there, too.

Subsequently, as an adult, I moved to nearby Oldham, where (Mr. AF) Mark is from, and where his mother has followed avidly the sterling work of Raja Miah in attempting to expose the widespread abuse of white children in the town, primarily by British-Pakistani gangs. Miah has been ignored and dismissed (and worse) by the authorities for years, but is finally starting to get the prominence and recognition his work deserves.

So, in short, I've been aware of the grooming gangs scandal for a long time, and understand implicitly what a real and severe threat this is to the safety of British children, and to the fabric of British society, about which serious action is long overdue.

Therefore, in that sense, of course I feel relief and gratitude that the issue is finally getting the kind of prominent political attention it deserves, even if that attention has been galvanised by the likes of Elon Musk.

Of course a proper investigation should take place; of course the perpetrators should be severely punished and the victims properly compensated.

The question I have, however, is - as ever with any high-profile media event - why this, why now?

As real and horrific as the grooming gangs scandal is, one nevertheless has to be suspicious when so many prominent establishment figures are suddenly telling us to be horrified about it - and only telling us now, when it's been going on for such a long time - whilst doing their absolute utmost to whip up maximal fury and outrage in the population.

They only do that when they want to use the fury they have fomented to their own advantage, in a way that, ultimately, does not advantage us.

In trying to gauge a deeper understanding of the situation and where it might be going, I read two memoirs of survivors of the grooming gangs. One called 'Exploited' by Emma Jackson - a pseudonym, as she is still in hiding - and the other, 'Violated', by Sarah Wilson - her real name, as she remains a very outspoken activist against the gangs, after she was relentlessly abused, starting in her school playground at age 11. Her sister was subsequently killed, aged seventeen, in "the UK's first white honour killing".

Needless to say, the memoirs make for extremely dark and disturbing reading, but they also provide us with a great deal of insight into how white British girls - not always from chaotic, dysfunctional families, as Emma's memoir makes clear - can fall prey to being groomed.

I do think "grooming gangs" is an accurate term (although I understand why some use "rape gangs"), as the period of gradually winning the girls' trust, and using a variety of non-sexual methods to systematically enmesh them ever more deeply in a web they feel unable to escape from, is key to understanding how the gangs operate.

The girls these gangs target are so young, that the gangs often do not use the so-called "loverboy method", as preferred by the likes of Andrew Tate, to win a girl's trust. The loverboy method entails an aspiring pimp convincing a girl that he loves her and that they are boyfriend and girlfriend. It is only when he is sure she has fallen in love with him that he reveals his true intentions, using her feelings for him to manipulate her into sex work.

However, for the loverboy method to be effective, the targeted girls have to be old enough to have romantic feelings for the opposite sex. The girls the grooming gangs targeted - not infrequently as young as 11 or 12 - had often not reached that age. Both memoirs I read made clear that the girls had not yet so much as had a crush on a boy when they were targeted, and so simply saw the polite, well-dressed young Asians who approached them as new friends.

The girls enjoyed rides in cool cars, illicit cigarettes and alcohol, and hanging around in disused buildings and deserted spaces, simply chatting. The sexual element crept in gradually, and when the girls were already hooked on feeling a valued part of an integrated community.

That seemed to be the major hook for both girls whose memoirs I read. They both talked about how impressed they were by how all the Asians seemed to know each other - how every new person they met was an uncle or cousin - and that they themselves increasingly felt a deep sense of belonging to, as one put it, "a whole connected web of people".

We as humans are deeply wired to desire that level of connection to the people around us - to be intrinsically entwined in the daily lives of about 150 other people. It's why soap operas are so popular: as our real-life communities and sense of connection to each other started to disintegrate in the decades after world war two, as families separated and scattered, we were given more and more soap operas to fill the gap this community breakdown had created.

We, increasingly as the twentieth century progressed, could no longer rely on having real-life daily interaction with extended family, friends, and neighbours, so we were given televised Neighbours to watch instead, developing the same interest in and attachments to the fictional characters portrayed onscreen that we once had to real people.

Inevitably, of course, this isn't as good as the real thing - which the girls whose memoirs I read felt that they had found with their new Asian 'friends'.

When these 'friends' started demanding they participate in sexual acts to remain part of this "community", the girls were so hooked on the sense of belonging, that they did.

Even after one girl eventually reported her rapists to the police, she still continued to go out and socialise with their friends and acquaintances, because - as she tellingly recorded in her memoir - "what's the alternative? Staying in every night and watching TV?"

The grooming gangs were able to operate with such impunity because they zeroed in on one of the deepest and most powerful needs human beings have - a need for community - and ruthlessly exploited it in the most despicable ways.

That real-life community - an intertwined web of people who's daily lives we are intrinsically connected to - doesn't exist for most white people in the UK any more.

The Asians, however, overwhelmingly still have it, which was ultimately what enabled the grooming gangs to do what they did, and is a key reason why specifically white children (rather than non-Muslim children of other ethnicities, whose communities are often more intact) were targeted.

Although social and economic vulnerabilities of the targeted girls was certainly a factor - their often being from poor and dysfunctional environments - this wasn't always so, as Emma Jackson's memoir makes clear. Emma was from a stable, working family, with happily married parents, and had endured no trauma or abuse at all in the lead up to being targeted by a gang, whom she innocently first encountered aged 13 whilst in the local shopping centre with her friends.

So, what I learned in reading these memoirs was that it wasn't so much the individual circumstances of girls that made them vulnerable to targeting, as much as it was the broken social infrastructure of the country as a whole - breakages that are very intentional, and engineered by social architects for a reason.

One particular factor that emboldened the grooming gangs, and that they ruthlessly exploited to their advantage, was that the girls they targeted were often returning from school to empty houses, because their mothers had to work.

It is the reality for most white families, especially working-class ones, that the women have to work. It's not generally some feminist lifestyle choice about personal fulfilment: it's about the stark reality that they have to bring money in keep their children warm and fed.

In the memoirs I read, Emma's mother worked long hours in the convenience store the family ran, and Sarah's mother picked up whatever shifts she could get, in factories or pubs. These were not glamorous career choices based on chasing self-actualisation, they were simply matters of survival.

This meant the two young girls would often return to empty homes, an uninviting prospect for young children, which their abusers made much of, with one twisted character even explicitly telling Emma her parents didn't really love her, or they would be at home with her, and they only pretended to need to work so much so they didn't have to be with her.

As a naïve 13-year-old, she believed him, noticing as she did that no Asian children were returning to empty houses after school.

It's important to note that social architects targeting the West have engineered this situation - where both parents have to work to keep the family afloat - on purpose.

They know it makes children more vulnerable. It's a key reason they've done it.

It has previously been perfectly plausible for a family to survive on one wage, so the other parent can be at home with the children, as was generally the case in the 1950s.

But to remake society as they desire, breaking down family cohesion and forcing mothers away from their children and into the workplace has been essential to the ruling classes. They needed to untether children from family and community bonds to make them vulnerable to state indoctrination at school and via the media.

So, since the 1950s, social engineers have worked hard to decimate traditional family and community models, and to isolate children from all the mechanisms that have historically protected them.

And, on the subject of the 1950s, I have written before about how "15-minute cities" wouldn't be such a daunting prospect had they been imposed in 1950, because then, everyone more or less lived in them anyway. Few people had cars, everyone walked to the local amenities, and most close family and friends lived nearby.

Yet the social engineers took a claw hammer to these close and intertwined indigenous communities that had existed for many generations, and used a variety of tactics to destroy them, meaning it is now the norm for people to live isolated, atomised lives in towns they aren't from and have no enduring connections to.

At least, that's the norm for white people.

When mass migration of Asians to the UK began, they were strongly encouraged to keep their families and communities intact, by all living in the same areas, having multi-generational homes, and running family businesses, where there is always a job for the latest uncle or cousin to arrive.

This makes British Asians exceptionally powerful in many ways, and it is this same "strength in numbers" influence that makes politicians grovel to them - because Muslims block-vote as instructed by their community leaders - as makes them so alluring to young girls dealing with increasing feelings of disconnection and a yearning for community. Girls who feel that all that awaits them if they return to their own houses after school is watching fictional communities on television, often by themselves.

Boring.

Lonely.

Their Asian "friends", they felt, were offering them something much better.

That is the social landscape into which the grooming gangs entered and in which they were able to so proliferate and thrive, and this landscape - the badly fractured, scattered, and sometimes non-existent indigenous communities many white children grow up in - is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

White extended families are not going to move closer together, open businesses together, or (ye Gods!) live in the same houses as each other, in the way Muslims and some other ethnic groups do. Whilst a small minority of families may choose to do this, the great majority will not, not least because so many families have been irreparably torn apart by the Covid episode.

So even if we completely throw the book at every known offender in the grooming scandal, and generously compensate every victim in every possible way, that will not be enough to stop the same phenomenon simply repeating in more and more towns across the country, with new gangs and new victims every year.

No doubt the would-be perpetrators will lay low for a while, whilst this is such a prominent news talking point, but, inevitably, it will soon drop out of the headlines and "operations" will re-commence, because as long as there's lonely and disconnected young kids on the streets, yearning for community and connection, there is a market for these predators to exploit.

And to be clear, they weren't sourcing these children from anywhere sinister or untoward, they were befriending them in completely normal environments where it should be entirely safe for children to be: walking home from school, playing in the park, shopping centres on Saturdays, and so on.

So therein lies the ultimate messaging, and, consequently, the explanation for why this situation - which has been a huge problem for so many years - is only getting the widespread press attention and media outrage, now.

It's been very deftly timed to coincide with the ever-intensifying propaganda offensive to encourage people, as far as is possible, never to leave home.

The ruling classes have already told us explicitly that their vision for the future consists of the vast majority of the population existing only through their screens in an entirely virtual world, whilst "reality privilege" is reserved solely for the moneyed elites.

The Covid episode and "lockdown" were all about setting the stage for this, as working, shopping, and socialising from home all became normalised, and many external leisure and entertainment venues collapsed, whilst the ones that remain inevitably become unfeasibly expensive (I went for a coffee in town yesterday, where I ordered a small black coffee and my companion ordered a small white coffee. Despite our order therefore being primarily composed of tap water, we were charged £8.80).

Therefore, the reason the grooming gangs scandal is being so amplified now is, ultimately, to further promote the idea of living life entirely indoors, by getting the message across to parents loud and clear that your children are not safe outside.

They're not safe walking home from school. They're not safe in the park. They're not safe in a shopping centre or at McDonald's. On the contrary: these are all prime recruitment grounds for the grooming gangs.

Want to keep them safe?

Keep them inside.

It's just the same messaging they give us about pets, and what they want to do to children, they soften us up for by first doing to pets (see chipping).

After my amazing cat, Tiger, died unexpectedly aged nine, the vet solemnly told me - literally minutes after he had died and I was standing there trembling in white-faced shock - that this is why she never let her cats outside.

Tiger had had some sort of accident which had caused internal bleeding, which the vets couldn't stop. They didn't know what kind of accident (he most likely fell in a misjudged jump and landed on something blunt that caused the injury), but they did purport to "know" he would have been safe from such hazards if he had been an indoor cat.

After the requisite period of extreme guilt and mourning, blaming myself for ever letting him outside, I eventually came to the conclusion that, in fact, the vets were wrong (as well as being spectacularly insensitive and unprofessional - imagine a doctor telling the family of a car crash victim, "yes well, what do you expect if you let him outside").

It's true that Tiger probably would have lived longer were he an indoor cat: but being confined to the indoors would have vastly diminished the quality of life he experienced. He loved to be outside, feeling the grass on his paws and the sun on his whiskers, and so, when I later acquired two new cats, Jack and Cleo, I was always determined they would be outdoor cats, despite what had happened to Tiger and how nervous I initially felt about letting them out.

I got them as kittens (now they're nearly two), and they're happy and healthy outdoor cats.

Nevertheless, the vet was of course right that they were and are at higher risk for injury and premature death by virtue of going outside, than they would be if I kept them in.

With cats, it's easier to make the judgement that this (still relatively small) risk is worth it. I can see that they gain so much from having access to the outside world, that I can comfortably make the decision to allow them to have it.

Obviously, this judgement is hardly so easy to make with a child, where the risks are much more significant and complex.

If the only way to reliably keep your child safe from horrific, life-altering abuse and assault is to keep them indoors, shouldn't you do it?

I had already deduced that this was the likely intended messaging of the current huge media focus on the grooming gangs, when this fact was qualified beyond any reasonable doubt by the headline story I saw in the Daily Mail today:

"British teen's 30-man rape hell which will horrify every parent: How a young woman's trip to Italy turned into a fight for survival against mob who 'grew more excited' the more terrified she became.'

So there you are: they are telling parents explicitly.

Your kids are not safe outside.

Regardless of whether they're in public or with friends - no matter how seemingly "safe" the environment - it isn't.

On Twitter, users are now routinely making comments such as, "it's every day now! I wouldn't let my wife or daughter be out on their own walking the dog any more".

That's exactly what this latest propagandist assault on the population is designed to achieve: the feeling that the risks, to female children particularly, are so pronounced by going outside, that it's better that they never do.

Sure, they'll lose out on some things by becoming "indoor children", but, just like indoor pets - and as the vet was so keen to impress upon me - at least they're alive.

They're safe.

An electronic toy mouse and other engaging gadgets can adequately entertain an indoor cat: ever-more sophisticated AI and virtual reality, we will be told, can comparably entertain a child.

Instead of meeting friends outside in the dangerous real world, why not use your avatar to meet them in the Metaverse? Just like drinking over Zoom was presented to adults during Covid as a "safe" alternative to going to the pub, engaging with the world digitally and virtually will be presented to parents as the safe alternative to letting your children out into the predatory and dangerous real world.

As more and more parents now work from home - a trend that will accelerate exponentially over the coming years, as will overall job loss, leading to even more parents being at home all day, sustained by UBI - they will be able to supervise their children learning from home, rather than going to school. Again, lockdown was the preview for this.

The future of education is online learning and AI teachers, all delivered to children in the safety of their bedrooms, and therefore eliminating the prospect of groomers accosting them as they walk home from school or wait for the bus.

That's why high-profile media and political figures are cynically pretending to care about grooming gangs now, after at best ignoring, if not actively facilitating, them for all these years.

It's because now it's strategic. Now, they're busy putting the architecture in place to reframe reality as something we experience from inside our homes via screens, and they need to acclimatise the next generation to seeing this as "normal" by never letting them experience freely going outside.

Somebody who has grown up leaving the house every day, walking to and from school, going to the park with their friends, and the shopping centre on Saturdays, is highly likely to resist a lifetime of living indoors, just as if you try to make an outdoor cat an indoor one, the cat protests wildly, meowing in indignation and scratching at the door.

Yet a cat who has known no different easily accepts its life inside the home, and shows no inclination to go outside.

If the ruling classes can scare parents enough with the horrendous threat of grooming gangs, the parents will cooperate in raising "indoor children", just as, during the Covid scare campaign, they cooperated in masking and injecting them - all under the guise of keeping them safe.

That's "why this, why now". That's why so many dubious figures are turning their attention to the grooming gangs now, after ignoring them for years.

It's because now, we have the requisite technological advances - highly sophisticated AI and VR - to make a life lived entirely indoors a genuine possibility.

When the grooming gangs scandal first began, and all that was available to entertain children in their homes was terrestrial TV and Sonic The Hedgehog, they were always going to seek further excitement outdoors. But what AI and VR can offer will increasingly become so advanced and immersive, so exciting and addictive, that real life will seem a dull - and dangerous - alternative.

In short, the very real concern millions of parents have about child predators will ultimately be weaponised against them to fulfil a key ruling class agenda item: the creation of the lifelong "indoor human".

(If you're wondering, "what about boys?", as the grooming gangs threat seems to only pertain to girls, have a look at the county lines drug gangs, which primarily target boys, and which are getting increasing attention in the media. I can see a similar campaign of concern and outrage gathering steam with this issue, as the drugs gangs target boys in the same sort of places the grooming gangs target girls, and so the solution to "keep boys safe" will be the same.)

Of course, the reality is that confining children to their bedrooms, as well as being cruel and inhumane, is no solution to the social problems that ravage the UK, and is effectively a form of victim-blaming. After all, it's the perpetrators who should be confined to isolation for life, not children.

We should, obviously, severely punish any child predators - but by definition, to convict these people of a crime, they must already have committed it, so punishing offenders isn't actually protecting victims, because the assault has already occurred.

Further, and needless to say, we can't have a 'Minority Report' situation where "suspected" predators are arrested because they "might" abuse a child. Nor can we deport every offender or potential offender, as many of them were born here and are British citizens.

So imprisonment and deportation - important as they are to do where we can - don't offer a comprehensive solution going forward, and do little to prevent this kind of crime continuing to blight vulnerable communities.

There are real solutions available, and ones that would benefit, rather than penalise, the people of the UK - solutions that entail rebuilding our own communities, and reclaiming the kind of influential power these communities give us to protect children and affect change.

But the ruling classes won't facilitate those solutions and will, in fact, do everything in their power to prevent them. Because those solutions - real solutions - don't benefit them.

Their "solution" will be the introduction of the lifelong indoor human, and that is what all the affected outrage in the establishment press about grooming gangs is really all about: it's grooming us to stay in our rooms.

Ostensibly because that "keeps us - and especially children - safe".

But really because (and as we saw so clearly during "Covid") the destruction of our real-life communities completely disempowers us, and makes us vulnerable to total domination and control by the most dangerous predators of all: the ruling classes.

So, as always - and just as we did all throughout "Covid" - we must unite, defy, and resist.

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