Britain's Enduring Shame

"[British and Scottish political parties leery of accusations of racism combined with fear of loss at the ballot box took] precedence over the protection of British children."

"[A recently launched official government inquiry into grooming gangs may be a time-waster and there is] no guarantee that it will adequately address the politically sensitive ethnoreligious nature of the phenomenon." 

Rape Gang Inquiry Report, Britain

Woodhouse says she became pregnant at 14 and was forced to have an abortion. When she became pregnant again at 16, she was allowed to keep the child. Photo supplied/Woodhouse

 

Chaired by British MP Rupert Lowe, and led by survivor Sammy Woodhouse, the Rape Gang Inquiry Report has exposed the horrors of systematic grooming and sexual exploitation of mostly white British girls, by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs. It has been a shocking open secret for years that vulnerable white British girls have been used and savagely sexually abused by these grooming gangs, and though there have been citizen-calls to formally investigate the situation and put a stop to it, while prosecuting the malefactors, nothing was done for far too long.

 

It took a widely-publicized campaign by one of the world's most recognizable names, when the wealthiest man in the world wielded his own notoriety to highlight the assaults on young British girls, demanding that Great Britain finally respond to the human rights outrage and rescue any future victims from the fate that had befallen their earlier counterparts, to hone international outrage. The squeamishness of British government agencies including politicians, to confront the issue head on admitting that it was Muslim men who were persecuting, mocking and grooming female children for sex reflected an unwillingness to be labelled 'racist' and perhaps worse in their opinion, 'Islamophobic'.  

"[A pre-release briefing states of the inquiry that it is required to] consider how the ethnicity, religion and culture of both perpetrators and victims may have influenced offending patterns, as well as institutional responses to abuse."

"Men of Asian ethnicity are over-represented as perpetrators in group-based child sexual exploitation." 

Official Government Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs  

Undeniably, Muslim Pakistani grooming gangs in towns and cities across the United Kingdom have been engaged in the grooming and exploitation of young girls in Britain. On June 15, the 219-page independent report titled the Rape Gang Inquiry was released, a crowdfunding project where a campaign raised 794,677 pounds, thanks to over 20,000 Brits who responded to fund the inquiry. In the report, stories of girls systematically groomed as young as 11 by gangs were recorded.

 

More than 800 recommendations relating to grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation and abuse dating back to the 1990s have been identified by the inquiry. Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters

 

Befriended, introduced to alcohol and drugs, young girls were often taken from schools and care homes to be subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking and torture.  In some instances girls in the throes of sexual abuse were recorded on video, informed they were 'white trash'. Miscarriages, forced abortions were endured by girls whose rapes resulted in pregnancies. Other young girl who gave birth had them taken by the state, while yet others were taken to the Middle East to be part of arranged marriages.   

"[Over 250,000 girls were trafficked since the first recorded case in 1955], when four Bradford-based Pakistanis were charged with raping a 15-year-old girl from Middlesbrough." 

Rape Gang Inquiry Report  

Sammy Woodhouse was groomed at age 14 by a 24-year-old, Arshid Hussain, ringleader of a Pakistani-heritage child exploitation gang. Neither the police, social services, the National Health Service nor schools intervened at any time to rescue girls and to spur investigations into the ongoing abuse. Anyone who did make an effort to report the rapists were labelled racists or Islamophobes. The gangs acted with complete impunity. Urged to launch an inquiry the Labour government refused, until sufficient pressure was exerted to acquiesce.

 

When the government did launch an official independent inquiry, it was handed 65 million pounds to get the job done by March 31, 2029. The inquiry has not been given prior specific instructions on ethnicity, religion or any similar identifying demographic. Whereas the Rape Gang Inquiry Report tackles the issue head on, adding that the grooming gangs represent an immigration screening problem. 

 

Ethnicity data was found not to have been recorded for two-thirds of grooming-gang perpetrators, according to a 2025 audit examining available national databases and police data. This was highlighted by Baroness Casey of Blackstock in the audit. All the Casey report's recommendations have since been  accepted by the British government. It is yet too early to discern whether politicians will revert to their usual catering to groups in their constituencies in avoidance of being labelled racist and Islamophobic.  

Victims as young as 10 – often those in care, or children with learning or physical disabilities – being singled out for grooming precisely because of their vulnerability.

Perpetrators still walking free because no one joined the dots or because the law ended up protecting them instead of the victims that they had exploited.

Deep rooted institutional failures, stretching back decades, where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way - and Baroness Casey found “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions” all played a part in this collective failure.

Baroness Casey audit

The Franklin Terror and Erebus Northwest Passage Expedition

Francois Etienne Musin’s Erebus on Ice (1846) Photograph: National Maritime Museum

"People are superstitious. They feel there is a connection between the deaths and disturbing the wreck sites."
"My late mother told me, even before these wrecks [HMS Terror and Erebus of the 1845 Arctic Franklin expedition] were discovered ... the whole King William Island has non-human people that we cannot see."
"It's a funny feeling when we get on the other side of the island. You sense that somebody's around you, but there's nobody around you."
"It was always like that, even before these shipwrecks were found."
"My mother used to warn me] Don't let them get to you – just do what you have to do."  
Jacob Keanik, president, Nattilik Heritage Centre, Gjoa Haven, King William Island, Nunavut

Louie Kammokak (left) and Jacob Keanik (right) in 2015 at the blessing of the wreck of HMS Erebus. (Parks Canada)

"It is only artifacts that are being taken off wreck sites."
"There are plans in place that if any bodies are found [in and around the wrecked ships' sites on the ocean bottom], they will be left in place."
"We will not bring up or disturb human remains."
Fred Pedersen, Kitikmeot Inuit Association


"This summer, following the tragedies, elders blessed sand from Gjoa Haven and the Terror Guardians brought it to the wreck of HMS Terror, where they sprinkled it over the wreck and performed a blessing."
"Both of these blessings were led by Inuit from Gjoa Haven."
Parks Canada spokesperson Dominique Tessier  

The ship's wheel of HMS Terror. Some in the 1000-member Inuit community link recent deaths with its rediscovery. Parks Canada/Thierry Boyer/The Canadian Press

The search for the fabled Northwest Passage from the Arctic to shorten long sea voyages and connect from the Atlantic to the Pacific consumed the British Royal Navy which sent ship after ship to investigate the presence of the passage -- during times when the Navy wasn't otherwise occupied in fighting various wars -- and to chart the Arctic, to no avail. Finally, a last stab at its location to discover a route through the vast sea-iced Arctic was undertaken by an elderly and unfit Sir John Franklin, his last stab at acquiring notable explorer-status.

Maps showing the route of the Franklin expedition and New York-Hong Kong’s flight trajectory. (Cryopolitics)

His voyage too was destined to end in failure, but it is also known for the tragedy that ensued while he led the expedition when all hands were lost when sea-ice trapped his ships and ultimately the sea claimed them. He died himself of illness before the full tragedy struck, but there were no survivors from the expedition. Ship after ship was dispatched from Britain to search for the missing vessels and every one returned with no hints to solve the mystery of what had occurred to the expedition. It was considered a great disaster with the deaths of 129 crewmen.

Remains were eventually discovered. Along with some grisly evidence that in their desperation to survive cannibalism took place. Through their oral tradition, memory of local Inuit coming across some of the crew in a parlous state was handed down from generation to generation. That memory and its recounting immeasurably helped in the discovery of the wrecks by Canadian divers in 2014 finding Erebus and in 2016 when Terror's preserved underwater presence was discovered.

A 1945 photo of skulls, bleached white by the sun, discovered around King William Island in what is now Nunavut.

Since the wrecks' discovery divers have been carrying off artifacts from the wrecks for historical preservation. Great Britain ceded ownership of the ships and all their artifacts to Canada. The artifacts when fully assembled will be placed on public display. What has disturbed local Inuit is their belief that disturbing the dead will bring their spirits back to life and they will wreak vengeance. Six deaths of natural causes and accidents that occurred in the space of two weeks the past summer led the Inuit community to the conclusion that the wrecks should have been left as they were, undisturbed.

Traditional local Inuit "guardians" performed a formal blessing soon after the Erebus wreck was discovered. Then the realization struck that no blessing had been carried out when the Terror was discovered. Belatedly that blessing was performed and the purpose of it was not only to carry on the traditions respecting history. heritage, and the site of deaths on the island, but in the hope of pacifying the demons the Inuit feel certain occupy the island, and in so doing, putting an end to the "curse" they are convinced has been provoked.

Following the community's tragedies of the six deaths -- two men dead from an all-terrain vehicle accident, another two the result of a boating accident, then the death of a local school staff member who died of a heart attack, and the final death, that of an elder dying of old age -- a traditional ceremony took place where community elders blessed sand taken from Gjoa Haven, to sprinkle it over the wreck of HMS Terror.

The small community of Gjoa Haven is on King William Island in Nunavut. The wreck of HMS Terror was found in an island bay, while HMS Erebus was found further south. (CBC News)

Ancient Primitive Funerary Rites

"[The] zig-zagging incisions were undoubtedly engraving marks, produced with no utilitarian purpose but purely for artistic or symbolic representation."
Researchers, Natural History Museum, University College London, Britain

Bones with markings  Credit: Natural History Museum

"The engraved motif on the Gough's Cave bone is similar to engravings observed in other Magdalenian [later cultures of the Upper Paleolithic age] European sites."
"However, what is exceptional in this case is the choice of human bone and the cannibalistic context in which it was produced."
"The sequence of modifications performed on this bone suggests that the engraving was a purposeful component of the cannibalistic practice, rich in symbolistic connotations."
"Although in previous analyses we have been able to suggest that cannibalism at Gough's Cave was practised as a symbolic ritual, this study provides the strongest evidence for this yet."
Silvia Bello, Calleva researcher, Natural History Museum, London

A prehistoric forearm bone appears to have been disarticulated, filleted, chewed, and then engraved with a zig-zag design before being broken to extract bone marrow, said scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum. (Trustees of the Natural History Museum via Reuters)

When survival hangs in the balance, desperate people in our modern age resort to the unthinkable; with sadness and distaste but obeying nature's endowed irresistible urge to continue existing, they will make the decision to carve away the flesh of their companions who have died. These are castaways whose ships have met with disaster awaiting rescue, or survivors of plane crashes, or explorers of centuries past who turned to the desperate mode of survival through cannibalism. There are few who would fault them.

In some primitive societies it was part of the mourning ritual on the death of a loved one to wish to retain their spirit within the living, and to do this it was thought that eating their vital organs represented the ritualized manoeuvre that would ensure that the dead one's spirit was not lost, living on within the corpus and spirit of others. In other societies cannibalism was practised for other reasons, the taste of human flesh acquired a religious connotation, perhaps tinged with symbolically vanquishing an enemy, in death as in life.

So it should hardly be surprising to discover, as British paleontologists recently affirmed through their published research in the journal PLOS ONE, that some 15,000 years ago, unearthed ancient bones show evidence of having been cannibalized. That early cave dwellers ate their dead relatives, perhaps ritualistically; filleting their flesh and cracking their bones to extract the marrow, then scribbling markings on the bones, perhaps leaving a message relating to the departed.

Cheddar Gorge in Somerset  Credit: Joe Daniel Price

Hundreds of incised marks discovered on human and animal bones out of Gough's Cave were being studied by researchers in the field. The field happened to be in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, at Cheddar Gorge, a natural geological site of great beauty complete with limestone cliffs and vast rocky chambers. The discovery lends itself to the opinion that it represents the first Paleolithic age -- dating from 2.5 million years ago to around 12,000 BC -- evidence of ritualized cannibalism.

At Gough's Cave, an impressive cavern at Cheddar Gorge, researchers discovered one human bone that had been disarticulated, filleted, chewed and finally a zigzag design was tooled onto it -- and then it was cracked to extract the bone marrow. The marks appear not to have been produced through the process of butchery, evidently. The speculation is that they may represent details of the dceased's life, perhaps alternately memorializing the manner in which death arrived.

People are seen inside Gough's Cave in April 1934. Discovered in the 1880's, Gough's Cave in Somerset, southern England, was excavated over several decades ending in 1992. (Harry Todd/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Frequent excavations at Gough's Cave have unearthed evidence that humans had lived there for thousands of years, with human bones discovered in the cave, along with the remains of butchered mammals. Scientists from the Natural History Museum and University College in London found ample bones with carefully incised patterns marked on them to understand that the patterns are not random cuts but deliberate patterning for some obviously important purpose in mourning the dead.

Descendants of the early humans who lived in that far-off early era are known through DNA analysis of "Cheddar Man" the earliest complete human skeleton dating to 7150 B.C. to be living today in the area.

Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge