Be Disturbed

Since the beginning of the new year, I’ve written about some of the ghastly child abuse in England that is deliberately ignored by the authorities. In particular, I addressed the “grooming gangs” that exploit young girls, as well as the government’s repeated failures to rescue Sara Sharif. These topics are unlikely to be discussed at the dinner table; horror-genre writers could not author passages as nightmarish as the stories relayed by the victims or judges. 

Consider, for example, what a judge wrote about an Oxford child-rape gang:

“We can only give a flavour of the appalling and sustained abuse they suffered. It consisted of the men themselves engaging in sexual acts with the girls, alone or with others; and the girls being taken to other men to have sex with them often in groups and often in return for money. It included vaginal, anal and oral rape. It involved the use of a variety of objects such as knives, meat cleavers, baseball bats and various sex toys that caused physical injury. It was often accompanied by humiliating and degrading conduct such as the girls being bitten, scratched, urinated upon, suffocated, tied up, and burnt. Some had to endure men licking the blood from their injured vaginas and smelling their dirty or stained underwear.” 

Similarly, consider what the judge wrote in the case about Sara Sharif, a ten-year-old girl who was tortured to death by her family:

“In addition to the 71 fresh injuries, the medical experts found a total of 25 separate fractures to the bones in Sara’s body. These included a fractured collar bone, two fractured shoulder blades, fractured ribs, a fractured humerus, eleven separate fractures to her spinal column, and fractures to bones in both of her hands. . . It is absolutely clear that, in the last few weeks of her life, Sara was tied up. She was trussed up with masking tape and with skipping rope. Even worse, she was hooded. Plastic bags were put over her head, which were then held in place with masking tape, and a hole was ripped in the plastic bag through which she could breathe.”

In response to my articles about these topics, I received messages from friends and strangers that can all be categorized as expressing one of the following: (1) “I tried to read but I had to stop,” (2) “I had to stop halfway through and then return,” (3) “After reading, I cried,” or (4) “After reading, I puked.” Such reactions are perfectly natural and understandable. I too felt nauseated, especially after engaging with such material for days in the course of writing. In fact, I almost requested a day off after submitting the Sara Sharif article draft because I felt drained, almost soulless. To be frank, someone who enjoys reading such content must have a significant psychological problem that warrants institutionalization. 

But it occurred to me that, if these little girls lived through such awful torture for years, then I can certainly manage the mere act of writing about it. I purposely included graphic details to avoid sanitizing — and thereby diminishing — the plight of the victims. It might be emotionally convenient to read surface-level accounts of these tragic stories, but the summaries that lack explicit descriptions risk being inaccurate because they fail to report what actually happened. Furthermore, purifying the crimes by omitting details makes the evil perpetrators more palatable. And, most importantly, illustrating the barbaric crimes underscores how absurd it is that the English authorities decided to look away.   

So let me make something absolutely clear: You should read about these topics, you should be disturbed, and then you should be angry.