Why don’t they call it rape?
Yesterday some of the papers reported that, according to a report by the charity Save the Children, child migrants mostly from sub-Saharan Africa were “being sexually exploited” or in earlier versions “selling sex” in...
Category: Crime
The mystery of Ruth Wilson
Recently a half-hour film featuring Martin Bright, the former New Statesman, Spectator and Jewish Chronicle contributor, and a retired Northern Irish cop named Liam McAuley, was published on YouTube about the disappearance of a...
The men alive because we can’t hang them
The past two weeks it was separately announced that one serial rapist who preyed on women in London was to be released after serving nearly ten years and another, who attacked women and girls...
A 20-year-old is not a baby!
Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was killed in an encounter with the police in London, and the footage has been posted on social media with the hashtag “Justice for Rash”. The footage...
On Ian Brady and the death penalty
Last week Ian Brady, a serial murderer of children from the 1960s, died in a “special hospital” (a high-security hospital which takes criminals who are mentally ill) aged 79. He had been convicted of...
On the problem of proving hate
Yesterday I saw a post on the Disability Hate Crime Network group on Facebook about a crime in which a ‘vulnerable’ man was kept captive and tortured for more than a week by a...
Foreign criminal scum!
The Sun are OUTRAGED this morning because an “American strangler”, as they call him, has been deported from the USA to this country after serving nearly 40 years in a New York state prison...
Citizenship is not just a visa
Today three members of the notorious ‘grooming gangs’ who raped and sexually abused girls in the Rochdale area lost an appeal against deportation to Pakistan. Two of the men, who were jailed in 2012,...
Jill Saward, the Press and civil liberties
Last week Jill Saward (pronounced Say-ward), best known for having been the victim of the notorious “Ealing Vicarage” rape attack in 1986 in which she was raped and subjected to other sexual assaults and...
What happened to the child’s best interests?
Last Wednesday, Ben Butler, a convicted armed robber and serially violent offender from Sutton in south London, was convicted of murdering his six-year-old daughter Ellie in 2013 and sentenced to life in prison, with...
Cologne attacks tell us nothing about Islam
On New Year’s Eve, an organised gang of hundreds of young men, described as being of Arab or North African appearance, descended on the main railway station in Cologne, Germany, and molested and robbed...
Sympathy for Tania Clarence shows disablist attitudes
In April 2014, Tania Clarence smothered three of her four children, Olivia, Ben and Max, all of whom had spinal muscular atrophy type 2 (SMA2), at the family home in New Malden (see earlier...
Rapists to Rio? Are we that desperate?
This past week, a man from Surrey was given a non-custodial sentence for a series of serious sexual assaults against a 12-year-old girl in December 2012. Adam Hulin plied the young girl, whose age...
Before you say "poor mum" …
Last night three children were found dead at their home in New Malden, at an address half a mile from where I live. Olivia Clarence, aged four, and twins Max and Ben Clarence, aged...
Four years too short for “one-punch” killing
It’s been reported recently that a man who killed a man with one punch on a street in Bournemouth has been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison (see also today’s Daily Mirror), which means...
Woolwich murder was perverse, not merely extreme
Last Thursday, the two men who murdered the soldier Lee Rigby in the street outside an army barracks in Woolwich and then paraded on camera with bloodied hands and a meat cleaver, were found...
Roman Polanski raped a young girl. Not much nuance there.
[Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/29/roman-polanski-samantha-geimer) (in today’s *Observer*) Victoria Coren Mitchell tries to make a case that the situation of Roman Polanski, the subject of a book published by the woman he...
Why do you believe her?
Last Tuesday a British soap actor, Michael “Le Vell” Turner, was found not guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault on a child (now 17). There has been some suggestions that his...
Ariel Castro’s suicide is no tragedy
Ohio captor ‘needed suicide watch’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23967581 Ariel Castro, the man who kept three young women captive in his house in Ohio for several years, was found hanged in his cell on Tuesday. According to...
Not quite Independence Day
Last week I read about two separate distressing incidents that underline the need for support for people with disabilities to remain living with their families if that is at all possible. The first happened...