What’s the image that stays most with you? The teenage girl with four simultaneous men inside her? The rape victim forced to marry her abuser with her social worker in attendance? The fathers who tracked down their daughters to a rape house and were arrested by the police? There are any number of images unforgettable, even if you tried. For me it’s the girl doused in petrol and warned not to talk to the police (the police who would have told her she had it coming).
It has suddenly re-erupted. A combination of the election of Trump and Elon Musk’s intervention has changed the Overton window into something of a greenhouse. The unspeakable is now sayable. Groups of men in dozens of towns all over England have organised themselves into rape gangs, are committing what might be the greatest crime in British post war history – and it’s all happened in time for the first PMQs of 2025.
