Ezra Levant interviews Samantha Smith, a survivor of Britain’s grooming gangs—British Pakistani Muslim men who exploited vulnerable white girls in towns like Telford (1,000+ victims over 30 years) and Rotherham. Authorities dismissed victims as "child prostitutes," ignored reports, and even enabled abusers, with police officers convicted in Rochdale and intimidation tactics used post-Telford scandal. Despite progress like scrapping early sex offender releases, only 1.3% of rapes reach court, exposing systemic failures where institutions prioritized avoiding racism accusations over justice. The abuse of tens of thousands of girls demands urgent, unflinching accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, a very special feature interview today with Samantha Smith.
She's a British conservative pundit, very interesting thoughts on what's going on there.
But she herself, I suppose is part of the news, a very difficult conversation with the victim of child sexual exploitation in that country.
I'll let her explain what happened to her and her thoughts on how to make sure it never happens again, even though it is still happening again every day.
That's our show today, a very special interview with a survivor of Britain's rape gangs.
But let me invite you to get the video version of these podcasts too.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
A heavy conversation, to be sure.
here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a heartbreaking and infuriating interview with a victim of child sexual exploitation in the United Kingdom.
It's September 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, you know, our motto here at Rebel News, it's telling the other side of the story.
Sometimes that means talking about a story that everybody's talking about, but just giving a different perspective.
But sometimes it means telling a story that everyone else is afraid to even mention.
Afraid for various reasons, because it's too difficult to talk about certain things.
Or you might be accused of being a bigot.
You might be accused of being a racist.
That's something that happened in the United Kingdom over years, in fact over decades, as a terrible phenomenon took root in that country.
A phenomenon of what can only be called rape gangs.
Groups of men who would sexually assault women night after night after night.
The same women, and actually to say women is inaccurate.
They're girls, children.
It's child sexual exploitation on a mass scale.
It's tough to talk about it because in the main, the young girls are working class white girls.
And as terrible as it sounds, the majority of the perpetrators are Pakistani Muslim men in the UK.
It's very difficult to even say that, unless perhaps you yourself are a Pakistani Muslim man in the UK, like Majid Nawaz.
Listen to this clip from his radio show a few years ago.
For too long in this country, we, media, the establishment, society, the chattering classes, the liberal elite, whatever term you want to use, have ignored the issue of grooming gangs of young, vulnerable teenage girls who have been victimized, drugged, and raped and abused.
Whether it's the Rotherham case or all the other cases that were replicated across the country, it is both the conclusion of the prosecutor in the Rotherham case, British Pakistani Muslim Nazir Afzal, or indeed the official inquiry into why it took so long for these young, vulnerable, underage girls to get justice.
Both of those concluded that fears of racism prevented us from coming to the defense of vulnerable underage girls.
Fears of racism, meaning that the state was scared that it would be accused of being racist if it rightly arrested and prosecuted British Pakistani, largely, British Pakistani Muslim men, in their abuse of underage white teenage girls.
And so from fear of appearing racist, there was a silence across the country as multiple cases of grooming gangs emerged up and down the country, as evidenced now due to multiple prosecutions, successful prosecutions, but sadly and unfortunately too late.
If we hadn't all been silent, if we had all addressed this issue head-on when it needed to be addressed, when it was time to address it, then the void would not have emerged for the populist agitators to fill that gap and become popular, actually, as a result of addressing what is a legitimate issue.
They ended up hijacking what should have been the concern of every right-minded citizen in this country.
And unfortunately, it takes a bit of courage to address something that people will hurl abuse at you for talking about.
I know on this show, on my own show on the weekends, I've tried to book certain MPs to come on and address the issue of grooming gangs, and on multiple times they've had to back away from fear of the backlash.
We recall Sarah Champion, who in the Labour Party attempted to address this and lost her position in the front bench as a result.
There have been multiple cases now, and it's beyond any level of doubt that there's a disproportionate number of British Muslims involved in grooming gangs against underage white girls.
And to say that is to report on the facts.
It's not to be racist.
And if we're backing away from this conversation, then all we're doing is leaving the ground far open in what is a legitimate issue that requires addressing.
We're leaving the ground for the populace to hijack that legitimate issue and make it their own for their own nefarious purposes.
And that's precisely what's been going on.
And it's in that regard that what I'm saying here is I just wish, I wish that those young girls had seen justice served for them as fast as the judge served Tommy Robinson justice in this case.
Because in this case, it's very easy for us to pick on the bogeyman.
But actually the truth is that our silence over decades in this country is the real bogeyman.
And that's the real thing we should despise, our own cowardice in the face of grooming of young girls up and down this country and our conspiracy of silence.
Isn't that interesting?
He can say those statistics because no one's going to call him a racist.
He's not anti-Pakistani.
That is who he himself is.
He says that by not talking about it, other people fill the void.
In that case, Tommy Robinson did.
Can other people talk about this?
Or is the fear of being called racist even greater than the fear of rape, the most atrocious crime imaginable?
Well, we're going to have one of those difficult conversations today.
I came across our next guest sort of by accident.
I would follow her on Twitter for her conservative political commentary in the United Kingdom.
I'm fascinated by that country and there's lessons we can learn from them and warnings we can take from them.
But I saw her one day, not as a political pundit, but as a witness and I suppose a survivor herself of this grooming gang situation in the United Kingdom.
I saw her talk about it on the UK network called GB News.
Unexpected Conservative Voice00:07:27
And I was surprised to learn that she was here in Canada for a period of time.
And I invited her by to have that same challenging conversation.
Here's my feature interview with Samantha Smith.
And joining me now is Samantha Smith.
First of all, welcome.
It's nice to spend some time with you and to talk with you.
Thank you for having me on, Nesra.
I really appreciate it.
Well, I admire a lot of the places where you work.
I love GB News.
I think they're the great, I think they're the best English language news and commentary station in the world.
I mean, I love Fox, of course, but GB News has some real characters.
You're also on the BBC, talk TV.
Are you a pundit?
Are you a politician?
How would you describe yourself?
I'd say I'm a bit of a jack of all trades.
I do a lot of print journalism.
That's my bread and butter.
That's what I really love doing.
I write a lot for the mail and the spectator.
Good old-fashioned bastions of free speech.
They really are.
I mean, they're great.
They really are.
And I'd say that my focus is on education, sociability, and justice.
You know, I follow you on Twitter very closely.
It's very interesting.
And there's a class angle to things that we in the new world don't know about.
I mean, we're vaguely aware of class, but I think the idea of the American dream, you start at nothing and you move up and you admire someone.
You don't look down on someone.
The idea of judging someone by their accent, for example.
I mean, I suppose people sometimes do that to the southern accent.
They think it's sort of hick.
But that's actually still pretty hardwired in the British system.
Definitely.
I mean, I come from a very working class background.
I would say my mother's a first-generation immigrant.
My father was adopted.
He, you know, didn't get a great education.
I grew up in, I was born in Surrey, but I grew up in Telford.
I moved around quite a lot when I was younger.
And the fact that I'm working class, that I, you know, am not privately educated, that I'm just a run-of-the-mill ordinary citizen, it seems very at odds with my accent.
And I get a lot of comments on the flip side of things.
You know, people are often persecuted or prejudiced because of their accents if they have a northern accent or a working class accent.
I often get assumptions that I must be privileged, upper class, and that I must have some sort of fortunate background because of the way I speak.
And so I often am told that what happened to me couldn't have happened because I'm living off of daddy's money and that I must come from a brilliant background.
I must have gone to a private school, privately educated very, very well off.
And so I agree in Britain especially, there is a massive, massive class divide.
And it's so complex.
And often people look surface level.
They look at skin colour.
They look at ethnicity.
They look at religion.
the class divide in the uk is so is so apparent in the fact that for example white working class boys are the least likely to progress to higher education they have the lowest yeah they have the lowest the lowest outcomes when it comes to careers education future prospects And so I think it's very underrepresented, especially in politics and in the media, the plight of young working-class individuals.
And Parliament itself.
I mean, there are very few MPs, even for the Labour Party, that could truly be called working class.
Kier Starmer, the head of Labour, he's not working class.
He's pretty fancy.
No, he cases the metropolitan elite.
That's what Lake Polly is.
It's sort of like the Democrats.
They're more about woke university faculty than they are about the working man.
I think that's why I identify with the Conservative Party.
I'm a die-hard conservative, true blue.
And the reason that I am so passionate about conservatism in the UK is because they care about aspiration.
Like you said, they aspire to be greater than what they are.
It's all about hand-ups, not hand-outs.
And the idea that no matter your ethnicity, race, class, background, you can achieve whatever you want to.
I mean, that's evident in the fact that we've just elected our third prime minister.
I was going to say, Liz Truss, she's not like the others.
Tell us a little bit about Liz Truss.
We're still trying to get to know who she is.
That was, Boris Johnson was thrown out the window.
Big battle to succeed him.
Some very interesting candidates.
Yes.
Final round, Liz Truss versus Rishi Sunak.
I mean, in his own way, a trailblazer, too.
Tell us a little bit about Liz Truss and the new Bridge PM.
Well, Liz Truss is about as plain speaking as they come.
She's a remnant of the Thatcher era, although she wasn't lived on when she was younger, but we can all be forgiven for our sins.
She is, you're right, not like the others.
She comes from a working-class background.
Her parents were both working class.
They were not manual labourers, but they certainly weren't businessmen or millionaires.
She grew up in a very ordinary town and a very ordinary house.
She lived a very ordinary life.
And the idea that she has become our third female prime minister, that she is now the leader of the United Kingdom, one of the greatest powers in the world, speaks to the fact that the Conservative Party has all that aspiration.
And the fact that we managed to achieve it without any all-women shortlists or diversity quotas says a lot about the reality of diversity and equality, that you can't force it.
It has to happen naturally.
And that individuals that are, you know, I'm mixed race, I'm working class, my mother, I'm a second generation immigrant, and I would perish the thought of being handed a job because white people had been told that it wasn't for them or that men had been told that it wasn't for them.
They need to step aside.
I think that it only fosters a lack of aspiration in minority communities.
And it suggests that we can't succeed off of our own merit, that we need to have handouts, we need to have all women shortlists, we need to be afforded special privileges in order to succeed when in reality, women, ethnic minorities, people of different religions, they are just as capable of succeeding if given an equal playing field rather than elevating them beyond their peers.
You made me think of a short exchange in the House of Commons.
I think it was Theresa May who got it started talking about the fact that all three women PMs were towards the end.
May I congratulate my Right Honourable Friend and welcome her to her position as the third PM in the United Kingdom.
Can I ask my Right Honourable Friend why does she think it is that all three female Prime Ministers have been Conservative?
Thank my Right Honourable Friend for her fantastic question.
I look forward to calling on her advice from her time in office as I start my work, as I start my work as Prime Minister.
It is quite extraordinary, isn't it, that there doesn't seem to be the ability in the Labour Party to find a female leader, or indeed a leader who doesn't come from North London.
I don't know what it is.
I don't know what the issue is.
Rise of Nuclear Energy00:06:40
Well, that's a hoot.
And you're obviously a political commentator, and it's a feast for political commentators between Boris being ousted, the new, I mean, it was quite some drama of who would be the new PM, who's going to be the cabinet.
I mean, Britain is at a lot of crossroads.
Shocking rise in the price of energy, in part because, you know, how do you put sanctions on Russia, which is one of the world's largest energy producers, one of the world's largest exporters to Europe?
Like, there's a real crisis in the UK about energy bills.
Give us a little bit of details.
I don't think in Canada, like we complained recently, with good reason, about our gasoline being about two bucks a liter, which is atrocious, by the way.
But natural gas for home heating in the UK, I've seen some reports of it being 10 times normal.
Give us some stats.
So energy prices were set to rise by a minimum of 8%, if not 12%, 16%, in some cases across the UK.
Energy bills were increasing by thousands, tens of thousands of pounds.
Small businesses were facing having to shutter their doors.
So it's more than just 16%.
Like I saw some pubs saying last year our energy bill was £2,000.
This year they predicted it would be £20,000.
So it wasn't just 16%.
It was like 1,600%.
How is that even possible?
How does that work?
Well, it's because with the rise in energy prices and the lack of infrastructure that we have domestically, so we don't have a lot of our own natural resources.
Obviously, there's Scottish oil, there's British gas, but a lot of our reliance did come from Russia, and we have completely cut them off.
We've completely shuttered those operations.
And so right now, we're facing a struggle to get enough gas and get enough oil and get enough natural resources to keep everyone's homes heated and homes warm and on.
And something that I think is very good, first of all, is that the new Prime Minister of List Trust has pledged to scrap the national insurance tax rise.
So it was planned to rise from 19% to 25%.
That was a policy put in place by Richie Sunak.
She has said that's absolutely not going to happen.
So that's going to put some immediate cash back into pockets of those that need it most.
The ban on fracking has been lifted.
That's so important.
That's incredible.
I mean, when I think of the UK, I think of climate protesters.
I think of extinction rebellions.
Bluing your hands to the most.
Yeah, the dumbest stuff.
And so to say, boom, we're getting rid of the ban on fracking.
That's such an enormous change, done really just with the wave of a wand.
That's incredible.
Nuclear energy is another thing that is being seriously investigated by the Conservative government at the moment because it was Caroline Lucas, I believe, that said back in 2010, she said it would take 10 years to get nuclear energy off the ground.
And she said she didn't think there would be a need for it, that it wasn't, that the need for nuclear energy didn't outweigh the demand and the climate, the climate issues that come along with nuclear energy, supposedly.
But now it's 2022 and we're facing the worst energy crisis we've had in modern memory.
The idea of blackouts in winter in the 21st century is beyond comprehension.
And so right now the immediate focus is, I'd say, re-evaluating net zero and green energy policies, scrapping the green levy for now, which is used.
So the green levy is used to invest in sustainable schemes.
That's a tax on top of people's energy bills.
Scrapping that needs to come first, in my opinion.
Lifting the ban on fracking is a brilliant first step towards incentivizing domestic production of oil, gas, natural resources.
I think that also looking at some sort of energy price cap, although that's very dicey territory.
Yeah, you don't want to get into price.
You know, setting the price that's a little Marxist.
Exactly.
You know, it's funny because Boris Johnson, what a character.
And by the way, his eulogy to the Queen in Parliament was the best I've ever heard.
Would you agree with me that one of the reasons he was given the heave-ho was because of the lockdowns, the cheating and the rule-breaking.
Is that an accurate?
I mean, there were a number of reasons.
He was sort of a mess in a number of ways.
But was the straw that broke the camel's back, was it because he knew about parties that broke the rule?
Is that an accurate assessment of the final reason that gave him the boot?
I wouldn't say that would be the final reason because we saw him continue on.
We saw him carry on afterwards.
There was massive uproar, both within the party and in the public eye, but we didn't see the wave of resignations come until the Chris Pincher scandal broke.
And that was very much along the same lines of sleaze in government and of impropriety and cover-ups, the cover-up culture in Westminster.
But I would say that the things that made Boris the most popular, the things that made him an election winner, the things that people loved about him, you know, that he didn't play by the rules, that he was a character, that he was a showman, that he was, you know, no one can outboris Boris.
That's what has always been said.
That's true.
The borisisms that made him so popular are what were his undoing in the end.
Because in a time of national crisis, in a time of pandemic, an energy crisis and imposing recession, impeding recession, we don't want a showman.
We want someone that's going to keep calm and carry on, that's going to put money back in the pockets of British people.
We want a strong conservative leader.
And I think that Boris ventured too far into the realms of populism.
He changed his policies on a whim, often at the wishes of Carrie of his wife, Carrie Simmons, who was a very big climate protester.
Oh, really?
Yeah, she, you know, she, granted, a lot of the work she did was absolutely brilliant, but it was, it very much felt at times like Carrie was running the operation rather than Boris.
And I would say that Liz Trust moving forward, she is going to want to assert herself as the complete opposite of Boris.
She's going to want to make a clean break and show the Conservative Party is merging into a different direction because the last thing that the British public want and the thing that will hurt us most in an election as a Conservative Party member and as a Conservative Party voter would be more of the same.
There's so much interesting in the UK.
I used to go there fairly often, but of course I'm on Trudeau's no-fly list.
I was for the longest time.
Listen, I was glad to talk with you about the UK I'm interested in.
Groomed and Blamed00:15:25
A lot of our viewers are.
We have two reporters there now, Lewis Brackpool and Ed Crawford just joined us as a producer.
And you have a lot to say, but I follow you on Twitter.
I enjoy seeing what's up.
And you're pretty young.
I mean, you're a 20-year-old student at law school in the University of Durham, which is interesting in the UK.
I guess you can go straight into law school.
You don't need your degree first.
But you alluded to something very quickly in passing about your own background.
And I want to come back to that because there's an extremely difficult subject in the United Kingdom to talk about.
It's hard to talk about it because it's always hard to talk about some horrific crimes.
But if there's an element of race or class or there are extra reasons why this subject is so hard to talk about, many of our viewers know about the story of Rotherham.
It's a city of about a quarter million where at least 1,400 girls, and I don't mean women, I mean girls, were systematically groomed and raped.
In a city of 250,000, how could you not know that 1,400 and the Rotherham inquiry showed that people did know, but they were more afraid of being called racist?
In fact, that phrase appears again and again in the official Rotherham inquiry.
Police, social workers, doctors were afraid of ringing the bell because it was typically white working class girls who were targeted.
And I'm sorry to say it, it was typically Pakistani Muslim-British rape gangs.
And I know this, you have to be careful about that.
You don't want to paint with a broadbrush.
In the end, they brought in a Pakistani Muslim prosecutor, which I think was a brilliant solution because no one would accuse him of racism.
Of racism.
But imagine being so paralyzed by fear that you were more afraid of being called racist than to stop.
And that's just one city.
And there's Telford, and there's Rochdale, and there's so many.
Tell me your story, and I'm afraid to talk about this.
I'm afraid to ask about it.
But you lived through this.
Yes, so I was abused from the age of 5 to 14, roughly.
I was abused for nearly a decade by successive men at different times throughout my life.
I'm a victim of, I say survivor, I prefer the term survivor.
I'm a survivor of grooming, of child sexual abuse.
I'm not personally a victim of CSE in the way, you know, Pakistani grooming gangs.
I was abused by some Pakistani men.
I was abused by some white men.
I was abused by different people throughout my life.
But I grew up in Telford, and the experience that I had when it comes to police social services local council, those in positions of power, is all too familiar to those that have followed the cases in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham, Halifax.
You can name, the list goes on and on.
And for me, I've been on GB News quite a lot speaking about it.
I've written a few articles as well.
My experience was that those in positions of power found it far easier to blame the children.
And let me get this clip, get this straight.
These are children, not young women, not prostitutes, not madams, not adults.
They are children being raped and groomed and exploited and even murdered in some cases.
If you look at the case of Lucy Lowe in Telford, her and her family were burned to death in house fire by her rapist, by a Pakistani man who had groomed her as part of a grooming gang in Telford.
And only her daughter and her father survived, survived the house fire.
And Tasnim, Lucy's daughter, went on to expose a lot of what her mother experienced.
But many, many girls in areas like Telford, many girls like me, found that we were victimized, that we were blamed, that we were criminalised rather than believed, because it's far easier to blame the victim than to prosecute the perpetrators.
I'd also say that over decades in the UK, in Telford especially, so for 30 years, the Telford report came out recently.
It was shown that police had failed in their most basic duty, quote-unquote, to report and to investigate a purported instance of child sexual exploitation.
They would witness girls coming into the police station claiming to have been raped, saying that their faces were pressed down to the gravel while they were raped by successive men.
This is a true story where a young girl, she was raped in a graveyard, her face pushed down to the gravel forced down her throat when she tried to scream, and she reported her abuse and nothing was done about it.
There are countless other, over 1,000 girls in Telford were victims of child sexual exploitation over a period of around 30 years under the purview of the Telford Independent Inquiry into child sexual exploitation.
But wider than that, Telford is also the child sex crime capital of the UK.
More children in Telford are sexually abused per capita than anywhere else in the UK.
That beats Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, Greater Manchester.
And that's not a list that you want to be at the top of.
But yet, so few people have heard about my town, about my hometown, because it's flown under the radar.
Because those in positions of power have turned a blind eye for so long.
And girls who don't have access to well-off parents, who don't have those that are fighting their corners, they have had nowhere to turn.
They've tried to go down the traditional routes for support.
They've gone to their GPs, they've gone to their school, they've gone to sexual health clinics when they've shown up pregnant at 13, week after week asking for contraception, morning after pill, etc., etc.
And those that were supposed to help them, those that were tasked with protecting them and safeguarding them, turned a blind eye.
And in some cases, criminalized them, accused them of asking for it, said that they were packy shaggers, white slags, child prostitutes.
That was a big thing in Telford.
Girls were told that they were asking for it and that they had entered into that lifestyle.
I remember when I went to the police to report my abuse, they asked whether I had consented at any point, which I thought was laughable.
The idea that a five-year-old can give consent to sexual activity is beyond belief.
I can't believe I have to say it, but children can't consent to sex.
Children can't be asking for it.
Children can't be child prostitutes.
Children cannot be at fault in the case of sexual abuse.
The adult men that perpetrate these crimes are always the ones at fault.
A few years ago, I was involved with the case of Chelsea Wright in the city of Sunderland.
She was a working-class white woman and she needed a little bit of legal help in a situation similar.
Not the same, but there was an accusation of a gang rape.
And we were working with a very prestigious London law firm.
And when we asked for their help just to do some legal paperwork, they said yes.
But the next day I got an email from the partner saying they had a man, a partners meeting, and they would not help Chelsea for, quote, reputational reasons.
She was a rape victim.
She was a pure victim.
She had no politics.
But because the accused rapists were a politically sensitive group, this prestigious law firm refused to help.
What were they afraid of?
Quite simply, they were afraid of being accused of racism.
That's what we see in the Telford report, in the Rotherham report, and the Rochdale report.
It's been stated over and over and over again, in successive investigations into what went wrong in areas like my own.
It was shown that those responsible organisations refrained from reporting and investigating for fear of being called racist.
That was put in quotation marks in the Telford report, that they failed to act due to fears of racism.
That Pakistani men who are predominantly, this is not some sort of wild accusation, some unfounded suggestion.
It's true that the primary demography that is committing these crimes are British Pakistani Muslim men, and that the victims are predominantly white working class girls.
There are exceptions.
There are girls who were African, who were Indian, who were Pakistani, who were mixed race.
But these two groups are the ones that in this specific type of crime are most commonly involved.
And in the case of police, local council in Telford Social Services, they failed to act because they didn't want to be accused of being racist against British Pakistani men.
And in doing so, they neglected the plight and the justice that young, innocent girls, victims like Chelsea, deserved.
I don't think people in North America understand this.
It may be happening here, I don't know.
But if it is happening, it doesn't feel like it has the same template as over there.
I could be wrong.
Maybe I'm just not opening my eyes to it.
Can you help us understand how this grooming process, I mean, the word grooming doesn't sound as disastrous and violent as it is, but it's a process of taking a normal child, a healthy child who maybe is afraid of strangers.
How do you turn that normal child into a rape victim?
Can you tell us how that process happens?
Like an example of it.
So you are right that it does follow a template.
In many cases of child sexual exploitation in the UK, you can see the same pattern of behaviour and the same pattern of exploitation occurring with girls up and down on Ash.
And it usually starts with a vulnerable girl.
These are predominantly vulnerable girls, so those that are in the care system were often targeted.
I was under social services myself for a few years, and I can say with absolute certainty that it was very easy for us to fall through the cracks under systems like that because those in charge simply didn't care.
We were often seen as disasters waiting to happen, as though we would never have any sort of positive contribution to society.
So they were biding their time before they could release us into the world and relinquish all responsibility over us.
So it would often be young, vulnerable girls, many of them white and working class, who were either in care, had absentee parents, didn't have a great education, came from an impoverished area.
So that's why many areas in the north, rather than Rochdale, Oldham, have seen such massive scandals.
Telford is another one, although we're in the Midlands, because there are very large pockets of poverty in those towns.
They would be kebab shop workers, taxi drivers, takeaway owners that would pick up girls off the streets, that would ply them with alcohol, money, food, gifts, rides.
They would drive them around in their taxis, give them free kebabs, give them vodka and cigarettes.
The traditional grooming process of stranger danger never accepts gifts from a stranger.
And this would slowly progress onto, in some cases, relationships.
These adult men, 30, 40, 50-year-old men, would convince young girls that they were in relationships with them, that this adult man was your boyfriend, that you were in a consensual relationship, and therefore it was normal to have sex and to please him and to do whatever he wanted.
In some other cases, it would be straight-up rape, sexual assault, forced from the very beginning.
But in many cases, girls were groomed into thinking that they wanted it and to thinking that they had asked for it, which is why it was so difficult for many girls to come forward and report later on in life.
I struggled with that myself.
I, for many years, felt like I was responsible for it somehow because in a twisted and horrible way, I somehow liked, not liked, but I got a positive feeling when I had positive reinforcement from these men.
It was the feeling of, oh, I'm loved, I'm wanted, I'm appreciated, I'm valued.
And that's what many of these girls were often missing in their lives.
They didn't have a family, positive role models that would support them and that would provide that positive reassurance.
And so when adult men came along, gave them gifts, gave them food, gave them money, told them they were beautiful and they loved them and that they were their boyfriends, of course it's only natural for a young girl to gravitate towards that.
And then it would open up into, oh, well, I want you to have sex with my brother.
If you love me, you'll go and have sex with my friend.
You'll do this for me.
you'll do this for me because you love me, or in the other predominant pathway, I suppose you could say, with this sort of crime, they would be taken to parties with large groups of Pakistani men with grooming gangs, and they would be passed around like party favors.
They would be brought to a kebab shop and in the back room they'd be raped by six, seven, eight different men.
They would be ferried around in a taxi to have sex with different men for money.
And they were essentially pimped out.
Children were being pimped out on the streets of Telford, Oldham, Rochdale, Rotherham, Halifax, across the UK.
And police, social services, local councils turned a blind eye.
They knew that it was happening, as you said.
They were entirely aware that this sort of crime was occurring, but they willfully ignored it because it was far easier, like I said, to blame the victims and to prosecute the perpetrators.
Girls were literally picked up from the doors of the police station by their abusers after reporting their rape.
They went to the police station, they went to a supposed safe haven to report the abuse they had suffered, were completely ignored and dismissed, and then were picked up by their rapist to continue with the abuse cycle.
Other girls would go to sexual health clinics week after week after week, asking for the morning afterpill, asking for contraception.
And these were 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old girls, girls that had no business being in a sexual health clinic every week asking for the morning afterpill.
And like I said, children can't consent.
The age of consent in the UK is 16 years old.
Anything under that, whether or not it is quote-unquote consensual, is statutory rape.
Survivors' Silence00:15:07
And yet, those in positions of power were turning a blind eye because they simply didn't care.
They didn't think that these young working-class girls were worthy of support and worthy of justice and worthy of protecting.
They saw them as troublemakers and as prostitutes and as white slags, packy shaggers.
They viewed them as somehow beneath help and beneath saving and beneath support.
I read stories in newspapers about the entrapment, not just once a girl might be pressured or persuaded or given alcohol and her guard is down and engages in some sexuality, then there's a blackmail element too.
You've done this, if you don't do more, I'll show your family, I'll tell your family what you do.
So it's the positive reinforcement, it's the drugs and alcohol, but it's also the blackmail.
When I was being abused, I remember being told that if I didn't do what I was told, then they would show up on my doorstep and either hurt me, hurt my family, or expose everything that I'd been doing that I had done.
The responsibility is always placed on the girl, on the child, that this is your responsibility.
You put yourself in this position.
And if you don't continue to do what we tell you, we will expose your sins, your moral transgressions, your misbehaviour, your crimes, whatever it is that, whatever it is that you have supposedly done, we will expose that because you are the person that's in the wrong here.
You brought this on yourself.
You deserve this.
And so girls would often feel like it was their only option.
Like there was no escape.
And in the case of Lucy Lowe, for example, she tried to get out, she tried to escape, and she faced threats for months and months and months that her abuser was going to burn her house down, was going to murder her, was going to kill her, was going to bring harm to her family.
And eventually, one day it happened.
She was burned to death.
She was pregnant with her second child, by the way, by the same man.
Her first child, Tasnim, survived, was placed outside on the grass by her father, by the rapist, and her grandfather, Tasnim's grandfather, managed to climb out of the window and also survived.
But girls, and in many cases, Lucy's case, her death, her passing, her murder, was used as an example by other grooming gangs, by other rapists that said, you're going to end up like Lucy if you don't comply.
I heard stories of a mother who might rescue her daughter, take her to the police, and the police would say, look at you, an atrocious mother.
If you don't shut up, we'll charge you with endangering your child.
Or look at your daughter.
She's drunk right now.
You let that happen.
Shut up or we'll prosecute you.
I found that almost impossible to fathom, but it sounds like that's true.
Well, it's a culture of ignorance, incompetence, and victim blaming.
And this is what I mean when I say that responsibility and complicity goes right to the very top of these organizations in areas like Telford.
So the cabinet member for Children and Young People in Telford and Regan Council had to resign over the CSE scandal because it was found that he was complicit and that the services that he oversaw were complicit in ignoring the systematic grooming, rape, exploitation and abuse of hundreds of over 1,000 young girls, little girls.
And parents, like I said, girls and families who came from disadvantaged, impoverished backgrounds, who didn't have the education, who didn't have the means to support themselves or defend themselves, were made to feel responsible for the abuse that they or their children had suffered.
They were in fear of having their children taken away from them if they dared to speak out about the abuse that their children were suffering because somehow it was always twisted that this was the child's responsibility or the family's responsibility was anybody but the perpetrator's fault.
Were any of the politicians or the police in on it as participants?
Were any police or politicians rapists as well?
In some areas, yes.
I don't think it was, as far as I'm aware, it wasn't widespread with regards to active participation, but there have been cases where I believe it was in Rochdale where a police officer, a police sergeant, was convicted of being part of a grooming gang, that he actually participated in the rape, exploitation and abuse of young girls.
But I don't believe that that in itself is a systemic problem.
The problem in areas like Telford is that those in positions of power may not have held the girls down and raped them or passed them around to their friends or family.
But the fact that they turned a blind eye for so long, for decades, makes them just as complicit as the men, as the perpetrators themselves.
There was the inquiry in Rather than the inquiry in Telford.
You're telling your story, which must be very difficult to do.
I can imagine most girls don't want to relive it, don't want to talk about it, don't want to maybe be embarrassed by it.
I don't know if that's a feeling that some victims have, I don't know.
Well, I would say that Reports like the Rotherham Report, like the Telford Report, like the Rochdale report, wouldn't have come about without the bravery, determination and grit of survivors, victims, and their families.
Without girls that stuck their head above the parapet and refused to be blamed for the abuse they suffered, none of this would have ever come to light.
And without the bravery of whistleblowers, so Maggie Oliver is a fantastic champion of young survivors and victims of CSE across the country.
She was a great Manchester police officer.
She blew the whistle on the child sexual exploitation scandal that she was investigating and ended up losing her job.
Her life was almost ruined because she dared to speak out about thousands of girls being systematically raped and abused.
And so I would say, while it is very difficult to speak out, it is very difficult to relive one's experiences and to make yourself vulnerable.
I mean, I still struggle with it a lot.
I have to do a lot of mental preparation to be able to speak about my experience and my abuse.
But I would say that victims and survivors are nothing if not brave.
There is so much bravery and so much determination and so much willingness to continue fighting, even though they've been knocked down so many times.
I would say it's an absolute testament to survivors that we are now able to have an open conversation about this and girls are now beginning to be believed about the abuse they suffered.
Because without those crusaders, those champions of the cause that fought the good fight before anyone else was willing to, we wouldn't be in the position that we're in today.
Has anything changed?
I mean, there's these reports.
Has there been, has anything actually changed?
I would say that there is a great deal more awareness.
20 years ago, no one would be talking about this.
The term child sexual exploitation didn't even exist at that point.
The idea that group-based grooming gangs could be operating in towns and cities across the UK was beyond belief, beyond comprehension.
It just wasn't something that was talked about.
It was, in many communities, an open secret.
Girls on the ground and families knew that it was happening.
Police, social services, local councils also knew.
But it wasn't something that you would see broadcast in the national media or talked about or inquiries held.
But now there's tougher sentencing for serious sexual offenders.
That's something that came about after the successive CSE scandals were exposed.
There is open debate in the House of Commons.
There are MPs like Sarah Champion, Lucy Allen, my own MP, who are fighting for justice for victims and their families, who are leading, leading the way in when it comes to legislative change.
But there's also those who say it's against social cohesion to talk about this.
It's against community cohesion.
I've even seen members of parliament say that, don't pull us apart by talking about this, by talking about who's doing it and who it's being done to.
You're pulling our community apart.
I've heard that, even from MPs in the UK.
I'd say that many, many organisations, MPs, councils want to pretend like CSE is a crime of the past, as though mistakes were made and lessons have been learned and this doesn't happen anymore.
But the sad truth is that it is still happening in towns and cities across the UK.
In 2020 alone, over, I think it was approximately 300 cases of potential child sexual exploitation.
This is group-based gang raping, exploitation, and abuse of young girls was reported in England and Wales.
So this is a crime that is still going on.
It hasn't stopped.
And there is massive progress to be made still in recognizing the abuse, in investigating crimes, and in prosecuting the perpetrators.
Because while thousands upon thousands of girls have been abused across the UK, very few rapists are in prison.
Very few people have been brought to justice for the brutal exploitation and abuse of thousands of young girls.
You know, I follow the UK media enough that when there is a conviction of a rape gang, let's say there's five people or ten people or twenty people.
Here's what I hate about the media coverage: rape gang or grooming gang sentenced to 100 years.
And you read it, it's 20 guys who got five years each.
And they're probably out in three or two.
I don't know what parole is like.
100 years prison.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
Five years each.
They're not each doing 100.
And this isn't even, I mean, for one rape, but often these are again and again and again, dozens or hundreds of times.
I don't even know if that can be called a serious country with a serious justice system.
And I think the media knows it because they're trying to twist the headline.
100 years.
No, no, it was 20 for five years each.
I think it's important to remember as well that only 1.3% of rape cases in the UK make it to court.
That's 98.7% of rape cases in the UK never reaching a courtroom, never reaching trial.
And so, as I said earlier, for the thousands of girls that were abused, raped, exploited, even murdered, only a very tiny minority will ever have legal justice for the abuse they suffered.
And you are right that in many cases, the crimes handed down to perpetrators, to those convicted, are often overstated or blown up to make it seem as though justice had been served to a greater extent than in reality.
But I would also say once again that things aren't good.
Things aren't where they should be.
But things are also a lot better than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago.
The early release of serious sexual offenders and violent offenders has been scrapped.
That was a white paper that was brought in.
There's stricter sentencing regulations for serious sexual and violent offenders.
There is the end of early release for convicted sex offenders.
I think that there's a ways to go in ensuring effective prosecution for rape, child sexual abuse, child sexual exploitation, grooming, etc.
But it's important to acknowledge the steps that have been taken and the improvements that have been made.
Well, I can't imagine how brave you are.
And you're on a positive, exciting, ambitious path.
I mean, 20-year-old student in law school, university during political commentator, columnist, you're doing a lot of amazing things.
Thank you.
But I understand that you recently were on GB News.
It's my favorite broadcaster over there, talking about this subject.
It's a very difficult subject to handle, to talk about.
I can only imagine how difficult it is to live it and then to talk about it.
I understand that after one such courageous TV presentation, you were contacted by police afterwards.
Is that true?
Yes.
So I was on GB News.
I was on the Mark Stein show.
Mark is absolutely brilliant when it comes to addressing and bringing to light and shining a spotlight on child sexual exploitation in particular in grooming gangs.
He spent many years interviewing victims and survivors and their families.
This is something that GB News is very passionate about and I'm always very, very grateful for their continued pursuance of this issue.
I went on to speak about child sexual exploitation in Telford, the recent, the upcoming release at that time of the independent inquiry into CSE and Telford, the report that was due to be released in the coming weeks, and the fact that child sexual exploitation and child grooming were still going on in towns and cities like Telford, up and down the country.
And the very next day, you know, bear in mind that I never face legal justice for the abuse that I suffered for the decade worth of abuse that I suffered.
But, and the police turned a blind eye, frankly, as soon as I went on national TV to speak about my experience, the experience of girls like me, and the Telford CSE scandal, the very next day, police showed up on my door, two officers, two male officers, banged on my door, as threatening and as imposing as could be, and told me that when you go on national TV,
when you go on GB News to talk about CSE and Telford, it's our duty to follow up with you.
And let me be clear, it wasn't their duty at all.
What possible duty is that?
Exactly.
They weren't.
That's not your duty.
You're a police officer, not a media censor.
Maybe that is what police do these days.
Formal Interview, Intimidation?00:03:56
As far as I was concerned, the way that they came across was very intimidating.
They had very little to do with the pursuit of justice and far more to do with the pursuit of intimidation and silencing.
Yeah, the fact that they came to your home is intimidating in itself.
We know where you are, unannounced.
Now, if you were to say, and by that they mean they asked me questions and then they investigated who your abusers were, okay, you had a duty to follow up.
You heard of crimes that had not been solved.
Your duty was to follow.
Okay, so you're launching an investigation.
That I understand.
What did they say?
Was it you they were investigating?
It felt very much like that.
You know, there was very little that they said that had any substance behind it.
It felt like they had very, very little reason and very few grounds on which to be knocking on my door at midday on a Tuesday while I had chicken in a pan in the kitchen.
I was in the middle of cooking my lunch, which, by the way, I burned, and I was very upset about that.
So then I wasted public good chicken talking to them.
But they tried to coerce me into going to the police station to torture them for a formal interview, which, as someone that has been let down by the police, I'm naturally wary of complying with those sorts of demands.
They offered to take me in their squad car to take me to have a police escort to the station.
They wouldn't leave me alone until I agreed to a formal interview.
It very much felt as though they were addressing me as some sort of criminal or a perpetrator rather than a victim and a survivor.
And you're very right, if they had legitimate concerns or legitimate grounds on which to be questioning me, you know, as a potential help to them in investigating child sexual exploitation, then I could understand it.
But the way that it came across to me was as though they were trying to scare me into silence.
And I came away from that interaction, genuinely wondering, did I do something wrong?
Had I somehow provoked this?
Had I invoked their questioning and their Descending upon my place of residence.
But when I spoke to friends and when I spoke to colleagues, they all said, absolutely not.
You did nothing.
They were overstepping their boundaries by showing up on your doorstep and trying to scare you and trying to intimidate you into silence.
And it was very, very interesting to me that, as I said, they showed up on my doorstep unannounced, but they told me that they hadn't just gone to that place of residence, to that address.
They had gone around every single address that I had previously been registered at in person looking for me.
Bear in mind, they had my phone number, they had my email address, they had plenty of legitimate ways to contact me that didn't involve going and knocking on every potential place of residence that I could be at.
Under any normal circumstances, you would give someone a phone call or a courtesy email and say, hi, we'd love to speak to you about your recent interview.
If there's any way you could help us, we would really appreciate it if we could organize a time to speak.
But they didn't do that.
They came and banged on my door, demanding that I come in for questioning over, I don't know what, frankly, besides the fact that I had gone on national TV and spoken about the Telford CSE scandal.
Well, that tells me that things are not yet resolved in the United Kingdom.
Well, listen, Samantha Smith, pleasure to talk with you at such length.
We'll continue to watch you on social media and wish you good luck in your law studies.
I think you'll be an excellent lawyer.
Thank you very much.
And I hope we can keep in touch.
Pleasure to Talk00:01:05
This slow-motion disaster that has been going on, as you say, for decades, is a great shame on the United Kingdom.
And for all we know, it may be happening in Canada too, though we don't know if it's happening in the same manner.
I think you're very brave, and I appreciate you speaking so candidly today.
Thank you very much for having me, Ezra.
All right, it's my pleasure.
Stay with us.
My final thoughts are next.
Well, what do you think about that?
It's a difficult conversation to have, but listen, if it's difficult to talk about it, imagine the pain of enduring it and thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even over 100,000 British girls have been raped that way.
It's atrocious and not talking about it, averting your eyes, pretending to hear no evil, see no evil is not the way.
So we will at least talk about it.
Let me know what you think.
Send me an email to Ezra at rebelnews.com.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel News headquarters, see you at home.