Julie Bindel - 100,000+ Underage Victims: This Has Been Going On Longer Than We Know…

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Hello and welcome to the Winston Marshall Show. With me, Winston Marshall. I sat down with the journalist Julie Bindle for a look at the National Inquiry going on in Parliament this week, led of course by Rupert Lowe and ignored, of course, by Most of the mainstream media. In this conversation, Julie covered not only what she was going to say and what she's now said in the National Inquiry in Parliament, but we looked at Starmer's failures, Sadiq Khan's failures.

The grooming gangs in London, which has been little reported, as well as her long history covering this story all the way back to the nineteen nineties, well ahead of her peers. Before you hear from Julie, I just wanted to say thank you, thank you for your continued support, without which

We could not keep this show on the road. And if you head over to winstonmarshall.co.uk, not only will you enjoy ad-free viewing and listening, but you'll have the opportunity to ask future guests your questions. That's all at WinstonMarshall.co dot uk. But without further ado, Julie Benton. Julie Bindle, thank you so much for coming to speak with me. You've been covering the ongoing rape gang scandal for decades. You're one of the first journalists, perhaps the first journalist to uh report it.

in the broadsheets in in the in the Times back in two thousand seven, I think it was, and you actually came across this story in the nineties. I want to cover, of course, with you Rupert Lowe's inquiry

the national inquiry under Starmer and the London Grooming Gangs are heavily underreported, but you've been reporting on it. But before we get to that, might I ask about your story? How did you first come to this horrible, wicked um s stuff we've been seeing up and down our country. Well, before I was a a journalist, I worked in research looking at violence against women.

rape, sexual assault, child abuse, all of those things that happen and that have been happening for millennia. And in the nineteen nineties I was alerted to a group of mothers in the main, some fathers, but mainly mothers, based in Leeds that call themselves Crop, the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping.

And it was set up by a woman called Irene Iverson, who was the mother of a girl who three years earlier, so this was ninety six when I met her, so in nineteen ninety three her daughter Fiona was murdered. And Fiona was seventeen and she was found dead in a car park in Doncaster, her head had been caved in by a punter, by a sex buyer.

Now, how had she got into prostitution age seventeen? Because girls do not gravitate to this. Women do not gravitate to the sex trade. There's always a story behind it and it's never pleasant. And what Irene told me is that when I went to visit Krop, was that when she was fourteen, Fiona, a middle class white girl living in Sheffield, with a family that were very liberal peace activists.

had met a man with whom she became completely enamoured. He was an African Caribbean man, and he was, we subsequently found out, involved in a drugs gang and also a pimping gang, because the two often go together, as many will know. So he was part of a loose gang of criminals that preyed on vulnerable girls and women. And he groomed Fiona for sex. He also introduced her to other men.

She ended up acting out, being very angry at her mother when she told her that she couldn't stay out, that she was too young. Fiona then started saying things to Irene, like, you're just a racist. And Irene was anything but, as I say, they were a liberal family. They weren't at all racist. But what the perpetrator had done very cleverly was he'd pushed a button. The last thing that Fiona had to

this nice liberal girl wanted to be seen as was a racist. So of course when her mother said, I don't want you seeing this man, she'd been told by the groomer, This is what your mum will tell you. They all have different tactics, but they all are pretty much based around coercive control. So Fiona would stay out at night, she would be smoking cannabis, drinking alcohol, members of her family would go and try and rescue her from this house where she was with the perpetrator.

Police were called, social services were called, and the same response came back, which was it's consensual. It's her boyfriend, she wants to be there. Now this is a child. And this also sounds very familiar, doesn't it, when we look at now the evidence coming out about grooming gangs that are happening now and that we've seen reported on that's been happening in the two thousands. So in other words, the authorities did nothing to help Irene and her family to make Fiona safe.

And then the inevitable happened, because for these men it's profit. Of course they also enjoy the abuse themselves. But they want to pimp them out to earn money, whether to business partners because they owe them a favour or for pure cash. And three weeks before she was murdered, the Fiona had been sent out on the streets, where she then met the man that murdered her.

Irene tried her very best to get the authorities to take responsibility. She tried to get accountability. And she couldn't. The door was closed to her. the door was locked to her, effectively. So I realised at that stage You mean for the crime itself, so a conviction for the crime? The murderer was convicted and he was sentenced to life in prison.

And in fact he's still in prison. He hasn't been deemed safe to release. And he was imprisoned in I think it was nineteen ninety four, so that's a very long time. So you can see how dangerous these men are. But the doors that were closed to Irene were the doors that have been closed to the parents of subsequent victims. Which is the police not taking responsibility. Social services looking at these girls as though they're complicit.

the health workers that just consider it completely normal that these girls should be in prostitution as a child. But through talking to Irene and visiting her organization that she set up in the wake of of Fiona's murder.

I realised how many mothers there were. There were mothers in the office telling me that they had realized that their daughters were being picked up by taxi drivers, that they were reported as hanging around the takeaways. These were all Pakistani Muslim men, there were one or two from the Middle East, but effectively they were mainly of that um demographic. in Leeds and surrounds, in Bradford and

other towns and cities close by, the old mill towns, where there were a high proportion of Pakistani Muslim men. And they told me that they'd given the police Car registration numbers. The men that were picking up their daughters were They'd told the police names of these men that the girls had come back full of Oh Pav is Gorgeous, he really likes me, he's going to take me for a drive, or Naz is going to pick me up tomorrow. So bells were ringing'cause these were all underage girls.

Police did nothing, social services did nothing, and I then reported on it eventually, after I became a journalist in the

two thousands, when a girl called Charlene Downes went missing in Blackpool, and it was the same old, same old. So these pimping gangs, these grooming gangs, with pretty much the same tactics had been, and this is just from my insight, from my knowledge, had been going on since the nineteen nineties. Yeah. Well there's some evidence that there's Been versions of it as early as the nineteen fifties. There's a anonymous substack called Jacuz.

which has shown newspaper reports from, I think, nineteen fifty five, of South Asian perpetrators w operating in gangs targeting white British girls. So this is a long story. It actually took decades before You would come across it because it I guess it i it just it's p politically cor incorrect and it's still in some circles politically incorrect to talk about it. What was the problems you'd had

bringing it to the media's attention. Wha wh why wasn't this like and you you speak it now, I'm like, if I was the editor, I'd be like, Right, yeah, we're getting that out immediately. W why wasn't that the case then? At the time that I met Irene and the mothers at Crop, I wasn't a journalist, but I was a feminist campaigner and keen to look at the ways in which organized child abuse operates. And how the institutions don't act.

And this, the Pakistani Muslim grooming gang phenomena, is very specific. But I'd seen it before with the Catholic Church, for example. I'd seen it with Nursery workers and teachers that had been operating in plain sight. And that nobody had done anything about it because they disbelieved the girls, because it was seen that the girls were consenting even when they were children, that the men were very plausible. So child abuse and organised and institutional

child abuse is nothing new. It really isn't. This didn't come in um with Pakistani Muslim migrants. It really didn't. But it is very specific and there are elements to it that make it even more tricky. to get the institutions and the authorities to speak about. Okay, so you don't think it's unique to well, it's obviously not unique to the Pakistani uh Muslim community, um but it is the case that the conversation

has emphasized that it is. I've looked at it when it comes to group child sex exploitation, particularly street level. it is overwhelmingly dominated by Pakistani Muslim, notably not Pakistani Sikh, not Pakistani Hindu or Indian Hindu. It's so it's not a racial thing, actually. It's specific to uh a community. Um Well i if you think that it's as you say across it's institutional and it's it's happens across all

uh d demographics, why are you emphasizing that demographic? Because as I say, child abuse is nothing new. Organized child sexual abuse is nothing new. Institutions and authorities not giving a damn about the victims is definitely nothing new. But this, the Pakistani Muslim Grooming gangs or those led by that demographic is something very specific which brings a particular set of problems, which is why I don't do the whole yes, but the majority of child abusers in the UK are white.

Well, surprise, surprise, we're seventy odd percent white in this country, in this nation. So of course that's the case. But as you say, there's something very specific about the dominance of Pakistani Muslim men The main perpetrators are of grooming gangs as we understand them. As as we we we know we've defined them enough.

Sadiq Khan can pretend to not know what Susan Hall meant when she raised it during um the London Assembly, but we all know what we mean by grooming gangs. It's clannish behaviour, it's family structured, it's Shields that they hide behind are their religion. I've had people say to me, religious men don't do this. Yes they do. The mosque is like a town hall. It's not just a place of worship. I've heard people say

Well, you can't possibly say that they're all Pakistani Muslim men because there are others such as Middle Eastern Muslim men. Well, that's all the case. But if we look at clannish structures, then this is something that is A gang that is impenetrable when it comes to the authorities. It shouldn't be, because of course the law of the land is the law of the land and applies to those men w whatever um their belief system is. But we know that the shutters come up.

Or rather the shutters, you know, are there very, very plainly for us all to see. whenever we talk about the element, the the de the demographics of these men. So the particular problems I had was trying to convince when I became a journalist and I was looking at Charlene Downs, a fourteen year old girl that went missing from Blackpool. joked about cutting m butchering her into the kebab meat. Is that the right I I've under is that remember that correctly?

mythology that grew around the case of Shallin Downs. There's no evidence whatsoever that that was the case. It's one of those urban myths that circulated without any evidence. And I think No, there were plenty of reports on it, but the men that were tried for the murder of Charlene Downes were acquitted and there's a huge police ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r hyn.

They did what police often do, is that they focused on the most likely perpetrators without looking, without casting their net further, without looking beyond the obvious. And they got the wrong men. And there's plenty on record about these men, reprehensible characters. definitely at least one of them involved in procuring girls for sex.

But no evidence whatsoever that they are responsible for Charlene Downs. So there's never been justice for There's never been justice. And Charlene was from a bad family. And often people put quotation marks around that. I'm not. She was from a bad family in Blackpool with a father that brought convicted child abusers back from the pub. to stay overnight in the house where his children lived, where Charlene was abused by over a dozen men. Friends of her father.

prior to being abused by men that would more easily, comfortably fit the grooming gang demographic. And Charlene went missing when she was fourteen and she's never been found. And I saw what was happening in the surrounding areas. In Blackpool there's long been endemic child abuse, convicted child abusers qu quite a substantial minority of convicted male child abusers that leave prison gravitate towards Blackpool.

And this is because single parent homes, lots of poverty, lots of problems with drugs, lots of social problems. There are fun fairs, there's a pier, there are amusement arcades. All of those tick boxes So when Charlene went missing, it was known by then by police that she had been abused by men who ran the local takeaways. in an alley that was dubbed Packy Alley because there were to all intents and purposes, although I think that it was very much

an assumption from some unsavory people that they were all, well, sort of Asian, so therefore Pakistani. But they were Muslim men who were definitely Taking sexual favours from girls that they gave chips, cigarettes and vodka to. So you're straightforward groomers and abusers.

And the police had known this for some time. So when Charlene went missing, the police then all of a sudden kicked in with this great initiative called The Awaken Project. Oh, we really want to find out what's been happening in this town. They already knew. There were so many girls that had been abused, by those men in that alley, with by those that worked in those takeaways, as well as elsewhere. But police hadn't done a thing.

So anyway, I got the story. I talked to the police that were involved in the investigation. You went up to Blackpool. I did. And I looked around and saw exactly what I'd heard from Irene Iverson and her

um, the mothers that I'd met back in the nineties and realised this was organized grooming gangs, here we go again. And went to my editor, who I wrote a lot for, at The Guardian, and asked her Can I do this story? And within minutes she sent me an email back saying Oh, we'd be seen as racist if we did this. It was extraordinary. Now I won't organise on the left any more. But I'm socially on the left in terms of key principles, welfare state and

the like. So she knew. She knew my position and my politics. She had nothing to worry about. I wasn't going to start I wasn't going to do any race baiting. I would have reported as I found. But even even looking at Those men that were involved. in the abuse of Charlene Downes and other girls in the town. Even just naming them as Pakistani Muslim would have been seen in her eyes

as racist and I was disgusted at that. Absolutely disgusted with it. What do we do? We protect those men, but we don't protect other men, or we just protect any brown and black men. So we ignore the abuse, including to women within their communities, so black and brown women and girls, and we just focus on the white men. Is this what we're doing now? In a country where we have so much. um so called diversity where we have but so many men, people living amongst us from different cultures.

From different countries, from different ethnicities. We ignore them. So I, undeterred, I went to the Sunday Times. And it was eventually published in two thousand and seven. So five years later. It was. I'd got onto the story in two thousand and four of of Charlene Downs. Well, it was early two thousand and five. She'd been missing for two or three months and eventually it was it was published. I actually wrote it a year before it was published.

But the Sunday Times took took it and after that the Guardian were, Oh well perhaps we could take a story if these The suspects are going to trial, maybe we could run something. So they let

another newspaper take the potential hit, of which there was none. It had a really good reception. I mean I was instantly put on Islamophobia watch which was a thing. Badge of honour. Who gives the damn? But sh you know, they then realise that actually this is a story that can be told without them having to shield themselves from

virtue signallers shouting racist. Yeah, so what do you th put the success of getting it published at what was different about the times that you think you managed to push through and uh nudge the overton window there? That's what you're sort of describing. I think they behaved like proper journalists. at the Sunday Times and saw a story that needed reporting on.

And they were not knee jerk in their response to this particular demographic of men, which obviously in the UK we've seen for decades, we've seen the Maltese pimping gangs in the fifties in Soho in London.

We've seen African Caribbean gangs in the nineteen seventies that were dealing other types of of drugs. We have seen white gangs of Eastern European men committing other crimes as a gang, as a group, as a kind of loosely based mafia clan. But it was the Pakistani Muslim issue that scared the Guardian. Because remember, on September the eleventh, which wasn't that long before I'd pitched this story. Yeah.

An op ed written by Seamus Milne, who many will know, and he's easy to Google. I think his moniker is shameless. And he's a Stalinist Communications of uh Chief of Communications for Corbin was he? That's what he went on to do when he left the Guardian. But at that time he was he had quite a senior position. at The Guardian and he wrote an op ed, which was published I think a day or so after the four thousand Americans

were murdered by Al Qaeda, which pretty much said they had it coming. They asked for what they They they got what they asked for, American imperialism, yadda yadda yadda. And it was quite unbelievable. But at that time the newspaper had almost a George Galloway approach. Two. Anti imperialism and anything that America did was wrong and anything that the most extreme and completely deranged Islamists, fascists did.

was justified. Yeah. I remember this in the music industry after the Ari Grand Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, twenty seventeen, and hearing peers say, Well, you know, gotta keep in mind what we've done to them. I'm like What what those innocent girls did a at the M M Arena to some to some Libyan. What are you talking about? And political violence is justified how? Yeah. And in what circumstances? Never, never. And so this was completely and utterly

shameful. And that's the only thing that I can really draw it back to. That's a really interesting uh context. Is there was a great fear at that time of Islamophobia and and that that nine eleven uh th I this I actually hadn't pieced that together myself. That's a it's a helpful observation. So you uh you've you've covered it across the country, not just Blackpool and Bradford, um and names like Rotherham and Telford. It's almost household name now.

Unfortunately girls like Charlene Downs and Laura Wilson and Lucy Lowe's the the victims who were murdered in in these various cases are not yet household names. I I I hope that they will be household names. Um but Oddly, the the big glaring gap in the ongoing rape gang scandal has been London. Very little has been reported about London. Which is odd, not just because it's our biggest city, but um because we have huge immigrant popula uh populations here. Why would

uh the the this phenomena that exists in the rest of the country not exist in London. You mentioned Sadiq Khan there. kind of denying it, even though we now have evidence he had overlooked uh he'd s he'd read reports by the Metropolitan Police, he's denied it and goes to this kind of county lines uh rhetoric, which I'd like to explore with you. But before we do that You've written about the London grooming gangs. Maybe you can paint a picture about what's really going on here.

The idea that there are no grooming gangs in London would actually be laughable if it wasn't so tragic. We've just been talking about Blackpool and one of the factors of Blackpool and one of the reasons why the grooming gangs do so well in places like Blackpool is because they've got a very vibrant sex trait.

And if you look at brothels and walk ups and nail bars and all and and massage parlours, all of which are brothels, masquerading is something else. You've always got girls, you've always got underage girls in there because there are several punters, many punters that want to pay extra to have an underage girl, to rape an underage girl.

London, and I've done masses of research on the sex trade in London over the years, has not just a very vibrant sex trade, but it has one that the police consider to be hands off. So occasionally there'll be a raid or we found 20 tie women in a brothel who were trained to a radiator, they were forced, they were trafficked, this is terrible. Um we've given them support and we're now looking for the perpetrators. Is that a real story? Well yes. I mean this is ex

this is the extreme end of the terribleness, of the everyday terribleness in the sex trade. So what the police do is they'll occasionally

give us a little taste of something brilliant and heroic they're doing to clamp down on the sex trade by saying, We've rescued some trafficked women. What we don't get to hear about is the thousands upon thousands Of flats and of other brothel type places, where it's business as usual for the pimps, where there are underage girls, where these men that run the grooming gangs take the girls to be abused.

Mm-hmm. And so I had known that in hotels, in the shabbier hotels, the ones in residential streets, the ones that uh could advertise as B and Bs. They're often those that you can rent for a couple of hours where no questions are asked, where these men We'll take the girls to be raped for cash. by the men that incidentally we've never once had an arrest of any of the punters that pay for these girls.

that are pimped out by the grooming gangs. It's almost like they're invisible men. It's almost like they don't exist. So when I started looking at the grooming gangs Same same old, same old. I looked at What evidence there was? Well, there are plenty of survivors that can tell me about the brothels that they were in, about the men that they met at the takeaways, about the men they met online, on Snapchat or Facebook or wherever. who were yeah, same demographic. Pakistani Muslim men

There's other forms of child abuse going on. There's there's other men that are abusing children, of course, but we're being very specific, aren't we? About the type of gangs and the type of organization that Sadiq Khan denied exist. Every single town and city in the country probably have some form of county lines, drug dealing, criminality, where there are boys, underage boys, on bicycles, doing drugs drops.

getting girls to be complicit in those drug drops, using them in whatever way, hiding the drugs in their bedrooms, having a few sexual favours on the side. That's all terrible. And county lines means it's the the lines drawn up by gangs Yeah. So in Harlow or or or in Basildon, um or in Enfield, there are gangs that control those areas. And it's again for profit. There's always sexual exploitation of the girls that are on the fringes of those gangs that are being used.

as I say, to hide drugs, to courier drugs, to be the clean skin so that the police don't necessarily think that they're holding, you know, c a c a couple of kilos of of of hash, um Rather than picking up some black boys on a bike. But but this is not the same as the grooming gangs.

the boys that make initial contact with the girls who are the younger brothers or young cousins of the then twenty two, three year olds who have a nice car, who are the ones that start giving the vodka and the cigarettes to the girls. up to the men that run the takeaways or whichever nighttime economy they're involved in, that actually do the breaking in, the pimping out. Exactly the same MO as in Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, wherever you look, the same.

Of course there are some differences, because we live in the capital city. It's the capital city. So of course there are different ways in which these gangs operate than if they're in a former mill town in the north of England. So it's the same. Exactly. So it's the same sort of culture in the in the gangs. That's right. So it might be that the initial contacts are made more likely

online because it's not that practical to wander around the local park or the shopping centre, which is what happens in the smaller towns. So same old, little bit of variation.

And what Sadiq Khan did when Susan Hall asked at the assembly, the London Assembly, about grooming gangs, is he race baited her. He absolutely did that. And you can see it if you look at the clip of her asking. And him repeatedly asking her, What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? He was so stupid he just assumed Susan Hall would say those Pakistani men, those Muslim men, those horrible brown men that do this

But she isn't racist. She wasn't saying that. What she was meaning was exactly the way that I mean. The organization. The way that they meet the young boys, they meet the twenty odd year olds, they're given drugs and they're given alcohol and they're given food from the takeaway, and the next thing they're in a flat being raped for money. That's what she meant.

And he of course diverted it to county lines because with county lines, those boys, the ones on the bicycles, the ones carrying the drugs for Mr Biggs. They of course have started out as victims. They themselves are victims of these big drug barons, but they turn out they end up usually as perpetrators. So you can get some sympathy.

For the County Lions lot, you can have a look at the way in which this is about child exploitation of the boys as well as the girls, and you can ignore the fact that this is child rape and prostitution on an industrial scale. It's entirely different. The grooming gang method is torture, debasement, breaking the girls in, ensuring that they have no spirit or will left.

To the point of where they are just a shell of themselves completely traumatised, laying on a dirty mattress in a room where men queue up to rape her for money that goes to the grooming gang leaders. yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'.

about this. How dare he make out that this is a racist narrative? When he had read the reports and he knew what was happening and he could see why there was a cover up, because the police In my view, and I've worked alongside the police and I've criticized them and I've researched them and I've written about them for decades.

The police aren't scared of being called racist. This is where a lot of people get it wrong. They're scared of the race riots. They're scared of the bother, they're scared of the inconvenience. Mm. They're not scared of being called racist. Interesting. But the social workers, some of the health workers, and some of the white liberals are scared of being called racist. And that's why they'd rather posture as an anti racist.

pro multiculturalism rather than concern themselves with the rape and torture of vulnerable girls. Well with s with Sadiq, it seems clear from that interaction with Susan Hall that he prioritises. He is sort of the moral ill of accusing a certain demographic or a Pakistani Muslim demographic, which he happens to be, I believe, um, of such a crime is more offensive to him. Just the idea of that, because she Susan Hall doesn't do that.

is more offensive to him than the crimes themselves perpetrated by the like you've described by these gangs. So Uh Uh you can see in him how how his order of uh morals there have have stacked up. Well, in the same way that some members of the public that have bought the hook, line and sinker, this is just a racist trope. And everyone that talks about this is a racist.

In that same way there are members of the public that have no skin in this game at all, but that develop an opinion, of course, we all do, subliminally or consciously or whatever. who look at the girls and see them as the problem, see them as the troublesome slags, and that's a quote from one of the police officers. They see them also as the problem when it comes to race and racism.

They consider the girls to be no better than they're ought to be, which is a phrase that I've heard again describe these girls, who somehow lure these men in takeaways and taxi ranks. so that they can no longer help themselves to have sex with these white girls. Because of course the mythology around these men, and I've had it said to me recently by child abuse experts that spend their time researching child abuse in the UK. That religious men, of course, don't do this. Televictims.

of clergy abuse. Look at what happened with the Catholic Church and tell me that these weren't religious men. Tell me that these men don't go to mosque and that don't believe in God, or that don't pray five times a day, or that aren't involved in all of the cultural baggage. Of what it means to be A devout Muslim. Because we can't get inside their heads and decide whether they really truly believe But we know that they are religious because they're involved in that structure.

Well it's worse than that, if I may, is that they're actually some of them explicitly referencing hadith to justify what they're doing. There's one hadith about Muhammad saying taking golden girls or blonde girls, implying white girls as war bounty or booty rather that you should exploit and enjoy. And and that's in the Hadith that's been referenced. And Some of the perpetrators have been More like a town hall than a place of worship. Deals are done in the mothers. Imam's a very

rarely likely to speak out against this because of course these are all devout men and these men don't do this. And when people say this to me, I tell them about this pit and I'm going to offend even more people than I usually do. So bring it on. But there's there's a pilgrimage every year. where Hasidic Jews flock from all over the world to a place called Umam in um in Ukraine. where they pray for the life of a rabbi who is

someone who's become a a really important symbol of Hasidic Judaism. And so it's a really important pilgrimage and this particular area of Ukraine is heaving with the most devout Jewish men, the most religious of the religious of Jewish men. And what happens every year when they're there is that busloads of Russian women are brought into this area For prostitution. Let's run OttoCasino.se Spela ansvarsfullt! Stödlinjen.se Sporak! Rasiga lökringer. Lucky barbecue sauce.

Alltid. Svenskt nötchat och kyckling. Välkommen till matchen. Sveriges godaste börjare. Bravo! ' Explain that to those that say that religious devout men don't do this. Yes, they do. They do. There's a market for it.

And you could you can make all kinds of excuses or come up with all kinds of reasons for this when Catholic priests were in the limelight were seen as a danger to children because such a significant minority had committed acts of abuse or turned away when they saw their fellow priests abuse children.

We were told, Well, it's because of course they have to take a vow of celibacy and they're red blooded males and they need sex. Well, I say two things to them. Well, that vow of celibacy is ridiculous. But this does not This does not ever lead to to men making a decision to rape a child. So it's the same with any of these men that we talk about. And I I'm sick and tired of the likes of Sadiq Khan.

Coming up with any excuse for us not to scrutinize what's happening in the city that he presides over. Yeah, yeah. So am I. So am I. I'm disgraced by him. So on London, there's a couple of locations that you've mentioned in your unheard article from a couple of months ago. One is Westfield in Stratford, another is a McDonald's in South West London.

There are other loc locations like Paddington when this is already in the public domain because one of the Oxford grooming gangs perpetrators, Mohammed Carrar, was going via Paddington to sell his victims onto other men. I wondered in your uh experience what you'd seen in Stratford and and in other parts of London that you know, this is new to me. I I hadn't heard this, so wha what can you tell me?

It is the same old actually. It's shocking the way that when I spent time back in the early two thousands in a big shopping centre in Blackpool where I saw the approaches from the boys the same age as their potential victims make initial contact with the girls and I saw the boys buying a coffee or an ice cream with the girls and sitting and flirting, nice looking young um Asian boys. And this was clearly a dynamic that had been so carefully explained.

So carefully worked out. I mean these the the the level of organisation that goes into these encounters is extraordinary. And it's the same in Westfield in Stratford, where I spent the afternoon looking at what was happening. I saw the same thing. I saw girls, some of them Diving off school. Some of them Looking around for fun, they were bored, they had no money. Fair game. Absolutely fair game. I saw one particular group of girls.

Three of them, probably about thirteen, fourteen, and a group of about four or five young Asian boys. around the same age, just make a direct beeline for them, after they had muttered behind their hands, after they had been nudging each other and clearly making a plan No, obviously you could look at the fact that this happens with dating, with innocent boys and girls linking up, liking the look of each other. having a bit of fun, innocent fun.

on an afternoon in a shopping centre. But this was planned. This was orchestrated. They were looking. They were on the hunt. And I didn't see what happened to the girls. They they went down an escalator with the boys. After quite some conversation, after they'd been bought a milkshake or something. And it was clear what was going on. Now what I saw during that encounter

or a couple of older men, and I can't swear I don't have proof that they were watching the boys, watching the girls, and that they had a bird's eye view of all of it. But they were certainly taking an interest in these two men. Maybe in their twenties, we're watching. They watched from the beginning right through until the end until they disappeared down the escalator. Hm, okay.

And what did you see in this McDonalds in southwest London? Is there a reason why you're not saying which McDonalds it is? Yes. Yeah, th there's an investigation at the moment that's live that hopefully will get somewhere. The same. Um, I was there from probably about eleven o'clock in the morning. There were groups of boys around that age, teenage boys, good looking boys.

Sitting together, one group on one table, one group on another table, obviously knew each other. I mean it's it's difficult, isn't it, to to play a spy if you're not trained by MI five, but they were obviously communicating with each other. Teenage boys. Teenage boys and but they were trying to be discreet, so they weren't sitting next to each other.

There were one group of boys on one side of MacDonald's and another at the opposite end, but they were giving signals to each other, and any time any girls came in of around that age thirteen fourteen fifteen there would be a response. Now again people could say, well this is just boys looking out to date girls. This is regular red blooded teenagers, girls and boys.

Who are attracted to each other and this is how they meet. But it was more organized than that. It was obvious what was happening. The boys were there waiting. Hm. Were there older men like at the Westfield? It was difficult to tell because there were th the place was quite full by the time the girls came in that they showed an interest in. And yes there were men that fit that description. But again it's difficult to do.

Right. I see. I see. So you're by the time this interview goes out, you will have spoken at Rupert Lowe's, the independent MP for Great Yarmouth and he's led the charge on this national inquiry. He's it's been Crowdfunded to to the tune of six hundred thousand pounds, I think, or maybe up to seven hundred and thirty thousand pounds with twenty thousand different donors.

uh this inquiry which he's leading in Parliament because he has shown massive frustration at the failure of Starmer to get his national inquiry. Uh worth mentioning before I ask you about this is that of course, initially Starmer back in January twenty five didn't want to do a national inquiry, and you turned on that in june twenty five.

uh than saying there would be a statutory national inquiry inquiry. But as far as I've looked into it into preparation for this conversation, it seems to have completely stalled. Uh I I I don't see what it's exactly it's a and At best it's gonna take three years to get done. Rupert's just cloud ahead. You plan to speak there. Perhaps you can tell me what you plan to say. Well, first of all,

Somebody said to me recently when I told them I was going to give evidence at the rape gang inquiry, Oh, is that the one that's running parallel to the statutory inquiry? And I said no, because the statutory inquiry hasn't actually got off the ground. And it's important, of course, that that does, because statutory means that people are compelled to give evidence.

So those that are running Bradford City Council, for example, many of whom have a vested interest in keeping this under wraps about their failures to act, whether it's police, social services, local councillors. Uh they they would not give evidence unless they were required by law to do so. So the sex trade is full of adult women who were abused and groomed into prostitution as children.

Now there are a whole cohort of people, self interested, often for profit, often f who knows why they believe this madness? That prostitution is simply work. They call it sex work. They talk about giving the women labour rights. That prostitutions should be decriminalized, that there there's no problems inherent to it, as long as you remove all the laws from it. And that there are women in the sex trade who are perfectly happy who are making a choice. That's nonsense.

I've interviewed hundreds of women in the sex trade, including those that have escaped, that have left, none of whom have been happy hookers, none of whom have enjoyed it, some of whom say that they did when they were involved in prostitution. Most of whom had some kind of sexual abuse or rode directly into the sex trade as children, as underage girls. So when we talk about Grooming gangs, and we don't mention pimping.

Because it seemed to be impolite to Because the victims might not want to be described as prostitutes. I agree we should never call any woman, child or adult, a prostitute. we should say she has been sexually abused, exploited into prostitution. That she is pimped, that she is prostituted is something that happens to her, not something she chooses. Now there'll be

One or two people listening to this, maybe even more, saying that's nonsense. Bindles telling women what they can do with their bodies. It's her choice. That choice narrative is such a cloak, it's such a smokescreen for what men do to women and from the girls and their reality when they first are introduced. Yeah. To the sex trade. It's horrific. And why it's relevant to this

The victims and I won't call these women survivors because some of them don't survive. Either they die or they are in eternal hell in the abuse that they're then trapped in. Many of them are seen as no good for anything other than to continue being bought and sold by men. And many of them will remain in the sex trade.

And why don't we care about them? Because they're over eighteen? Does a magic switch come on when a woman becomes eighteen that she's suddenly choosing it and she's happy and she's got no backstory? So we have to talk about the prostitution element of it. 'Cause we have to name these men as pimps. And we have to look at who the punters are.

hearing you speak there actually, I'm reminded of the importance of the word grooming because it's been an important effort to get away from grooming gang, which has become a sort of w uh soft way of saying Pakistani rape gang scandal. But actually grooming is kinda key.'Cause what you're describing there is is the grooming, which is why the girls don't have agency in the way that some people think it's somehow empowering.

So the grooming is is key a key word which we shouldn't completely bin, I don't think. Grooming is an element targeting is possibly more appropriate. These girls are targeted. Rape, of course, is always an element. Torture is always an element. And I've never heard of an instance, although they do exist, but I haven't heard of an instance

of a girl being targeted by these men, these organized street based gangs, where there hasn't been a profit element. And that profit comes from selling those girls. And often the girls understandably do not want to call it prostitution because it's too horrific to think about. And the stigma is always on the prostituted person, never on the punter or the pimp.

But when you drill down, if I very carefully and gently ask the survivors, was there an element of pimping? Was there prostitution? Often they'll say well no And then they'll say, Well, his mates did come round and they did buy drugs and they did give them money for drugs and they did tell me that I needed to do a favour f for his business associate. So even if it's money in kind. The girls were effectively a merchandise. To be bartered.

by the pimps, by the groomers. So yeah, grooming is an important word, but it's only one element of the horror. Sure. Um what Do you make of the inquiry that Rupert's led so far? For me, the couple of things that have jumped out which, you know, I've been following the Grooming Gangs channel pretty closely for some years.

But the idea that these girls were now being taken abroad, taken overseas, I hadn't seen that before. That's new to me. And then there was one other story of It's horri horrifying um Stories. Wha w what have you as sort of the leading journalist or one of the leading journalists in the country on this issue for so long, what do you make of what you're learning? Is this new to you? Are there new bits jumping out?

There's always new bits when we look at violence against children, against women, from these vicious sadistic gangs. And Fiona Goddard, who gave evidence this week. about her experience. She was abused, groomed, pimped in Bradford. And actually her story has every element that we understand In these horror stories, hers has every single piece of the jigsaw it happened to her. And Fiona is an expert. She's not just a survivor. She understands why it happened to her.

She understands what the men's motive were, she understands the business model, the link with drugs and organized crime. the relevance of them being Pakistani Muslim. And she was one of these girls that was told, You're part of our family now. Because as she says in a long interview I've done with her for open justice for a podcast that's been released. Next week. As she said, They thought. that she they knew that what she was desperately craving was a family.

There were people listening to Fiona's story who think she wanted love from a boyfriend. She didn't. She wanted a family because she had had Years in care. and had been neglected and was desperate for that family structure. This was the last thing these men were going to give her. But children will use their imagination and get into a place of safety for as long as they can in their own head.

She was told you should come to Merpore, you should come to meet the family. I want you to meet all of the family. We'll organise the trip. And it was very, very fortunate for her that for all kinds of practical reasons that couldn't happen. She's very clear, looking back on it with a clearer head, that what they were doing was trafficking her to Pakistan for the punters, the abusers, the cash cow,

that they would have been able to access out there. Of course. And she's not the only one. And there are girls that have been trafficked out of the country. And of course there are girls All of the victims, the survivors I've spoken to, who've been abused by the so called classic grooming gang. Outfits, structures. They've been groomed around the country. They've been trafficked around the country to places where there can be access. By men, by extended family members, by family members that

are so distant to the perpetrators that they've probably never spoken to them for years. And this is the reality of it. It's an entire structure, it's an entire infrastructure within this clan. And of course some of those are in Pakistan and it makes sense that

Some of them would be taken overseas. So it's not a national scandal, it's an international scandal. It is. And it it always is. When you when it comes to the commercial sexual abuse and exploitation of girls, it's always international. And there are men that were coming from overseas. to abuse girls in these gangs caught up in these hellish I mean they were trapped. They were trapped in houses where they were Occasionally visited by police.

Where sometimes the girls would be arrested because they kicked off, drunk, and distressed. There was an eleven-year-old that was arrested for drunk and disorderly while she was in a house with several perpetrators, and none of them were arrested. Receptet för ett gott liv. Yeah. Smak för livet. Hej! Det här är Anton Berg från Spår.

Vår nya säsong Lovets fall finns ute nu och handlar om ett mystiskt dödsfall i Bangkok. Hösten 2025 påträffas en kropp nedanför ett lyxhotell. Polisen påstår att det är 21-årige Louva Engström. Men kroppen är 7 cm kortare än Loven, och den hittas på norra sidan av hotellet, lowe borde på södra. Följ med spår till Bangkok för att ta reda på sanningen om lovets fall. Eleven. It's just evil.

What do you think is the best we can hope from this inquiry that Rupert's leading? What is it just exposure, getting the story out there, or I mean they don't have for see strat statutory power, can we really expect justice to come of it? I think it will help push the government to act. It will shame them to act. I've stopped thinking that we can appeal to the better conscience, the collective conscience of the government.

I stopped thinking that would happen under the last government, under the Conservatives. This is not endemic to labour. But Labour are in power now and they are supposed to be the party that looks out for the vulnerable. They're supposed to be the party that cares about working class people.

They're supposed to be on the side of women and girls when it comes to male violence. This is what sticks in my craw more. This is what makes me more angry than when we were failed by the Conservatives. Because the Labour Party have Postured Forever.

on a working class ticket. I'm from a working class background in the north east of England, and I've long known that the Labour Party has let my people down And that they don't care anymore about working class people in general. They care about the Islington elite and those Stalinist leftists.

that look down on working class people and communities as though they are scum. And I'm afraid that's the case with Labour. So if this inquiry, if the rape gang inquiry shames them, Because it's fired up so many people in the general public and those that have power around them to act because these stories are horrific and Then that will be a job well done. You asked me if there are stories that I've heard that surprise me that I didn't know about. Yes, there are. Fiona Goddard, I've heard

To her on camera for nine hours for a project that we've just completed. And some of the things she told me. My drawer dropped dropped to the floor. I thought I knew everything there was to know. And before I started looking at organized grooming gangs, street based gangs. I'd been campaigning against child sexual abuse way before then, since the eighties. So I really do know a lot about it. But some of those stories

Shocked me. Really, really shocked me. And this is what we need to happen with the general public. There can be no complacency around this. Because we've sacrificed Hundreds of thousands of girls, and there'll be some boys as well. Hundreds of thousands of them in the name of multiculturalism, in the name of community cohesion. And also the same old tropes that I've been seeing from the nineteen eighties, which is the girls wanted it, the girls consented to it, these men were egged on.

These men, yes, they had sex with them, but she was over thirteen, it could be worse.

These men are the most dangerous perpetrators I have ever come across. Yeah. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands. I mean, I've seen this uh and th that's the n the number that's kind of hard to believe. I mean we're of course talking over decades, uh, not to in any way dilute that number, but we haven't if you think of that of how many victim individual victims, each of whom would have had hundreds, if not thousands, of individual crimes perpetrated against them.

Or maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. And where are the uh c uh convictions? And it's just it's an it's an absolute um horror show. Well where are the convictions? And why do we have convictions? of children who are being abused. This is not just Fiona Goddard. It's every single survivor and victim I've come across who've been abused by grooming gangs have had convictions.

for even some of them for prostitution. On street prostitution offences from way back in the nineteen nineties. Today it's more likely because we stopped criminalising children who are prostituted. But as I say, some kind of Drunken disorderly behaviour Criminal damage. All directly related to the fact that these girls are traumatized and abused and screaming out for help. They've got convictions. These convictions need to be quiet.

These girls need an amnesty. These girls need more than an apology. We need as Everybody knows that understands this problem. We need a statutory inquiry where heads will roll when we discover who has been complicit. We need to prosecute people. We need to Strike people out of their careers. We need to make sure that they pay. Not because I'm latch I I haven't latched on to some type of divine retribution or punishment for the sake of punishment, but we need to deter

others from doing this, from being as complacent. People need to lose their jobs. People need to be in prison for what's happened to these girls. In in my opinion, prison would be a a very light um Well the the the perpetrators the perpetrators need to be in prison, that goes without saying. But so do all of those that look And looked away and let it happen when they're being paid out of public funds. To protect these children. Yeah, quite.

I'll finish by asking about Prime Minister Starmer and you've touched on it there, but it seems to me at the best possible faith interpretation, which I loathe to do'cause I really have deep contempt for him, on this issue is that he is a Mr. Protocols and so he's he needs th the right procedure, everything one step at a time and that's why he's uh it's he's gone about this very slow process. And actually that contrasts quite with Rupert Lowe, who is uh

Entrepreneur and been in the private sector uh most of his life, who just gets things done uh by comparison. It's an interesting contrast. Um, but if there it I think what Lo's shown is that if there's political will, you can actually get things done and we can um move on. It d where do you stand on on on Starmer? Like why do you think

We c this isn't a priority and it's just like get it just get it done. Just make it a priority. It doesn't need to take three years. It doesn't need to cost e X or it can cost w however much it is. The the nation wants this sorted. And by the way, the These scandals continue. It's like it's we're talking about this as if something had happened some time ago. No, this is still going on. This should be our national priority. What what do you make about the the the Starmer uh behaviour?

Well I've been interviewing people about the grooming gang perpetrators, specifically those that are from Pakistani Muslim groupings and families. Pakistani Muslim people outside of the perpetrator gangs will talk to me. I've very rarely been blocked by those I've approached to say, What's happening? Do you see this within your community? Often they're helpful. Those that block me are the white liberals.

those that virtue signal about ethnicity and about cohesion and about multiculturalism. So I'm afraid that many of the people that do not want this issue to be laid bare in all its horror are those that are more likely to vote for Starmer than they are to vote for Badanock. And I've been a Labour voter all of my life. If we had an election tomorrow, I would spoil my ballot paper. I could not vote for this government.

I think his problem is because it's too big, it's too messy, and because the kind of heads potentially that will roll will make it very difficult for him to hold the country together in reassuring the general public that our services are still fit for purpose, police, social services, health and the like. He was good when he was director of public prosecutions. You think so. Starmer. I worked with him. On female genital mutilation.

Which is a culturally sens culturally sensitive topic, they say. Not for me, it's a crime, it's child abuse, child mutilation. He was very keen, but to get prosecutions for this which is a a problem for in uh predominantly in East African heritage communities. Yes, it's not just a a a Muslim issue. Um But it is one that's seen as predominantly Muslim. I mean it it it it cuts across Christianity also and other um cultures.

But it's seen as culturally sensitive, which I will not have. It's child abuse. Starmer was robust. He was having none of that, Cowardic. He really wanted to get the convictions through for FGM. He did more and I'm not saying it was perfect, far from it, it wasn't enough. As DPP, he did more to look at prosecuting child abuse than any other DPP that I've seen since I began doing the work I've been doing in the early eighties. So he knows he knows the issues, he said.

He But that's almost worse then, isn't it? Well it's it's not good. It's not reassuring. He represented Um, a young woman who had been sent to prison back in the nineteen eighties that I in my campaigning group, Justice Women, campaigned to get out of prison, who'd been abused into prostitution after a life of Child abuse killed her pimp. and was sent to prison for life. He was a barrister on her case.

Tragically she died before the case could get anywhere, where he was going to sue her original legal team. And I was in meetings with him about it. He understood the issue. He was good. So why he's doing this now, why he's so complacent? I think he's not fit to be a politician. I think that the man has got no delivery.

He relies on his spads and his advisers and he gets bad advice and he takes it. And this isn't good enough because he's leading the country and we've charged him with leading the country. And he is inadequate to say the least. And he needs to go. Well, in some ways you're preaching to the uh choir there. Um

Julie Bindle, it's been a great well, it's not been a pleasure, um, but your your work is phenomenal. Um it's because the the issue is is so horrible. And um is there anything you'd like to bring attention to viewers or listeners? Anything they want to follow your work, where's the best place to find you and is anything coming up apart from the national inquiry this uh national inquiry that you'd like to bring attention to? Look out for the open justice.

podcast series with Fiona Goddard. I interview her for this series. It's incredible. It is jaw dropping. And that will be up soon, at least the first episode, maybe by the time we go live. You can follow me on X Bindle J and I have a substack, easy to find, and you can find my work usually on there.

Thanks for listening to the Winston Marshall Show with Julie Bindle. Remember, head over to WinstonMarshall.co dot UK if you want to enjoy ad free viewing and listening, as well as exclusive content and to have the opportunity to ask future guests your questions. But also, if you want to support this show, all you have to do is press subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts from. Otherwise, until next time, be well.