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LOVED THIS ALHAMDULILAH!

Oxford gang drugged young girls and sold them as prostitutes, court told

Vulnerable girls as young as 11 were groomed, subjected to acts of "extreme depravity" and trafficked around the UK for sex by a gang of men based in Oxford, a court has heard .

Over a period of eight years the nine men made the girls' lives a "living hell", subjecting them to extreme physical and sexual violence, selling some victims for prostitution in Oxford and trafficking others around the country, an Old Bailey jury was told.

It took more than half an hour to read out the 51 counts against the men, who sat impassively in the dock, accused of crimes including rape, forcing a child into prostitution and trafficking.

The jury of seven men and five women heard that from 2004 to early 2012 six complainants were plied with drugs and drink, and raped, sometimes by several men and sometimes "for days on end".

The men targeted children in care or from chaotic backgrounds, the jury heard. Once groomed, the girls could then be used to recruit other children into the sex ring. Some of the girls, ranging in age from 11 to 15, were groomed to be child prostitutes, for which some men in the gang received payments.

Kamar Jamil, 27, Akhtar Dogar, 32, Anjum Dogar, 30, Assad Hussain, 32, Mohammed Karrar, 38 , Bassam Karrar, 26, Mohammed Hussain, 24, Zeeshan Ahmed, 27, and Bilal Ahmed, 26, deny the charges against them. The court heard there were more potential abusers who were not in the dock.

The trial is expected to last eight to 12 weeks.

The nine face 19 counts of rape, seven of them with a child aged under 13. Other counts include arranging or facilitating child prostitution, trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation and using an instrument to procure a miscarriage.

Noel Lucas QC, prosecuting said: "The depravity of what was done to the complainants was extreme."

He told the jury that they would have to steel themselves to hear the evidence. "The facts in this case will make you feel uncomfortable. Much of what the girls were forced to endure was perverted in the extreme."

The children were taken to guest houses and empty houses, thought to be kept for the abuse, and prevented from escaping.

They were subjected to "humiliating and degrading conduct", including biting, suffocation, burning and scratching. Weapons, including knives, baseball bats, knives and meat cleavers were used during the torture, the court heard.

The jury was told that sometimes men had urinated on the girls, who were raped vaginally, orally and anally.

The children were groomed in a variety of ways, given gifts or "simply shown the care and attention they very much craved", said Lucas.

"The attention lavished on the girls at the outset was of course entirely insincere, as it was merely a device, you may conclude once you hear the evidence, to exploit their vulnerability," he said.

He said the girls were also given "so many drugs they were barely aware of what was going on – indeed they say it was the only way they could cope with what was going on".

The men gave the girls cannabis, cocaine, crack and sometimes heroin.

"The girls became addicted to certain of the drugs and felt unable to live without them. This made them even more dependent on the men," he said.

The men, who were arrested by Thames Valley police as part of Operation Bullfinch, controlled the girls in their power entirely.

They were threatened "that should they ever seek to free themselves from the grasp of the group they and their families would suffer serious harm".

The men targeted girls who were unlikely to be believed and whose behaviour would be seen as delinquent, said Lucas. It was, according to one of the girls "a living hell" from which there was no escape.

The gang took some of the girls to empty houses where other men from as far away as Bradford, Leeds, London and Slough, would "come by appointment" to pay to have sex with them, Lucas said.

On other occasions girls were ferried to London and Bournemouth.

In his opening statement, Lucas told the court that one girl, who can not be named for legal reasons, was 12 when she was targeted by the gang while playing truant from school.

She was subjected to extreme physical, sexual and psychological abuse until shortly after her 15th birthday. The jury heard that she was in contact with police twice in 2006, and they would see a video interview carried by police in September of that year. Her abuse only came to an end when she "decided it all had to stop" and she threw her telephone away and went back to school, said Lucas.

The court heard that as part of the grooming process, the alleged victim, called Girl A, who had been put into care, introduced another teenage girl to the gang. In September 2006 the girls absconded from the home, returning two days later in a taxi. The jury heard that Girl A said she asked the children's home to pay the fare, but when they refused the girls returned to their abusers in Oxford.

The trial continues.

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I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

 THIRTY-TWO years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience for an Indian women’s magazine. It created a stir in the women’s movement — and in my family — and then it quietly disappeared. Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rageafter a young woman’s rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

It’s not exactly pleasant to be a symbol of rape. I’m not an expert, nor do I represent all victims of rape. All I can offer is that — unlike the young woman who died in December two weeks after being brutally gang raped, and so many others — my story didn’t end, and I can continue to tell it.

When I fought to live that night, I hardly knew what I was fighting for. A male friend and I had gone for a walk up a mountain near my home. Four armed men caught us and made us climb to a secluded spot, where they raped me for several hours, and beat both of us. They argued among themselves about whether or not to kill us, and finally let us go.

At 17, I was just a child. Life rewarded me richly for surviving. I stumbled home, wounded and traumatized, to a fabulous family. With them on my side, so much came my way. I found true love. I wrote books. I saw a kangaroo in the wild. I caught buses and missed trains. I had a shining child. The century changed. My first gray hair appeared.

Too many others will never experience that. They will not see that it gets better, that the day comes when one incident is no longer the central focus of your life. One day you find you are no longer looking behind you, expecting every group of men to attack. One day you wind a scarf around your throat without having a flashback to being choked. One day you are not frightened anymore.

Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.

If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal, and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

The week after I was attacked, I heard the story of a woman who was raped in a nearby suburb. She came home, went into the kitchen, set herself on fire and died. The person who told me the story was full of admiration for her selflessness in preserving her husband’s honor. Thanks to my parents, I never did understand this.

The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to him than a violation of her?

At 17, I thought the scariest thing that could happen in my life was being hurt and humiliated in such a painful way. At 49, I know I was wrong: the scariest thing is imagining my 11-year-old child being hurt and humiliated. Not because of my family’s honor, but because she trusts the world and it is infinitely painful to think of her losing that trust. When I look back, it is not the 17-year-old me I want to comfort, but my parents. They had the job of picking up the pieces.

This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

When I was 17, I could not have imagined thousands of people marching against rape in India, as we have seen these past few weeks. And yet there is still work to be done. We have spent generations constructing elaborate systems of patriarchy, caste and social and sexual inequality that allow abuse to flourish. But rape is not inevitable, like the weather. We need to shelve all the gibberish about honor and virtue and did-she-lead-him-on and could-he-help-himself. We need to put responsibility where it lies: on men who violate women, and on all of us who let them get away with it while we point accusing fingers at their victims.

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Birds of Paradise

 

A man came to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) saying two of his children had died, and asked whether the Prophet could tell him anything that would soothe his heart. The Prophet said: "Small children are the birds of Paradise. If one of them meets his father (or his parents) he will take hold of his clothing ... And he (the child) will not let go until God causes his father to enter Paradise." Sahih Muslim