A letter lands in a letterbox in England.
The woman who opens it is called Fiona Goddard. She was a child when seven men abused and raped her together. In turns. Repeatedly. She spent years of her adult life getting them convicted, and she succeeded, in 2019, seven convictions for what was done to her and to other children.
Now the letter from her own state says six of them could be out by September, years before the sentence she fought to secure had been served.
Her hair is falling out, she doesn't sleep, she's considering moving from the area where the men lived, because she has children, and because she no longer feels safe in her own home.
That's what it looks like down on the ground, before we've even begun to talk about principles.
The letter is not an accident in the machinery. It is the machinery's new law, passed in broad daylight and put into force from September, a Sentencing Act that divides imprisonment into phases and lets prisoners go free after a third of their sentence, because the prisons are full and the State would rather open the doors than build new walls.
The justification is lack of space.
And it is the victims who are paying the rent.
They promised that the worst would be excluded. That those who had done the most monstrous things would remain locked up. And then the letters came anyway. Sammy Woodhouse, who was fourteen when Arshid Hussain took her, the ringleader from Rotherham, convicted of TWENTY-THREE sexual crimes against CHILDREN, sent behind bars for thirty-five years, has been informed that he is now being assessed for release and could be out after approximately ten.
Thirty-five years became ten.
Read that again.
This is not a sentence reduction. This is an outright retraction of the judgment itself.
And here's what I can't let go of. Because it's the same pattern everywhere across Europe, and I've written about it before - about a justice system that rarely manages to place punishment and crime on the same scale, a system that almost always reaches for leniency, as if leniency toward the one who shattered a child were some kind of goodness and not just another betrayal of the shattered.
But this is worse than the usual imbalance.
Because in the few cases where the Scale actually held, where a judge actually saw the full weight of the crime and NEARLY sentenced accordingly, there the State now goes back and turns the Scale down again. This is no longer just lack of proportionality. This is proportionality being dismantled after it was finally achieved.
And then there's what one must not say.
Because there is a pattern in these cases, and the pattern is the very reason it was allowed to grow for so long. And I repeat it deliberately, because a society that must not say Voldemort is subject to a Darkness far deeper than the Word itself.
The men in the largest cases were predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, and this was concealed year after year, not because no one could see it, but because those who could see it were more afraid of being called racists than they were of what was happening to the girls.
Chris Philp, who is raising the case now, himself pointed to the mechanism in the House of Commons, that singling out those people who lift the problem forward is exactly the way it was covered up from the beginning. And he is absolutely right.
Fear of the word came before care for the child.
It's not the ethnicity that did it. Ethnicity never does anything. But there followed a view, a view of the girl, of the infidel child, as something available, something worth less, something one could use and put aside again, and that view came from a particular place, from a culture and a faith about the Human that the West didn't dare look at, because it was uncomfortable to look at. So they didn't. And meanwhile it happened again. And again. And again. And again.
The strange thing is that reality stands almost upside down from the way it's told. Those who pointed to the pattern were called "the far right". Those who covered it up called themselves "the decent ones". And the child, the actual child of flesh and blood, disappeared somewhere in between the two, while the adults argued about who had the finest language.
A state has ONE FIRST DUTY, and it is not to build, not to redistribute, not to please anyone.
It is to protect the innocent!
The English state could not protect these children when it mattered. It could not punish proportionally when the crime lay open and proven. And now, when it finally had a few of them behind lock and key, it cannot even keep them there.
The prisons have not run out of space.
They have run out of courage.
Nothing.
❤️🔥🪽
