A letter lands in a mailbox 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 both to her and to other children.
Now the letter from her own state says that six of them could be out by September, years before the sentence she fought to have passed was served.
Her hair is falling out, she doesn't sleep, she's considering moving from the area the men lived in, 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 full daylight and put into force from September, a Sentencing Act that divides the sentence 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 exempt. That those who had done the most monstrous things would remain sitting. 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 told that he is now being assessed for release and could be out after about ten.
Thirty-five years became ten.
Read that again.
It's not a sentence reduction. It's an outright revocation of the sentence 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 crushed a child should be some kind of goodness and not just another betrayal of the crushed.
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 ALMOST sentenced accordingly, there the State now goes back and turns the Scale down again. It's no longer just a lack of proportionality. It's proportionality being dismantled after it was finally achieved.
And then there's what you're not allowed to 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 is not allowed to 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 it was suppressed 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 issue now, himself pointed to the mechanism in the House of Commons, that hanging out the people who lift the problem forward is exactly the way it was covered up from the beginning. And he is absolutely right.
The 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 unbelieving child, as something available, something worth less, something you could use and set aside again, and that view came from a particular place, from a culture and a faith about Man 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 on its head from the way it is 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 some 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.
Piss.
❤️🔥🪽
