I read a piece recently on alt news media, normally a pretty good site, and found an article there that gave me pause for concern. The article in question was by an author called Grandpa1940 and was about the perceived lack of reporting of Islamic Rape Gangs and the reporting restrictions on the trials of the Islamic sex beasts. My article originated in a comment I made on a post about this Alt news media piece on the MeeWee site, but I thought that it could be the basis of a proper post. This post therefore is the MeeWee comment with some additions, including excerpts from the Alt News Media piece itself. What bothered me and has propelled me to write this article was that the author, whilst making the very valid point that there has not been sufficient publicity surrounding the details of the growing number of Islamic Rape Gang cases, didn’t seem to understand the admittedly complex (even for me, an ex-court reporter) issue of reporting restrictions or the valid reasons why such restrictions could be in place.
I’m not at all knocking the sentiments of the piece, like other normal decent people I despise the Islamic Rape Gangs that seem to crop up wherever there are Muslims in Britain and which have their roots in Islamic scripture. Like others I wish they had never erupted in the United Kingdom but at best I want to see these bastards brought to justice. However it’s to my mind right to point out when the assumptions of a piece can be attacked merely by looking at digests and abstracts of the relevant legislation regarding reporting restrictions. What bothers me about this piece and why I am commenting so extensively on it is, if I can see holes in this piece then so can others. This can include those who may well be considered as pro-Islam enemies, especially those on the Left who sadly seem to call the shots in much of our media these days. If we are going to win against the wily enemy which is the leftist – Islamic alliance, then we need to be sure of the factual ground on which we stand.
I have watched, over the years, many changes in how we actually are ruled, how the Law is interpreted, how those laws have been twisted, biased and turned so that the suspects, those accused of heinous and terrible crimes; are given more protection than those they abused. Your ‘right to know’ has been abused, because the authorities wish to quieten the uproar which would have ensued if, in certain high-profile criminal cases featuring Muslim Sex Abuse of White girls, each day’s trial had been reported as the evidence was given, in open court, as has been the practice for, literally, decades. No transcripts of these cases have been released!
I share with Grandpa1940 a concern that in the legal system there are more than adequate protections for offenders and alleged offenders, when compared to the help available to victims of crime. I also do not doubt that there are many both in the state and the voluntary sectors (including the likes of Tell Mama) who would probably love for there to be no publicity for the crimes of their Islamic pets. However the law does not permit that, as will be revealed later. It is also pretty plain that there are elements in government who would like reality to be like their fantasy and Islamic Rape Gangs to be a figment of the far right’s imagination and that they would prefer to avoid uproar over this issue. However the fact remains that there has been reporting of these trials, not as much or in as much detail as some may wish, but there has been reporting within the bounds of the law.
I do admit there is an issue with the space given to these trials and there is the possibility that some elements in the press, especially the local press (whom it is sometimes said have a harder job than national journalists, as they often ‘live on top’ of their stories), may have been leaned on by local or national political elements to tone down the coverage, but this is very difficult if not impossible to prove.
Also, hard to swallow as it may be for some, it’s almost completely economically impossible to assign a journalist to sit in one court all day unless there is a guaranteed earner for doing so. A crown court for example may, if its lucky, have one maybe two agency reporters working there covering a number of cases and only on big high profile trials will the ‘nationals’ turn out to cover the case. Even when the nationals do turn out it will be for keypoints in the trial such as prosecution opening statement, major prosecution witnesses, defence opening and key defence witnesses along with prosecution and defence closing statements and the Judge’s summing up for the jury. The days when the each publication of the national press kept one journalist full time on watch in the major courts is I’m afraid long gone.
We move no now to the issue of court transcripts, the author of this piece, as well as commenting on reporting restrictions, also alleges that no transcripts from major Islamic rape gang cases are available. The author has presented no evidence that in any of the cases concerned had an attempt been made by anyone to acquire (yes I know it’s expensive) official transcripts of these cases, there is just the assertion that there are ‘no transcripts’ available. It would have been helpful if the author could have pointed to examples where there has been a judgement made by a Crown court or higher level judge for the restriction of availability of transcripts. Judges can order the veiling of trial transcripts that are held in private and in some ‘sensitive’ cases, but such hiding of transcripts is not usual and an order to make one would develop some form of paper trail. Below you can find a link to government guidance on the request for court transcripts. Can anyone, whether Grandpa1940 or someone else, provide me with actual evidence that a judicial restriction has been made on an official court transcript of any of the major Islamic Rape Gang cases that are mentioned? If I’m wrong on this then fair do’s but I believe that if there is any restriction on the availability of transcripts then it will be mainly to protect witnesses and victims, not the offenders. I’m an ex-court reporter and every court I’ve ever worked in has had someone taking notes, it used to be by shorthand writers but now the recording of court cases is almost totally electronic. There is always a record of cases both in the civil and criminal courts and it is often publicly available to a greater or lesser degree.
I wonder if the author of this piece bothered to read the report by the Judicial College, complete with a foreword by a former Lord Chief Justice, which outlines all the relevant occasions where there is to be an exception to the principle of public justice in the form of a reporting restriction? It doesn’t seem like that to me.
Whilst like others I would like much more detailed coverage of these Islamic Rape Gangs, there are occasions when a reporting restriction would be morally and legally justified. One important reason would be to protect the integrity of a trial and reduce the possibility that a guilty defendant could have their conviction quashed on the grounds of adverse press coverage. This would obviously apply where there are linked trials and as many of these Islamic Rape Gang cases have a lot of defendants and therefore no reporting can be made on, say case one two or three until the final case, case four, has concluded for example.
Unpleasant as many defendants in criminal cases are, and not just the defendants in sex cases, I’ve covered the cases of some pretty sociopathic fraudsters for instance, I would ask readers to consider what they would want to happen to them, had they been arrested, charged and brought to one of a series of trials on a burglary, fraud or even ‘hate speech’ accusation? Wouldn’t you want your trial, even if it was the second or third of a series of say four trials to be fair? Would you not want your trial to be as fair as it could possibly be and not tainted by sensationalist reporting?
I completely agree with Grandpa1940 that a misplaced worry about ‘racism’ has been a factor in why these cases were not dealt with at the earliest opportunity. It is also likely that some local authorities may well have wanted to play down the issue of Islamic sex crime for electoral politics reasons, ie avoiding local anger over these rape gangs upsetting the political applecart. There are a lot of similarities, as I see it, in how councils like Rotherham have dealt with the Islamic Rape Gang issue, to the Islington child abuse scandal of the 1980/90’s. In that scandal the leader of Islington council Margaret Hodge, now a Labour MP and former minister, failed to take seriously allegations of a paedophile ring operating in that council’s social services department. It has also been claimed that an overemphasis on being politically correct over the issue of gay men and lesbians impeded the council from properly investigating paedophiles, who had exploited Islington’s Equal Opportunities gay-friendly policy, to get jobs in social services there. I think that like the Islington scandal, worries about being PC and the effect that not being PC would have on people’s careers, has played a big part in the long term existence of the Islamic Rape Gangs. If people are looking for where cover-ups or lack of action against Islamic Rape Gangs have happened then rather than look at the judiciary attention should be paid to the councils, mostly Labour ones, where the bulk of this abuse has occurred and the council’s relationship with police forces who are also labouring under the expectations of political correctness.
Grandpa1940 brought up as a comparison the reporting of the Moors Murderers trial and the vehement public reaction to Brady and Hindley, once the notorious Leslie Ann Downey tape had been played to the court. However, those were different times with different rules regarding contempt of court and reporting restrictions. There is also another difference between the Moors Murderers case and today’s Islamic rape gang cases and that is the victims in the Moors case were all dead, there was no further trauma that could be inflicted on them by any publicity. The vast majority of those who are the victims of these Islamic Rape Gangs are alive and identifiable and identifying them may put them through further emotional trauma or also expose them to attack from the relatives of said Islamic Rape Gangs.
Any identification of the victim or victims of sex crime, especially when the victims are under 16 or where the victim of a sex crime who is over 16 but has not specifically waived their right to anonymity, is forbidden. There’s really no way for any reporter to get round this one. The rules regarding identification of victims of sex crime is extremely strict because publicity for a victim may compound the damage that may have been done to them by the initial attack itself. This reporting restriction regarding victims of sex crime (and also regarding the reporting of the identities of the victims of FGM) applies not just to directly naming a victim but also to ‘jigsaw identification’ where naming the victim’s school, workplace or associates could allow identification of the victim themselves. One area that I can see where there would be concern about identifying a particular defendant is if knowledge of who the defendant is, also allowed identification of the victim but this may or may not be relevant in the various Islamic rape gang cases.
Here’s the guidance on Reporting Restrictions which is well worth a read:
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uplods/2015/07/reporting-restrictions-guide-may-2016-2.pdf
In the light of the guidance and in particular the statement that the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992 provides no provision for defendants in sex case trials for anonymity, the author of the alt news media piece may be being a little ‘tin foil hat’ in his claim that there is a blanket restriction on naming the defendants in Islamic Rape Gang Trials. There may of course be discretionary reporting restrictions on defendants, for example in linked trials but no, there is no legal provision for the blanket hiding of defendants’ names in sex crime cases. This passage of the guidance may be helpful for those interested in reporting restrictions:
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
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Reporting Restrictions Guide
3.2 Victims of sexual offences
Victims of a wide range of sexual offences are given lifetime anonymity under the Sexual Offences
(Amendment) Act 1992.
The 1992 Act imposes a lifetime ban on reporting any matter likely to identify the victim of a sexual
offence, from the time that such an allegation has been made and continuing after a person has been charged with the offence and after conclusion of the trial. The prohibition imposed by s.1 applies to “any publication” and therefore includes traditional media as well as online media and individual users of social media websites, who have been prosecuted and convicted under this provision.
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The offences to which the prohibition applies are set out in s.2 of the 1992 Act and include rape,
indecent assault, indecency towards children and the vast majority of other sexual offences.
There is no power under the 1992 Act to restrict the naming of a defendant in a sex case.
Complainants enjoy the protection provided by s.1 of the 1992 Act and it is for the media to form
its own judgment as to whether the naming of a defendant in a sex case would of itself be likely to
identify the victim of the offence.
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The same must be true for witnesses other than victims in sex cases
There has, I admit, been a woeful lack of publicity in the past surrounding the issue of Islamic Rape Gangs but my view is it may well be the media which is to blame for that, rather than the judiciary. It is my belief that there are many, maybe too many, journalists and editors who are taking the National Union of Journalists ethical guidance on not identifying someone’s race or religion if it is not relevant to the story a little too far. I do not dispute that reporting restrictions on Islamic Rape Gang cases where there are linked trials or where there is an danger of victim identification are approved of by those who want to hide the extent of Islamic sex crime, but exploitation of an existing legal instrument, for example reporting restrictions, by such individuals and groups, does not prove any conspiracy of silence.
There is a deficiency in awareness of the problem of Islamic sex crime, of that there is little doubt, but this may be more down to problems with the press than anything else.
There is an argument that maybe Britain should emulate the American court reporting system, where there are very little restrictions on what can be reported from inside the courts. But if we have that, we may also have to tolerate some of the negative things that could come from this system, such as traumatised victims being further traumatised by publicity and guilty people going free because their trials have been compromised by adverse publicity.
We may not like the law regarding reporting restrictions, including the Contempt of Court Act, but at the end of the day, that is the law. We must decide what we want and whether we want effective courts with the minimum amount of restrictions that are necessary to protect both justice and the victims, or do we want our courts to be turned into circuses or pantomimes? I would rather there be completely open reporting but for me the big question is what if such reporting freedom was at the cost of a system where victims ended up being further damaged by publicity and which guilty criminals use adverse publicity as a tactic to evade justice?
The author of the Alt News piece doesn’t seem to be aware that there are a whole host of cases, not just Islamic Rape Gang cases, that are subject to reporting restrictions and these cases are not just in the criminal courts but also the civil courts and even the divorce and family courts (see here and here). This looked to me like a woefully misinformed piece, although a piece that comes from the heart, but it is one which worries me. This is because if we are to beat the death cult of Islam, then the only way we are going to do that effectively is by telling the truth, not just about Islam itself but also about the justice system and not by making wild claims that are very easy for our enemies to debunk.
