Image courtesy of Freepik.com
Content Note: This article includes details of experiences of rape and abuse. There is a list of resources at the end if you need help or support with any of the issues raised here.
The nightmares are bad at the moment. It’s never an exact replay. Just an unwanted touch here. A smell there. A face leering out of the darkness between dreams. Never the same and yet each time I jolt awake into the dead of night, clawing for breath as my eyes adjust to the gloom of our bedroom. I lie back down, repeat to myself over and over ‘you’re ok, you’re ok’ as my heart pounds in my chest. It’s so loud I fear it might wake my boyfriend up as he sleeps next to me. Sometimes its minutes, other times its hours before I finally drift back off to face them again.
It’s always worse at night. In your sleep the walls and barriers you build around the part of yourself where they, and what they did to you, live forever cease to exist. They are free to walk through your nocturnal world, unabashed. Popping up to take you back through the years you’ve worked so hard to put between you.
It’s when they break through in the day that I know it’s really getting bad. The other day, as I ran around the marshes close to where I live, I could have sworn I saw him. The man who raped me when I was a teenager was there, hundreds of miles from his last known location, casually walking his dog. Ice filled my veins as I did a double take. His face dissolved, replaced by a different one I’d never seen before. I sprinted away, running until I was sick.
Later in the week, I jumped on the train back from town. As I walked up the carriage I stopped dead as the face of the man who beat me as a child stared back at me for a second before melting away into the features of a stranger. I quickly found a seat and sat clutching my knees and breathing in and out, in and out, the whole way back.
It is a phenomenon that is far from unique to me. Friends that I know have been through similar experiences have expressed similar difficulties in the last few days and weeks as the subject of abuse has been plastered across newspapers, news bulletins and timelines.
This latest furore was started when the world’s most divorced man Elon Musk took to Twitter on the first day of the year to berate Minister for Children and Safeguarding Jess Phillips’ decision to decline to order a national inquiry into grooming gangs in Oldham. Phillips responded by stating that the inquiry was a matter for the local council which prompted billionaire Musk to assert the MP for Birmingham Yardley “should be in prison” whilst accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to deal with grooming gangs whilst he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
Musk’s intervention thrust the heinous, awful abuse faced by young girls in Rochdale, and indeed in other parts of the country, back into the news. Just a day later, on the 2nd January, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch jumped on the bandwagon and called for a ‘full national inquiry’ into ‘rape gangs’. It was a demand echoed by her political rival Reform leader Nigel Farage who, until he was unceremoniously and very publicly dumped by Musk, had been angling for a sizable donation from the Trump advisor. On January 5th, Farage did the media rounds, echoing Badenoch’s call for a full national inquiry.
The days that have followed have been unrelenting. The far right have jumped on the issue, labelling anyone who does not back the calls for a national inquiry as paedophile enablers. Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and former Conservative party leadership contender Robert Jenrick stated on Twitter that ‘The scandal started with the onset of mass migration… importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women’. Roger Gale stood up in the house and started loosely throwing mud at Keir Starmer over allegations that have arisen about the conduct of the now deceased owner of Harrods Mohammed Al Fayed.
It is clear, to anyone with an ounce of sense, what is happening. The awful, unconscionable abuse suffered by young girls in Rochdale is being used as a wedge issue by opposition parties and more broadly across the right to score political points against a floundering Labour Government. In his widely denounced comments Jenrick said the quiet part out loud by trying to link the increasingly toxic debate around immigration to the unspeakable horrors experienced by thousands of children.
A casual search of both Badenoch and Jenrick’s Hansard records shows they did not raise the issue of grooming gangs, Rochdale, or inquiries into what happened in Parliament at any point previous to this latest round of discussion. Not once in their years in Government did either of the Conservative politicians speak up before it became politically expedient to them to do so.
Whilst Reform MPs do not have a record of governance, or indeed presence in Parliament in any material way, to be judged on the manifesto which saw 5 of them elected just 7 months ago does not once include mention of the need for a national inquiry. Let us also not forget how many times Reform Leader Nigel Farage has made it known that he is friends with President-elect Donald Trump, a man who not only was caught on camera talking about ‘grabbing pussies’ but has been subject to a ruling by a New York court that a claim that he raped someone was ‘substantially true’.
Earlier this week, on Wednesday, despite their bitter feud, Reform teamed up with the Conservatives to back the latter’s amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill which demanded a national inquiry into grooming gangs. Whilst much has been made of the failure of the amendment with push notifications and wall to wall headlines reporting on the vote, accompanied by accusations of ‘nonce defending’ bandied around on the internet what seems to have been lost is that Badenoch’s amendment was a so-called wrecking amendment. This means, had it passed, it would have killed the entire bill which includes within it measures to protect vulnerable children, such as tougher rules around home-schooling and support for those in care, inspections of schools, changes to academies, and regulation of private education institutions. It is clearly nonsense to claim one is fighting for the protection of children whilst aiming to stop what Schools minister Bridget Phillipson referred to as “the single biggest piece of children safeguarding legislation in a generation”.
Badenoch’s spokesperson stated that she has not met any victims of child sexual abuse, and has no current plans to, suggesting that she ‘doesn’t need to because she’s read all about the scandal in the media and reports’ (presumably from the 7 year long inquiry which already took place). This one little detail, I think perhaps more than any other, exemplifies the reality of what we’re experiencing right now.
Badenoch, Jenrick, Farage, Musk and everyone else who has jumped on the “hard right campaign to weaponise child sexual abuse and exploitation for political gain” as Green MP Ellie Chowns put it, are viewing these people, these children and adults purely in the abstract.
Why bother meeting anyone affected? Doing so would mean those who have spent the last two weeks engaging in a, frankly, disgraceful level of mudslinging, maneuvering and opportunism might have to consider the very real possibility that they have been doing so at the expense of real life human beings at the centre of this who continue to struggle to come to terms with what happened to them.
The Labour party, it should be said, also does not walk away from this scott free. Back in 2023 the party released disgusting adverts claiming then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not support the jailing of child abusers. The Conservatives repaid the favour this week by releasing their own version of the graphic on Twitter before then upping the ante to produce individual graphics for each of the 319 Labour MPs who did not vote for their wrecking amendment.
Zoom out and it’s a pattern we see repeated over and over again through our politics. The so called ‘debate’ on Trans rights regularly sees the rape of women and girls used as a club with which to hit Trans people with.The, more often than not hypothetical, cis woman rape survivor forced to endure the horror of being in the same space as a Trans woman is wheeled out time and time again without any regard for the realities of what that woman has been through. Without any thought or care put behind what that experience, and the brutal truth of having to reckon with it, feels like for that woman (and that of course before even considering the realities of life for Trans women in Britain in 2025).
Time and time again we see the worst day(s) of people's lives used by politicians of all stripes to one up each other. 1 in 5 people in this country will experience abuse in their lifetime. 1 in 4 women have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16 whilst for men that number is 1 in 18. 1 in 6 children have been sexually assaulted. We are talking about millions and millions of people.
Whilst most of them, like me, have not known the horrors of being groomed by a gang, we, each one of those millions of people, carry with us our own story, our own horrors. They are horrors many of us are forced to relive, over and over and over again, in big or small ways as politicians utilise that pain for their own political gain. Politics must be about getting involved in sticky issues. In the issues that affect people sometimes in awful, horrible ways. But the responsibility of our politicians must be to hold those at the centre of those conversations in their minds and to treat them, their experiences and their ongoing struggles with reckoning with what has happened to them with dignity.
This week in Parliament, Labour MP for Nottingham East Nadia Whittome was shouted down by Tory and Reform MPs as she spoke about the realities of child sexual abuse. She posted on Twitter that she would continue to advocate for victims and survivors. It’s a position that many in Parliament would do well to consider, remember and put into practice going forward. Justice for those who have suffered some of the most monstrous abuse imaginable will not come from those elected to serve the people of this country, commodifying experiences for a quick bump in the polls. It will not come via the medium of wrecking amendments, ad hominem attacks or grubby ads. Justice looks like holding those responsible to account, it looks like centring the voices and needs of those affected and investing in the services, networks and support so desperately needed to help people and stop this from ever happening again.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in the piece, you do not have to suffer alone.
NSPCC Helpline: Call 0808 800 5000 or email help@nspcc.org.uk for free, confidential advice and support
For the freephone 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline call 0808 2000 247
And for men, boys and non binary people who have experienced abuse, Survivors UK run a national online helpline
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