New film: the rape gangs are worse than you think

In a guest post, Dominic Frisby, star of 'The Grooming Gangs Cover-Up', argues that we need to face the unpalatable truth about the scale and horror of these crimes.

Dominic Frisby in The Grooming Gangs Cover-Up

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In a new film, The Grooming Gangs Cover-Up, Dominic Frisby plays Judge Peter Rook, recreating, verbatim, Rook’s sentencing comments from a notorious case in Oxford. The film is produced by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, founders of the Unreported Story Society, which specializes in verbatim dramas, plays and podcasts. The film was released yesterday. You can watch it via YouTube, but be prepared: some of it is horrific. Here, Dominic explains why he took part.

I regard the crimes committed by the Pakistani rape gangs as some of the most barbaric, if not the most barbaric, given the scale of them, ever to have been perpetrated on British soil.

Yet, while I knew they were bad, I don’t think I realized quite how bad they are.

I’ve just finished playing a judge - Judge Peter Rook - in a new ‘verbatim film’, which recreates the sentencing, word for word, of one of the most notorious grooming cases in Oxford. What went on is horrifying. At times, I could not believe the words that were coming out of my mouth.

The beauty of these verbatim dramas is that the creators cannot be accused of sensationalism or exaggeration. It is the truth. That is what needs to come out. We have to learn about what has happened if only to motivate ourselves and, more importantly, our leaders into doing something about this.

I’ve since learned that this abuse has been going on since the arrival of these people in the 1950s. It was the way that the authorities repeatedly turned a blind eye that enabled it to grow to industrial scale.

I remember telling my elder son and daughter about these rape gangs back in the mid-2010s. Neither believed such a thing was possible. My son started googling. Even on the internet, there was little evidence of what was going on. Rapists are predominantly white, he concluded, and that was that in their minds.

The internet had smothered the story.

In 2020, when everybody was squabbling over Brexit, there was this campaign to get the Remainer anthem - Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, conducted by André Rieu - to the top of the charts in time for the day we left. Fighting a rearguard action, Leavers then tried to get my song about Brexit, ‘17 Million F*ck Offs’, to Number 1. The result is that quite a few singles got sold. The media loved the story, and it was all over the papers. But there is one thing they left out: that I donated the proceeds to the Maggie Oliver Foundation, a charity set up to help the victims of rape gangs. Even that got covered up. (I don’t know what Rieu did with his royalties.)

Midjourney, an AI art app which I use to illustrate my articles, refuses to design me a picture to illustrate a piece I had written about the film.

And this is not some past disaster: the abuse is still going on today.

The Jay Report claims that 1,400 children (that’s just the under-age victims) were sexually exploited in Rotherham over 16 years. If you extrapolate that number over 50 other towns and cities, you arrive at roughly 70,000 victims. That is a conservative estimate. You can do similar extrapolations and come to a figure of a million. The likelihood is 250,000-500,000, given that we are talking about a period longer than 16 years and it has been happening in more than 50 locations. Kids!

We need truth, even if it is unpalatable, if we are to stop things like this happening now or ever again.

Dominic Frisby writes The Flying Frisby. Subscribe here.