Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time), please join us for a special guest-hosted Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Mark himself is currently in Lisbon on the 2025 Mark Steyn Iberian Cruise.
Today's shipboard edition of The Mark Steyn Show featured two indomitable survivors of England's paedophile rape scourge, Sammy Woodhouse and Samantha Smith, and one of the few UK columnists to address the issue, Allison Pearson.
In the course of the show, Mark mentioned a young American woman currently on trial in Germany for resisting her Eritrean rapist. Lara Logan puts her pushback in perspective:
I was gang raped by a mob of about 200 men while on assignment for 60 Minutes in Egypt. I would have stabbed any of them to make it stop. https://t.co/TXmVIgLb5Q
— Lara Logan (@laralogan) April 7, 2025
Although it was covered here at SteynOnline, Miss Logan's story was buried by her own colleagues at CBS News - because it was not helpful to the narrative. And so it has gone for hundreds of thousands of raped girls across England - for whom industrial-scale assault and torture is a small price to pay for the "strength" of diversity.
UPDATE! Barely had we wrapped the show than there was breaking news from the disgusting UK government:
BREAKING: Labour will no longer be holding five local inquiries into rape gangs. The £5 million will now go towards "locally-led work," following feedback from local authorities.
Are you surprised?
Of course not.
Our government is weak, pathetic, and an embarrassment to the...
— Sammy Woodhouse (@officialsammyuk) April 8, 2025
The cover-up is ever more brazen:
I did a panel on brilliant @MarkSteynOnline Show,
— Allison Pearson (@AllisonPearson) April 8, 2025
Two amazing young women, survivors of child rape gangs, spoke @officialsammyuk @SamanthaTaghoy
Unbelievably, hours later, we learn Labour has abandoned any inquiries into that national shame.
Karma is coming for @Keir_Starmer... https://t.co/IohFTc68KY
Over on the "other side", this story is an inconvenience:
Nigel Farage does not speak for me.
Nigel Farage did not "fight" for me, or the thousands of little girls systematically raped, abused and killed across the UK while those in power turned a blind eye.
He didn't care until it became politically convenient for him. pic.twitter.com/XQdvEQTs6Y
— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) April 6, 2025
That picture is of Samantha at the age her ordeal began.
Not so long ago, Sammy Woodhouse's home town of Rotherham was supposed to be a one-off. Then, one by one towns up and down the land were revealed to be suffering from the same pathology. Here is what I wrote seven years ago when Samantha Smith's home town of Telford joined England's sick pantheon - and it became clear that an entire nation had accepted that its women are simply meat to be preyed upon:
~Eight days ago The Sunday Mirror reported on "Britain's 'worst ever' child grooming scandal". The headline editor's sub-quotes are most prudent: This is the "worst ever" at the time of writing, but who knows what'll come along next week? This time it's the Shropshire town of Telford:
Hundreds of young girls raped, beaten, sold for sex and some even KILLED
If you're saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Telford? Surely you mean Rotherham? Or Rochdale? Or Oxford? Or [Your Town Here]?", well, yes, this story reads (especially for yours truly, who spent several days with the poor damaged young 'uns of Rotherham) with a certain numbing familiarity:
"Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men.
"The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.
"Days later, the ringleader turned up at my house and told me he'd burn it down if I breathed a word of what had happened."
As in Rotherham and everywhere else, all this was happening in plain sight. The Spectator's Douglas Murray:
Every arm of the state – including council staff, social workers and the police – allowed the mass gang-rape of children to go on in their town. And we learn – once again – how fear of accusations of 'racism' meant that the identities of the culprits were hidden and cases were not investigated.
Because, as in Rotherham, it was white working-class girls being gang-raped by "Asian" men - "Asian" being the coy euphemism for Muslim males of Pakistani origin, notwithstanding that it's immensely insulting to Indian Hindus, Sri Lankans, Chinese, etc. When Douglas indicts the various "arms of the state", we should also add the politicians - Labour and Tory - for whom these stories are not helpful to the multiculti narrative. Which is why, in the week of Telford, they chose to ban and deport more explicit threats to public order and social tranquility such as, er, Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone.
But, as Douglas notes, we should also indict another arm of the state - the dominant national broadcaster. The BBC was so panicked by the mass sex-slavery of Shropshire children by Pakistani men that, as the German media did after the Cologne assaults, they chose not to cover it at all. It wasn't on the BBC News homepage, or the BBC England homepage, or even the BBC Shropshire homepage - although in fairness, after 36 hours of negative online comments, someone from BBC Radio Shropshire managed to file a report on the subject that you'd be forgiven for not spotting because it got less prominence than a compilation called "My Telford", the usual bit of feelgood community boosterism.
When the child-sex crimes of lifelong BBC presenter Jimmy Savile were posthumously exposed, Commander Spindler of the Metropolitan Police piously announced:
Jimmy Savile groomed a nation.
But Savile's old enablers at the Beeb and Spindler's colleagues in the British constabulary are also grooming a nation. They're grooming Britons to accept that the serial mass gang-rape of English girls is just a social phenomenon, part of the natural order - regrettable perhaps, but nothing to be done about it; and thus the mountain of human debris is merely a small price to pay for the benefits of vibrant diversity. Which means the real problem is these ghastly types boorish enough to draw attention to the sacrifice of English maidenhood to the volcano gods of multiculturalism. By contrast, the BBC knows that the proper response is a brief story on Radio Shropshire followed by Part 457 of the "My Telford" diversity fairytale.
As I told Mark Steyn Club members last year of my meeting with the victims of Rotherham:
To Mad Ash and his fellow 'Asians', the likes of Jessica and Katie are 'white slags'. To Her Majesty's Constabulary, they're mere 'Paki-shaggers', and thus unworthy of valuable police resources. The girls recall the night Mad Ash's brother Bannaras was in his car having sex with a twelve-year-old. A 'jam sandwich' - a police cruiser - pulled up alongside, and the officer rolled down the window. 'She's just sucking my c**k, mate,' said Bannaras Hussain.
The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.
Jessica kept a detailed diary of what had happened to her. She took it to the cops. It 'disappeared'. There was an officer who died in an 'accident'. The air quotes are Katie's. Rotherham is a land of coincidence. 'Some of these things can happen, but not all of them, not in one town.'
And not all the same coincidences, all the same rationalisations, the same write-offs of "Paki-shaggers" and "white slags", in town after town after town. And the same insistence by authorities that this time they've learned their lesson, and it won't happen again. Until the next time, in the next town, in Yorkshire, in Lancashire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire...
And still the police and the social workers and the politicians and the media roll up their windows and drive away.
Oh, they can get worked up over ancient disc-jockeys who copped a feel on "Top of the Pops" in 1973 and thereby committed what the illiterate coppers call "historic" sexual abuse. But, in the face of truly "historic", truly unprecedented sexual abuse of thousands of English girls day in, day out, year after year, all they can manage is a fatalistic shrug. "Cuckolds" in the contemporary sense is a good word for the British state's attitude to what's happening. So is "wittols", the 16th century neologism for those who are aware that they're being cuckolded and go along with it. It seems reasonable to assume that the mass sexual exploitation of young girls is occurring in every English town with even a modest (as in Rotherham) "Asian" population, boundlessly cocksure and assertive, and a feeble British officialdom too cowed and appeasing to resist. The real word for what is happening is evil - for a society that will not defend its youngest and most vulnerable girls is surely capable of rationalizing many more wicked accommodations in the years ahead.
To channel Chaucer, British officialdom in Shropshire and elsewhere does not "demen of myself that I were" a cokewold - believe itself to be a cuckold; it simply accepts that, with all these different cultural traditions, a town shal nat been inquisityf of where its daughters are every night. A prudent sensitive man confines himself to celebrating diversity, and of all those complicating factors he nedeth nat enquere.
What happened in Telford is shameful; when a nation declines to be ashamed, that is far worse, and very telling.
~from SteynOnline, March 19th 2018