Police detective turned rape gangs whistleblower Maggie Oliver has blamed the “institutional cowardice” of Britain’s courts and police forces for the fact that convicted predators are receiving soft sentences and, in many cases, remain at large in their victims’ communities.
The issue of so-called “grooming” gangs, comprised largely of Muslims of Pakistani heritage who targeted mostly white working-class girls and young women, received a fresh flicker of attention in recent days after a leading tabloid published pictures of Rochdale predator Qari Abdul Rauf walking the streets of the city where he preyed on his young victims once again, having served just two and a half years of a six-year sentence, with the Conservative party-led government having failed to deliver on its promises to deport him.
“This week we learned that the betrayal of [rape gang] victims continues,” wrote Oliver in an article for the Daily Mail, noting that “when civic authorities, including the police and courts, succumb to institutional cowardice, inertia, warped priorities and moral collapse in the face of brutish criminality” the ideal etched in stone on the Old Bailey — ‘Protect the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrongdoer’.
“As a criminal with foreign nationality, the judge ordered that [Rauf] be kicked out of the country on his release under current immigration rules, and returned to his native Pakistan… [but] the authorities failed to act, allowing Rauf’s lawyers to cynically deploy human rights regulations to thwart his deportation,” the former policewoman accused.
Victims, she said, “were let down by the state when the grooming first occurred, and they are still being let down by officialdom’s refusal to uphold the law, keep them informed or respect their human rights.
“In sharp contrast, Abdul Rauf’s so-called human rights have been revered by the system — just as he and his other gang members have been lavished with expensive legal aid.”
Oliver further noted that, when it came time to try rape gang predators like Rauf for their crimes, “the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] took the easy route of bringing only limited charges against the defendants; instead of rape they were charged with trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sex,” and that judges — despite “tough talk” — imposed only short sentences, made even shorter by the fact that criminals in Britain are, often unbeknownst to the public, usually entitled to automatic early release on licence halfway through their terms.
Mainstream media has done little to elucidate this situation to the public, and in some respects has helped to create a false picture of how harshy rape gang predators are being punished — for example, by reporting that Telford rape gang ringleader Ahdel ‘Eddie’ Ali had been locked up for 26 years when he was first sentenced.
Technically, the courts had indeed handed him 26 years, but over multiple different sentences for different crimes, which were all the be served concurrently — i.e. at the same time — so that all but the longest were essentially meaningless.
This, combined with the fact that only half of his “custodial” sentences actually had to be served in custody before automatic release on licence, meant he ended up back on the street after just eight years.
Oliver noted that, as rape gang members are not prevented from returning to the communities where they perpetrated their crimes, some victims have now found themselves running into their abusers in public, with police, probation officers, and other officials not even having bothered to inform them of their release.
Oliver noted one incident in which a victim who had been abused from the age of 13 encountered her abuser in a local supermarket, and “fled the shop in hysterics and was immediately on the phone to me. ‘Why is he here? Why is he still in Rochdale?’ she sobbed down the line.
“The only answer is that instead of looking after the victims, the state prefers to safeguard the predators.”