Yorkshire-born, George attended Oxford University and the University of Pennsylvania, before beginning her writing career with an internship at the Nation magazine in 1994. Since 1999 she has been living in London and freelancing for a wide range of publications.
In 2003, the Guardian published George’s shocking account of the growing incidence of gang rape on France’s most deprived estates. The following article, written a year later, uncovered the grim reality that this behaviour is far from unique to France, being equally prevalent in London’s most deprived enclaves.
Tamika Bravo is eating spare ribs in an east London noodle bar. She’s 19 years old and has a one-year-old son. She’s talking about gang rapes. ‘They happen all the time, man. You hear about them in school – girls who went with a boy and his mate, who went with five boys. It’s so common.’
A year and a half ago, Tamika was at a friend’s house. Her friend liked to hang out with boys. There were five there that afternoon, and Tamika didn’t like it. ‘I have to know who I’m hanging out with. You can never be too safe, can you?’ Tamika went home and phoned her friend an hour later. ‘She was crying so hard, and she was dying to get out of her house, but she wouldn’t talk about it over the phone. I thought okaaay, and I guessed what had happened, and when she came over, she told me what they’d done.’
What the five boys had done to this one girl was nothing unusual. What the girl did, or rather didn’t do, was not unusual, either. ‘What could she do, man? She was scared,’ says Tamika. ‘You know that if you talk about it, they can do it again. If they want you to be quiet, that’s all you gotta do, just bite your tongue and continue. It’s a sad thing but it’s reality. Hard reality.’
In a north London McDonald’s, I meet Kelly. She’s 17 and originally from Jamaica, where she was gang raped when she was 13. ‘It was lunchtime,’ she says, hardly audible and ripping a bus ticket into tiny pieces. ‘I was with three of my girlfriends: we’d gone home to change clothes.’ Five boys came to her door and said they wanted to ‘batter’ – have sex with – one of Kelly’s friends. ‘I couldn’t allow that, so I slammed the door. They kicked it in and beat me unconscious. My friends ran away.’ When she woke up, it was obvious she’d been raped. ‘I went to the hospital and got a report of my injuries and told the police. But I don’t know what they did about it.’
She came to the UK later that year to live with her father in London, and she’s heard that one of the rapists is here now, too. That’s not her biggest worry any more: in July 2002, she was out with a friend in Hackney, east London, when two men with a gun abducted them and drove them to Southampton. They made the girls sell drugs for them, until 2.30a.m., when Kelly got a shopkeeper to call the police. ‘They didn’t rape us.’ she says quietly. But they could have. She’s getting counselling now, for the rape and the abduction, and she’s stopped banging her head against the wall. ‘I was thinking about it all the time, and I just wanted to get rid of it.’But where she lives, she can’t get away from it, not really. ‘I hear of other girls it’s happening to, all the time. In school, when people would joke about it. I’d get mad and walk away. Finally I told my friend and she said I wasn’t alone, that lots of girls get raped. But every time I hear about one, I get flashbacks.’
A year ago, I wrote an article in Guardian Weekend about gang rapes, tournantes, in France. In interviews, I confidently told people that nothing similar was happening in the UK. I was wrong. Last year, the following allegations were reported in the press: the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in Bedford by four men aged 17–19 (the police decided not to proceed); the rape of a 12-year-old girl by four teenagers in Feltham (all were acquitted); the rape of an 18-year-old by three paratroopers who, it was said, recorded the incident on their mobile phones (no charges were brought). A group of young men in Greenwich filmed their ‘rape’ of a 15-year-old schoolgirl and entitled the video Lethbridge X-rated Part One (they pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse).
This year, the Old Bailey heard the case of seven men accused of raping an 18-year-old at gunpoint ‘as a punishment’. The girl said she had been kept prisoner in a flat in Sudbury, Suffolk, where one man told her, ‘If you want to go home, you have to do me and my friends.’ After two trials (the first was thrown out for legal reasons) lasting eight weeks, the jury decided the girl wasn’t telling the truth, despite the evidence of an electricity bill that proved the address of the flat.
In December last year, in a modern courtroom in the Old Bailey, a gang rape trial is being played out before a press bench containing one journalist. Me. The nation’s media are filling a nearby court to hear a particularly scandalous murder case, but, in the words of a senior police officer, ‘nobody gives a toss about gang rape’. The case concerns a winter night two years ago, when the two girls and the three accused boys were together in a London park.
‘Emma,’ now 16, is the first to testify. She gives her evidence via a TV link, as does her best friend, ‘Lucy’. Because of the seriousness of the offence, juvenile rape cases are tried in adult court where attempts at informality are made, sometimes with unfortunate consequences. It’s hard to take seriously a courtroom that allows a juror to wear an FCUK sweatshirt in a rape case. Or a judge who consistently gets Lucy’s name wrong, and thinks it’s civilised to give the jury the afternoon off, because a juror wants to go to a nativity play. The prosecuting barrister gets the girls mixed up – he’s never met them before, because they have the status only of witnesses in their own case (the Crown is officially the wronged party). This may contribute to the appalling conviction rate of between 6% and 7% for rape (the introduction of specialist rape prosecutors, who are involved in the case all the way through, raised conviction rates in one New York borough to more than 80%).
The boys in the dock, though, are all formality. They sit impassively, three little heads close together, dressed to impress. They’re boys, not men.
Emma: ‘We were on the bus. Others got on the bus, and they started threatening us and calling us names. We got off the bus and they chased us. We ran into a cafe and hid there for half an hour. They said, ‘Come out, we’re not going to do anything.’ The people in the cafe said, ‘They won’t do anything’ and after about 10 minutes, they said, ‘Sorry, you have to go.’ They took us into a park. They made us have sex. After it happened, they took us into a block [of flats] and wouldn’t let us go.’
Emma did not report the incident until 10 months later. Any CCTV evidence has long been destroyed, as have any forensics. There is little evidence to go on, so it comes down to what it usually comes down to in rape cases: words against words.
Emma’s words do her no favours in the moral universe of the courtroom. She is feisty. She answers back. Easy for barristers to categorise as disrespectful. Lucy is sweeter, prettier and more distressed, but no match for the apparently polite, well-brought-up boys. They pepper their testimony with ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’. They have good character records, bolstered by teachers and youth workers. They say it never happened. But their strongest defence lies in most people’s perception of rape: that it’s either made up, or it involves a stranger with a knife. Nice boys don’t gang rape. Except they do, mostly with impunity. ‘Group rape is a black hole,’ said one senior London policeman I spoke to. ‘It’s a parallel universe where that kind of thing has become a way of living, and that’s why it continues.’
Emma: ‘He was trying to undo my trousers and I’d zip them back up. I wasn’t having it. He just pulled them down. I can’t really explain it. It was the threats, all the threats. He knows a lot of people and he’ll do what he says he’ll do. We was having sex and obviously I didn’t want to do it and he had the cheek to say, ‘Do you want me to stop?’ The thing is, they don’t see it as rape, as us being forced. They just see it as pleasure for them. Us, we’re slags.’
Outside court one morning, a barrister’s pupil pulls me aside. ‘Why are you interested in this case? Is it because they’re so young?’ I don’t tell her a 17-year-old defendant is old, as gang rapists go. There have been 13- and 14-year-olds. In 2002 in Croydon, five boys aged 11 and 12 were said to have raped a 10-year-old girl on her way home from school. One boy had been watching 10-minute free porn previews, according to a police officer, and copied what he saw.
The Metropolitan police are worried – enough to examine the statistics on 123 incidents in three London boroughs, involving over 900 assailants (including four gang rapes around the same school). Enough for Sapphire, the Met’s three-year-old specialist rape unit, to recognise gang rape as a separate phenomenon, needing specific attention. Enough for a senior officer, Commander John Yates, tipped as a future commissioner, to speak on behalf of the Met on the issue. There has been a decrease in group rape reports, he tells me; nevertheless Met officers visited France late last year to compare notes.
I doubt his figures, and so does everyone I talk to. ‘Gang rape is really common,’ says a youth worker in Hackney. ‘Girls won’t talk about it because they think it’s normal and there’s nothing they can do about it.’ Met commander Andy Baker, who used to be in charge of street crime, says, ‘It’s been going on for years. Before I was a policeman, I’d see boys coming out of a shed and a girl following later. Now, I’d know what that was, and so would you.’
‘It’s a taboo,’ says Bernadette Brittain, counsellor at the Haven, London’s first dedicated sexual assault referral centre. ‘It’s grim and it’s not talked about.’
There is virtually no research on gang rapes in the UK. In the US, some work has been done on gang rapes by sportsmen and fraternity members. In 1985, a report entitled Campus Gang Rape: Party Games? – released by the Project on the Status of Education of Women – calculated that at least one gang rape per week took place on campuses. ‘Fraternities are sporting clubs,’ a professor was quoted as saying, ‘and their sport is women.’ Over here, the best data comes from the Haven, which was set up in mid-2000.
The Haven’s database has collected details from 2,000 clients from in and around London. It doesn’t make for optimistic reading. Among victims aged under 16 who visited in 2001 and 2002, 25% had had multiple assailants, compared with 13% among over-16-year-olds. Kids raping kids. The figures show a rise in gang rapes by a third between 2001 and 2002. ‘We recorded 206 in two years,’ says Peter Trail, an epidemiologist with the Health Protection Agency charged with collating the Haven’s statistics. ‘A lot of people in the field are angry about this, but they won’t speak.’
I lose count of how many government agencies, schools and official establishments refuse to comment for this story. They say the same thing. ‘Sorry. It’s too sensitive.’
The added element in this is ethnicity,’ says Trail. The Haven’s statistics indicate that, in 2002, in the under-16 age group, 43% of the assailants were black, as were 33% of the victims. Even in an ethnically diverse population such as Lambeth-Southwark-Lewisham (LSL), this goes beyond demographics. It is controversial. When a documentary on juvenile gang rape was broadcast by Channel 4 in 1998, the channel was accused of racism. Trinidad-born writer Darcus Howe was a lone voice of support. Later, writing in the New Statesman, he recounted how his girlfriend Betty was gang raped for hours in Trinidad, and how – after he spoke out in support of the documentary – he got anonymous phone calls saying his daughter would get gang raped, too.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Trail says, ‘this isn’t about race, it’s about rape.’ He points to high numbers of sexually transmitted diseases in LSL, which also has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe – problems that were also hampered by a refusal to look at the racial demographics, in the beginning. ‘My line is lean, mean and clear,’ Howe concluded, in the ‘New Statesman. ‘I take a side in this war, the side of black women . . . There is nothing to discuss.’
There is much to discuss, but it takes courage. A Met press release from last year – which stated that black women are three times more likely than others to be raped, and black males aged between 10 and 17 are eight and a half times more likely to be charged with rape – was never released. And there has been little sign of the ‘debate in the black community’ promised by Ken Livingstone’s race adviser, Lee Jasper (who was not available for comment).
The Commission for Racial Equality was hardly more forthcoming. ‘We need more data and we need to know it is being collected in a robust and methodologically sound way,’ a spokesman told me. ‘If there is a problem, we need to know who is involved and who the victims are. We are also concerned that low levels of confidence in the police might mean that young ethnic minority women are less likely than other victims to report attacks.’
The majority of rapes are committed by adults at home, according to Women Against Rape. But young girls are being gang raped by young men or boys, who are – in reported cases – often black. Why? ‘It’s very difficult to explain things away with cultural factors,’ says Peter Misch, a forensic psychiatrist specialising in adolescents at London’s Maudsley hospital. He recalls visiting a young offenders’ institute in Siberia in 1993, where each of the 20 offenders aged 14–16 was in for group rape. Camila Batmanghelidjh, who runs the children’s charity Kids Company in Peckham, south-east London, thinks gang rapes go in clusters. ‘It’s not about race. You have to ask – is it because the black community is the most marginalised and pressurised, and does that lead to emotional consequences?’ She prefers to concentrate on the state of mind of most boys she works with. She calls it ‘emotional coldness’.
Poverty causes stress, which might contribute to emotional coldness. Add a macho culture and you might end up with a gang rape. Or not. No one has a simple explanation for why gang rapes happen, or why a third of all sex crimes are now committed by under-21-year-olds, according to recent Home Office figures.
‘Some of the boys are pretty normal,’ says Barry O’Hagan, who works with Misch on Southwark’s Stop (Support, Treatment, Opportunity, Partnership) project for young sex offenders. ‘That’s pretty scary, but that’s not what people want to hear.’ In one notorious gang rape, the group played basketball together. They weren’t a ‘gang’ in the street-gang sense of the word. For one of the boys, ‘it was totally out of character,’ O’Hagan says. ‘He knew it was out of order, but in a group situation, it was just what happened. Groups are very powerful.’
The leader of the group might be antisocial or psychopathic, Misch says. ‘They might think it’s OK. Some boys are sadistic, some are altruistic.’ He pauses. ‘It’s very complex. I’ve noticed that when a group of boys assault a girl, sometimes some boys want to help her afterwards. They somehow perceive there’s something wrong. They’ll help her put her clothes back on or something. They’ll give her her bus fare. There is genuine altruism, which might be interpreted as an awareness that a crime has been committed (contrition), or a lack of awareness (the boy helps her because he thinks what has happened was in the context of a consensual relationship, however brief).’ The almost standard use of condoms is equally open to interpretation. Misch thinks it’s about self-preservation. ‘Sometimes they use plastic bags. Whatever they can. It’s about not leaving their DNA, not being caught.’
Cross-examination: ‘Did they use condoms?’
Lucy: ‘That’s what I thought was weird. Usually when you hear about things like that, they look like boys who don’t care about stuff like that. But I heard them opening a packet of condoms.’
One of the defence barristers, subsequently: ‘My client apparently used a condom. You may think this is very sensible in one view and very polite in another. Two young people in a park and the boy is forcing himself on a girl who is not willing and he puts on a condom. That’s not an easy task in a comfortable consensual setting, but in the cold in the park, and his victim doesn’t run off – does that sound like rape to you?’
It sounds like rape to me. It sounds like rape to all the young women I talk to. ‘Of course she’d get on a bus with her rapist afterwards,’ says Tamika. ‘She’s scared, isn’t she?’ She tuts scornfully. ‘These people need to get out and see what’s happening in deep society.’
Patterns of behaviour recur. I mention certain scenarios from tournante cases to Baker at the Met. ‘Have you come across boys sending text messages to get their mates to come along?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Making home-made porn?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Boyfriend handing girlfriend over to friends?’Yes. Déjà vu.
Most of this is inconceivable to most people, and that is why juries usually acquit. In the courtroom, as the prosecution barrister attempts to explain what ‘wok it’ has come to mean to kids (have sex, from the Jamaican slang ‘work it’), and as the judge attempts to speak street, with every ‘yeah’ coming out as a ‘yah’, I am struck by the futility of it all. It is two worlds colliding. Outside the courtroom one morning, a solicitor on the defence bench says, ‘I don’t think it was a gang rape. They knew the boys. They always do.’
Most girls in gang rape situations know at least one of their attackers. Sometimes it’s their boyfriend who hands them over, with sexual blackmail. ‘If you don’t go with my mates, I won’t go out with you any more.’ Sometimes it’s the straitjacket of reputation. ‘You get one person who says, “She gives head” or whatever,’ says Tamika, ‘and then every man wants it. It gets out of proportion.’Add to that high levels of alcohol consumption and drugs. ‘You can build a picture,’ Trail says. ‘There’s a bit of drinking, a bit of drug-taking, and at some point it turns into a rape.’
This is the reason the Met prefers the term ‘group rape’. ‘Gang sounds like marauders,’ Yates says. ‘This kind of offending is more subtle than that.’
I prefer the Australian term ‘pack rape’, because its predatory tinge is most accurate. The boys themselves, depending on where they’re from, have a choice of terminology – line-up, pulling train, party rape. All cosy euphemisms for an activity that is twice as likely as single assailant rape to include debasing activities such as forced fellatio, biting, the use of implements and semen or excrement.
Lucy: ‘There were two girls, C and T, who had rushed me at school. [That night in the park] They [the boys] said, “Oh, you know what, C and T live just up there, we can call them, we’ll get them to bring knives and they’re just going to come and kill you in the park. You’re not going to get home alive unless you do that.” He said, “It’s so easy, you can do something with us, or you can never see your mum again. Take off your shoes and tights and get down on the floor.’’ ’
In some cases, such as an episode in Southend, the group of boys made an effort to charm the girls beforehand. ‘The three girls had been a bit naughty,’ someone involved in the case tells me. ‘They’d told their parents they were going to the cinema. They’d drunk a litre bottle of wine between them, which the defence of course made a meal of.’ They met a group of teenagers, aged from 11–17, and including two girls, who were down from east London. The girls were flattered to get the lads’ attention, until ‘they thought it was getting too heavy. They regrouped in a public toilet, but when they came out they were corralled across the road to the beach.’ The allegations were that one girl was raped twice, another once, and the third sexually assaulted. It seemed like a strong case: there was DNA evidence in the condoms, there was CCTV evidence, the girls had reported it immediately, and the youths from the gang voluntarily turned themselves in, though without admitting guilt.
The first trial collapsed on a technicality. The second was thrown out when one witness discussed a minor detail – about a soft toy – with another (witnesses cannot discuss the case with each other). It might seem innocuous, but the judge had no choice but to dismiss the case. It can’t be tried again. The girls were devastated, and in a letter to the investigation team, their parents thanked the police, and said they’d never again have any faith in the criminal justice system.
I don’t have much, either. A dismal number of gang rape cases get to court; an even more dismal number result in convictions. One of the few that did – three young men were given six-year sentences this year for befriending and raping 13-year-old girls in llford shopping centres – inspired Judge Henry Blacksell to comment, ‘This might be normal behaviour in llford, but the girls still need protection.’
Is it normal behaviour? According to official FBI profiling, ‘Participants in a gang rape are generally driven by group motivations: camaraderie and competition, sustaining an image, sharing an experience with one’s ‘buddies’, loyalty, and adopting and demonstrating a group identity and values.’ This is why all-male environments, such as sports clubs, football teams, fraternities and the army, throw up a high proportion of group rape cases.
But so do our cities. LSL has a youthful population in a densely inhabited urban environment where it’s easy to meet people and where boredom, listlessness and the stress of poverty are not uncommon. ‘There is a chain of brutality,’Batmanghelidjh says. ‘You have children who were brutalised when they were very young. I don’t mean that as an excuse. They know what moral values are, but they don’t have a belief system. If there’s no quality contact between mother and baby, subtle areas of the brain don’t develop, like empathy or any emotional repertoire.’
‘Ha!’ says a Harlesden youth worker when I tell him this. ‘They just think it’s fun, innit!’ He’d begun by talking about black history, and went on to be fiercely critical of the black present. ‘You’re going to get called racist when you write this,’ he says gloomily, ‘because that’s easier than talking about it. But it can only happen if their peers welcome it. Families defend their sons, but they’re wrong and strong. Half the dads aren’t there to tell them it’s wrong to violate a woman. The kids don’t have older role models. They don’t have morals.’
One boy being treated in the Stop programme, involved in a notorious gang rape, never once, throughout months of therapy, changed his story that the woman had consented. ‘He accepted responsibility for every other area of his life,’ O’Hagan says, ‘but not that. It was very striking.’
Experts will say it’s simplistic to seek clues in pornography, but there are questions to be raised about sexual access, illusions, frustration. ‘I’m no prude,’ says Misch, ‘but the level of sexualisation in our society is disturbing. Men’s magazines perpetuate a myth of availability, yet this is not an open sexual society.’
Such solutions as have been suggested are mostly of the show-willing variety. A new inter-party parliamentary committee on sexual offences has been set up, of which Yates has hopes. ‘Every school in France has to report every day to the Education Ministry any assault that’s taken place in their schools. That’s been in place 18 months. It’s that type of initiative I suspect the committee will want to consider. There’s a problem out there that we need to grapple with. But I suspect we deal with the symptoms, not what’s causing it.’
There is always education, education. ‘Sex education?’ scoffs the Harlesden youth worker. ‘What’s the point? They already know everything. Unless you keep publicising it, nothing is going to change. We’re saying our young women are worth nothing. We’re saying you can go out and rape because you’ll get away with it.’What needs to be taught, say psychologists, is boundaries. Respect.
Often, little respect is offered to a girl who’s been raped. ‘The mothers in our community are very scornful,’ the youth worker tells me. ‘You hear things like, “We hear say she invite them.” ’ From then on, she’s a slag. Kelly has had women calling her dirty because they’ve heard she was gang raped. She could take refuge in bravado, in joining a gang, but she doesn’t. ‘I stay home. I don’t go out with boys. I don’t want to.’
Emma: ‘I assure you that I wouldn’t be going through with this court case if I hadn’t been raped.’
Cross-examination: ‘We’ll let the jury decide that.’
Emma: ‘Yeah, let the jury decide that.’
In Lucy and Emma’s case, the jury take one hour and 39 minutes to decide. This is a long time, for a rape verdict; however, the not guilty verdicts are no surprise. Most cases I researched didn’t reach court, because the police decided no crime had been committed or the family dropped the charges, or the CPS decided not to prosecute. Most that did reach court were acquitted. The 12-year-old in Feltham? The jacket she was wearing had traces of DNA that were not the gang’s. She said it wasn’t her jacket; she wasn’t believed. Not guilty. A woman in Coventry who had extensive injuries? She had given her number to one of the alleged rapists, so it must have been consensual. She claimed her rapists had gone out into the street and recruited two more. Not guilty. In his summing up, the defence barrister said, ‘Some of the men hardly knew each other. You would not recruit people you did not know well to commit something as serious as a gang rape.’
In April this year, the home secretary announced a £4m fund for sexual assault victims, which would enable six more Havens to open. In the same month, the Met announced they were launching their biggest ever investigation into gang rape. They will reopen 2,000 old cases and attempt to establish patterns and trends. Victims who have stayed silent will be urged to report attacks, however old.
I wish them luck. Over her spare ribs in the noodle bar, I ask Tamika if her friend will talk to me about her gang rape. She laughs. ‘No way! Who’d want to talk about something like that?’But Tamika, I say, someone has to. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I suppose. Someone’s got to break the silence. But she’s not going to start.’