ARTICLE BY JOANNE PAYTON
Joanne Payton is a criminologist with expertise in harmful traditional practices, feminism, extremism and the Middle East.
Photo credit: MetFilm
Rhianan Rudd was fifteen years old when she was arrested and charged with terrorist offences, the youngest British girl to be charged with this offence. She had been groomed by extremist racists and anti-Semites, who drew her so deeply into their influence she carved a swastika into her own forehead. Rhianan’s interests, always intense due to her autism, quickly moved from My Little Pony to Aryan supremacism. When Rhianan downloaded a bomb-making guide, her concerned mother reported her to the Prevent programme. She had only been in the programme for a few weeks when she was arrested in the presence of 19 police officers, bailed and withdrawn from school.
For Rhianan, extremist influences were not merely outside the home: her mother had, in all innocence, been dating an American who had belonged a white supremacist prison gang. Perhaps his relationship with Rhianan’s mother was a route to his real target: a vulnerable teenager. He was an associate of white supremacist Christopher Cook, who has pled guilty to planning terrorist attacks on the American electric grid. MI5 were well aware that Rhianan had been sharing nudes of herself, which were circulating within far-right circles for at least seven months before she was arrested. But the focus of policing seems to have been on neutralising the supposed threat she represented, not in recognising the sexual grooming of a vulnerable minor.
Sammy Woodhouse was fifteen years old when she and her ‘boyfriend’ Arshid Hussain (known as Ash) took her on an armed robbery a post office. Ash was ten years older than her, married with two children – and a violent criminal who was the ringleader of the notorious Rotherham grooming gang. A classic ‘Romeo Pimp’ he had used his charisma to manipulate many other teenage girls into seedy drugs and sex-trafficking rings, passing them around like shared property. Sammy was just one of around 18 underage girls that he had personally exploited in this way, and her family had reported the abuse many times. But when the networks of abuse were exposed, it turned out that vital evidence had gone missing from the police files, including Sammy’s diaries, and statements form her father. There was, however, ample evidence that Rotherham’s institutions had turned a blind eye to the sexual exploitation of girls and young women in their community – including the suppression of a report on the crimes by an independent researcher.
Shamima Begum was fifteen years old when she was caught on camera at Bethnal Green Station, with her friends Amira and Kadiza. The girls were following in the footsteps of a classmate, who grieving the death of her mother, had absconded to Syria, to join the so-called Islamic State. A letter warning Shamima’s parents of the radicalisation risk this presented was found undelivered, tucked between the pages of one of her textbooks.
The phenomenon of social contagion has been recognised since the 1930s, known to be particularly common amongst teenage girls and young women. It has been catalysed by social media. Two days before Shamima left London, she tweeted Aqsa Mahmood, understood to be the first British woman to relocate to the Islamic State. Although security services were believed to be monitoring her account, there was no response to Shamima’s approach to Mahmood. Shamima’s proximity to radicalisation, and her online activities should have triggered some response; she had been interviewed twice by police after her classmate disappeared. But her sister’s passport was enough to get her on her way to Syria, where she was immediately married off.
Rhianan Rudd was sixteen years old when she killed herself, housed in a facility for young people, despite her mother’s warnings to staff about Rhianan’s fragile mental state. The teenager was found hanging in her room, even as staff reassured her mother that there was no suicide risk.
Sammy Woodhouse told her story to Andrew Norfolk, at The Times newspaper, and then testified in court and saw Hussain sentenced to 35 years in prison. After the publication of the Jay Report, the scale of the problem was revealed, and Sammy was vindicated. She is still fighting, rallying support for vulnerable girls against predatory men.
Shamima Begum’s classmates, Amira and Kadiza, are more than likely dead after their brief careers in ISIS’s caliphate, as is Aqsa Mahmood, their recruiter: the ‘jihadi girl power’ fantasy they shared ending in blood and bones. Shamima’s three children perished in the wastelands of Al Hol detention camp, where she herself remains. She faces a legal battle to restore her British citizenship, which was withdrawn by Sajid Javid. This rendered her stateless, counter to Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – effectively making a controversial citizen a former citizen in order to win over a hostile public. Her awkward, naive appeals for public sympathy on the media failed to win over the British public. She is not, as Lisa Downing notes, ‘likeable’; she fails to present the version of contrite victimhood that the public want her to see. She is effectively a hatesink for all the accumulated Islamophobia in our society.
Rhianan, Shamima and Sammy were all groomed at vulnerable ages, in different ways, for different ends. Each of them were complicit in criminal acts. Neither children nor adults, their competence to understand the implications of their choices is ambiguous and hotly debated. Sammy Woodhouse has campaigned for ‘Sammy’s Law’ – which would guarantee grooming victims would face no charges for criminal activities that they were involved in through the influence of their abusers. She says she was inhibited from testifying against Ash by the potential for prosecution hanging over her head, given the lengthy potential sentence from all the crimes committed with him. She denies, however, that she was an equal partner in wrongdoing. In court she said: ‘He was an adult and I was a child. There’s nothing equal about it, so no, I wouldn’t say we were equal. It’s only now I realise he wasn’t my boyfriend. It was abuse.;
None of these girls were forcibly coerced into criminality. However, few of the choices any of us make make in life are free from exterior influences. Girls – and boys – on the precipice of adulthood are particularly quick to establish emotional bonds, and to lower their boundaries. Groomers engulf young people with flattery and compliments, which intoxicating for those who feel neglected, insecure and misunderstood. They inveigle their way into their lives subtly, taking an interest in them that few others do, and then monopolise their attention entirely. They drive wedges between vulnerable individuals and their families and friends, isolating and controlling them. They escalate demands, so that the target finds herself (or himself) gradually, almost imperceptibly, drawn into criminal activities.
Through submersion in a different moral universe, such as the opposed-but-similar world-views of Islamist and white supremacism, or the amoral thrill-seeking of petty crime, a person’s sense of morality can become warped, particularly if they have had little previous life experience. It is easy to focus on the erratic and foolish criminal choices of girls on the brink of womanhood, in all its frightful potential. It is harder to look at the ways in which their choices were manipulated by the men who manufactured their complicity. It is easier to lay the blame at the lap of girls who have been groomed. It lifts the responsibility of those who could have intervened and failed to do so, or it fits into our pre-existing prejudices.
Just as Rotherham police saw the targets of grooming gangs as lovesick teens before they recognised them as victims, counter-terrorism needs to rethink how it deals with young people. In all cases, the apparatus of the state failed in its responsibility for safeguarding – by overreaching in Rhianan’s case, and then failing to undo the damage done to her fragile psyche; through inertia in Shamima’s, failing to detect her radicalisation, to prevent her emigration, and then ultimately washing their hands of her; in Sammy’s case through complacency, classism, and a fear of accelerating antagonism between Rotherham’s ethnic communities.
As a society, we have a responsibility to protect our children, from themselves as much as from others. Individually, three young lives were ravaged: but each small tragedy reflects a further safeguarding failure – a failure not just to support, but to learn. We failed to learn from Rhianan what draws girls like her into radicalisation, and what she knew of the internal working of the American far-Right. We failed to learn from Sammy about the exploitation of young women and girls in post-industrial Britain – until the numbers of known victims were numbered in the thousands.
And we are failing to learn from Shamima how the Islamic State draws in women, how it persuades women like her to take part in atrocities and how to combat it. By failing to prosecute her, we cannot learn what crimes she has witnessed, what crimes she has committed, and whether she can be rehabilitated. We cannot learn about the failings of our school system, our models of citizenship and our ways of managing diversity if we place all the blame on an individual, particularly one who was a minor when she chose to join a group responsible for the greatest atrocities of the decade. We are failing to learn from how to diffuse extremism’s appeal.
The services there to protect vulnerable girls and young women are delinquent in their duties. Ultimately, we will not learn how to prevent crime and radicalisation, or to protect young people through blame, but through protection measures, from injunctions and monitoring to deradicalisation programmes and social support. We need to develop sensitive and effective ways of supporting, protecting and managing girls and young women caught up in webs of exploitation – and these must be informed by the experiences of those who have been there, and those who have been failed.