One of the men who survived losing a leg during the 7/7 London suicide bombings is a convicted gang rapist, it turns out.
There was a very mild media furore a couple of days ago when Tory leader David Cameron was pictured shaking the man's hand.
What concerned me far more was the reaction of the man in question, Garri Holness. Here is a
report which describes the crime and Holness's reaction:
In the weeks after the 2005 attacks, which claimed 52 lives, it emerged Holness had been jailed for his part in the horrific rape of two 16-year-old girls in 1985. He was part of a gang known as the Young Raiders who dragged the schoolgirls into an underground garage in Brixton, South London, where they were raped more than 40 times at knifepoint.
Holness, a musician from Croydon, South London, was sentenced to seven years.
He was freed after serving three years but his conviction came back to haunt him when he took a leading role in the fight for justice for the 7/7 survivors. Holness has always argued his past should not be dragged up.
Speaking before Tuesday's Hyde Park ceremony, Holness said: ' People have to move on, I was a 17-year-old who didn't know himself.
'I don't want it raked up for the victims. I believe I am here now for a reason, to help young people.
'I was young, I was in a gang and I was brought up in a single parent family. I can help them.'
I think it is easy to forget that although it is fair enough to say a man has paid his dues when he serves time in prison for crime and is then released, Holness served a ridiculously, almost criminally short sentence.
Those women will probably never recover from what happened to them when they were young girls; to be raped once is a terrible ordeal that no one should have to endure, but to be raped up to forty times by more than one individual is almost unimaginable torture.
I don't personally believe that such behaviour is a slip up or a temporary blip when one forgets social etiquette; if you are capable of that level of appalling violence, of degrading and abusing another human being in such a fashion, then you are a dangerous sociopath.
Holness's comments come at a time when Britain is experiencing an alarming rise in gang rapes. Primarily, they take place within the culture of inner city black gangs where they are used as a form of punishment, or occasionally initiation.
Recently, the African writer Sorious Samura wrote an
article for the
Independent, entitled 'Gang Rape: Is it a Race Issue?' Here are some extracts:
In 1999 I witnessed a gang rape in Sierra Leone. I was forced to watch a group of rebel soldiers taking it in turns to rape a young girl in front of an audience of jeering men. It was the height of the civil conflict and rape had become a devastating weapon of war. When I moved to Britain I believed I had escaped such horrific sexual violence. As my Dispatches investigation tomorrow night shows, I was mistaken. Gang rape is happening here – and what I have found most disturbing as an African is that a disproportionate number of these attacks are being carried out by black or mixed-race young men.
Towards the end of last year, police and child welfare experts working on Channel 4's Street Weapons Commission told us of their concerns about gang rape. Then two big cases hit the headlines.
In December, nine schoolboys, some as young as 13 at the time of the attack, were convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl. She was dragged between tower blocks in Hackney where she was threatened with a knife, hit and raped during an ordeal that lasted an hour and a half – some of which was filmed on mobile phones. In January, three men were convicted of gang raping a 16-year-old with learning disabilities for two hours before dousing her with caustic soda in an effort to get rid of the evidence.
How prevalent is this crime and why it is happening in Britain? Despite the seriousness of the crime, I was amazed to discover that no national statistics exist: gang rape is simply not recorded as a separate crime category. So over a period of several months we set about collating our own.
We approached the Crown Prosecution Service, the Association of Chief Police Officers, all 50 police forces, crown courts, barristers and rape referral centres to try to establish the numbers.
One of the few police forces to have begun recording the figures of reported gang rape is the Metropolitan Police. In 2008 alone, they received reports of 85 gang rapes. Using the Met's definition of gang rape – those involving three or more perpetrators – we began to look at the number of convictions. We tracked down 29 cases, from January 2006 to March 2009, in which a total of 92 young people were convicted of involvement in gang rape.
One fact stood out. Of those convicted, 66 were black or mixed race, 13 were white and the remainder were from other countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
****
The groups of young men I met in London expressed some profoundly disturbing attitudes towards girls and sex. The boys explained how they make arrangements for "line-ups" in which one girl has oral sex with up to six or seven of them at one time. These arrangements might be made at school or on mobile phones.
Sometimes these girls initially consent because they want to be popular. But these events can spiral into rape because the boys consider that any girl who is prepared to agree to a line-up can be considered fair game. One boy told me: "If she wants to go and meet a bag of boys then she's probably a jezzie [slut], and if she's going to a house it's over – she's going to get beaten [have sex]."
In other instances, as some of the victims in our film describe, girls can unwittingly walk into a trap, innocently visiting someone's house to listen to music or watch a film only to discover that a group of boys are lying in wait. Or they might be hanging out with friends in a park and suddenly realise they have become surrounded by a group of boys intent on sex.
For both boys and girls, the line between this sort of group sex and rape seems to be blurred. A girl might agree to have oral sex with two or three boys but then be ordered to have sex with six or seven. The teenage girls I met told me that boys simply don't understand what rape is. And yet this is a crime that can ruin lives and is punishable by life imprisonment.
Occasionally gang rape is used to punish a girl for minor transgressions against gang members. In one of my most shocking interviews, I met a girl who admitted she had helped to set up girls for gang rape. As the girlfriend of a gang member, she organised these rapes, partly out of fear and partly to fit in.
She admitted she was terrified of being raped herself and had walked away when witnessing a girl being gang-raped at a party because she feared she might be next: "There was just loads of boys and the girl's tights were ripped up, like, she was bleeding as well, because I think she was a virgin, and they were just taking turns on her basically, and she was crying, and I didn't get involved because I thought if I get involved they're gonna turn on me."
The victims' descriptions of their attacks are horrific. One young victim likened her attack to being "pulled and pushed around like a rag doll", while another 14-year-old girl described her ordeal when she was gang raped by a total of nine boys who told her that she was not the only girl they had attacked. In that case, nine boys were subsequently convicted of raping her. The youngest perpetrator was just 12 years old.
The point is that Holness talks about his crime as if it was some light shop lifting or a bit of underage drinking. He does not seem to grasp that he is responsible for something which destroys lives, but also the social fabric of entire communities of people.
This alarming phenomenon must be addressed; as Samura indicates, it is not
exclusively a black crime, but it does seem that largely it is, finding its roots in ghetto street culture, lack of respect for women learned from fathers or male role models (or far more likely, lack of them), lack of any meaningful morality, and giving into to base impulses easily with no attempt at self-restraint.
Here is a recent
testimony from a victim of gang rape which was heard at a trial in January:
A WOMAN claimed she was beaten with a broomstick, made to dance naked and brutally raped.
The alleged attack was so horrific that the Advertiser cannot reveal the full extent of her ordeal.
The 27-year-old Walcot resident – who cannot be named for legal reasons – earlier this week described how she was shoved into a transit van in June 2007, beaten and tortured by alleged drug dealers. In court it was claimed that the one-time addict had stolen £1,000 from the men.
In Bristol Crown Court yesterday she claimed that the five-strong gang took her to a friend’s flat which she believed to have been in Peckham, London. She said that before the rape members of the gang told her to ‘strip off’ while dancing to music coming from one of their mobile phones. In court the woman said: “I hesitated for a few moments then he yelled it again. “He told me to ‘strip off’. I had to take all my clothes off. “He then told me that he was going to do what his dad did to him when he misbehaved – and he told me to stand on one leg.” She added that as she stood naked, and on one leg for 10 minutes at a time, two men approached her.
The court heard how Modele Adenekan stood on one side of her with a broom and Shane Nevins stood on the other. She added: “They said they were going to ask questions and if I lied they were going to whack me in the ribs, if I flinched I was going to get a punch in the face. “Dollars (Adenekan) wanted to know the truth about his money. “He asked me about his money and I told him I mucked up and spent it. He swung it, and I flinched.
“Then Lincoln (Nevins) punched me in the face.” The woman then said that she was made to do naked press-ups to get her clothes back. Later on when three of the gang-members slept on the couch she told the jury how two of the men came back and woke her. They were then alleged to have had a conversation with Adenekan asking if they could sleep with the woman and pay him, in order to help her pay off her debts.
She said a man known as Chris (Vernon) came into the room she was in and told her to strip. “But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to do anything with either of them,.” she said.“But my trousers were taken off, I kept saying no but I was so frightened it was like I was paralysed.” The woman then described how the pair took turns raping her while the other made her commit a sex act.
She then told how the next day she agreed to sell drugs for Adenekan again, to help pay off her debts, before he drove her to a train station, gave her crack and heroin wraps, and told her to go home and wait.
Iffy Ndidi, 21, Tunasho Chisanga, 29, Christopher Vernon, 31, Modele Adenekan, 22, and Shane Nevins all deny kidnap. Ndidi, Vernon and Nevins deny conspiracy to supply class A drugs, admitted by Chisanga and Adenekan. And Vernon and Chisanga stand accused of raping the woman. The case continues.
The above case demonstrates aptly exactly what these crimes are about; power, control, humiliation, and the fragile egos of worthless, extraordinarily violent thugs.
Holness can complain about how he is perceived, but in a just world he would still be in prison. Society cannot excuse this sort of casual brutality and disregard for women from anyone - it cannot afford to.
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