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BBC 1 miniseries, 3 episodes of 60 minutes<\/p>\n
Screenwriter: Nicole Taylor<\/p>\n
Director: Philippa Lowthorpe<\/p>\n
Broadcast 16-18 May 2017<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I am in awe at BBC drama. In the past week I have watched both BBC2\u2019s adaptation of Mike Bartlett\u2019s 2014 play King Charles III<\/em>, and BBC1\u2019s miseries about the Rochdale child abuse scandal, Three Girls<\/em>, and have been bowled over by both. But the latter moved me most.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Its muted title foregrounds the fact that writer Nicole Taylor had to select a manageable number of protagonists from the forty-seven girls who were interviewed for the Rochdale trial. But the number forty-seven is misleading in its precision. The drama stresses the fact that interviewing relies on willing interviewees, and that such willingness was often lost due to police contempt towards the abused, and to the abusers\u2019 successful emotional seduction and\/or terrorisation of their victims. The actual number of girls who were abused by the nine men convicted in Rochdale in 2012 will never be known. Nor will the real number of men involved in their abuse. In the similar case that took place in Rotherham, it has been estimated that one thousand four hundred children were involved over a sixteen-year period. The title\u2019s lack of the definite article suggests an element of randomness in the dramatist\u2019s scoop out of the vast vat of misery that is her subject.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The impersonality of the girls\u2019 eponymous enumeration recalls the \u2018Girl 1\u2019, \u2018Girl 2\u2019 format by which they were known when they came to trial, and by which they are forever to be known in relation to this case. The term \u2018girls\u2019 is, therefore, sure-footed. These were not girls in the sense in which women are patronisingly, affectionately or sexually termed such, but were legally and literally girls. The title points straight at them, as does the series itself, rather than at their abusers. Finally, the title has an echo of Chekhov\u2019s Three Sisters<\/em>. Of the originals of the three protagonists (renamed Amber, Ruby, and Holly, played by Ria Zmitrowicz, Liv Hill, and Molly Windsor), only two were sisters. To the extent that they moved in different patterns over time towards and away from cooperation with the police, and to the extent that \u2018Amber\u2019 bullied the others into cooperation with their abusers, they did not operate harmoniously. But, in the end, all three pulled in the same direction – and, it seems, have managed to continue with life. Certainly, they were willing and able to act as consultants to this series: Molly Windsor, who plays Holly, described her real-life counterpart as \u2018incredibly strong. I don\u2019t think [the abuse] will ever leave any of them, but she is brave enough to go through it again with us to film it.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I watched its three episodes back-to-back on iPlayer. Early on in the first, I made myself a whisky and coke. By the end of the third, I had finished three. This might seem to be in bad taste, given that the girls in the Rochdale scandal were all given litre bottles of vodka as part of their grooming, and that the sex then demanded was presented as repayment of gifts received. But it felt like\u00a0the right thing to do \u2013 to open myself completely and emotionally to this drama, in sympathy with these girls, whilst \u2013 on a parallel track of my mind \u2013 reliving my early teen years, and thinking how different they were from those of these girls. And yet, as Molly Windsor remarked of the girls with whom she spoke: \u2018Those girls did nothing I\u2019ve not done. You go out with friends at night when you are younger and get in a taxi, and you don\u2019t expect anything to happen \u2013 but what happened to them was appalling.\u2019 There, then, but for the grace of God, went the actor. And there, but for the grace of God, went I.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was aware of the Rochdale abuse story before the trial of 2012. In 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times<\/em> had broken the story of a pattern of child sex abuse in the Manchester-Rotherham area to the national press, along with a critical account of failures of the police to investigate it properly. This drama stresses these failures, especially on the part of the CPS (who seem to have been blinded by snobbery towards these disadvantaged, sometimes difficult, girls) \u2013 and also of local social services (who seem to have focused on the welfare of the babies born of these rapes to the total exclusion of their mothers, as though the remit of their care extended only to children younger than ten). In doing so, it bookends the trial with the narrative of its delay: the 2011 news story helped propel the case to court in the first place, whilst this story vindicates the first one, and leaves the troubling sense that not enough has yet been done.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A surtitle near the end of the third episode informs us that the one person who apparently did the most to try to bring the abusers to justice (sexual health worker Sarah Rowbotham, herself a consultant to the drama in which she is played by Maxine Peake), was made redundant shortly after the trial. In the wake of the success of the drama, there is now a campaign to have her honoured \u2013 and one may hope that the minds of police and social services country-wide have again been concentrated on this issue. Detective Constable Maggie Oliver, played by Lesley Sharp, resigned from the police in October 2012 over their handling of the case, and told The Guardian<\/em> \u2018I\u2019m speaking to kids who are telling me that even to this day they are seeing offenders that they\u2019ve named, walking around Rochdale. Somebody saw one in London, another person told me that one has moved around the corner from her.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The very fact that the drama was made, though, is encouraging. We, the license-fee-payers, have collectively helped to fund this piece of national soul-searching. Fine British Asian actors such as Simon Nagra and Wasim Zakir bravely took on the role of Muslim villains, and the drama, though it does not concentrate on them, does given an insight into the defendants\u2019 attitudes towards the end. \u2018Daddy\u2019 (Shabir Ahmed, played by Nagra) launched into a speech at his trial (of which the transcripts form the basis of the screenplay at this point), to the effect that these white girls had already been tainted by sex and alcohol when they found them; they were prostitutes trying to reclaim their honour after the event. Soon after the trial scene, we see a community meeting in which Rochdale Muslims air contradictory recriminations \u2013 against whites for no longer taking their cabs (several of the abusers were drivers), and against the misogyny which existed amongst some of their own men. In relation to the similar Oxford case, Dr Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, said that the views of some Islamic preachers towards white women were appalling, encouraging their congregations to see these women as decadent and deserving of degrading punishment. Julie Siddiqi, executive director of the Islamic Society of Britain, has called for an increase in the number of women at the top of Muslim organisations, arguing that their domination by men may have contributed to their community’s silence on grooming. Certainly, given that in all these British Pakistani sex scandals the men have been acting in concert, and given that minority communities tend to be particularly tight-knit, it seems unlikely that of all the people connected to these married, Mosque-attending men, nobody knew anything about what was going on, or had any suspicions about it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n