accused a fake grooming scandal

Both are awful. These grooming gangs, the issue needs to be taken much more seriously than it has been taken and, despite the MN view, I am glad that Elon Musk is being so vocal about it.

I also think that this girl is abhorrent and should've been punished severely.

People who sign up very recently with no long posting history to post rather strange view points on topical and controversial issues are an interesting phenomenon. Not making any claims or pointing any fingers but we know lots of organisations/actors do actually keep their fingers on popular forums and pay people to make posts to try and influence public feeling.

Unfortunately I think it’s inevitable in many western societies now.

The actions of past and present authorities and governments have hugely contributed to the rise in popularity for people like Farage and Robinson. Lack of clarity, honesty and discussion has led us here. People now seem to have more faith in Tommy Robinson than their own prime minister - something they should be working hard to fix, but they still go down the same route of fudging information and calling people far right racists.

I signed up because I could not tolerate people who think differently to me having a voice .

Fixed it for you.

It is somewhat unfair to call these "Asian" rape gangs. They are predominantly Pakistani origin Muslims.
Sikhs/Hindus/other Asians are not involved in these crimes any more than white Christians are. There are Pakistani Christians who do not do these things.
It'd be fairer to point out it is not an Asian issue but a largely Pakistani Muslim issue.

The problem is the false equivalence.

On the one hand we have a quarter of a million children raped and tortured. They never got justice, the perpetrators largely escaped justice as did the enablers of the perpetrators. To this day.

On the other hand we have one girl who likely was abused but made false accusations about a couple of people.

That is bad. Let's give them equal air time and make a documentary about the false accusation and discuss about them as if they were comparable problems.

Planned distraction?

This graphic might be useful here.

Why Channel 4 decided we needed a TV programme about one of the extremely rare cases of false accusations, is a question.

The BBC showed a similar documentary last year, I think.
I wonder why c4 are showing this now? The outrage over 1 liar when we should all be outraged over the thousands of children abused and tortured by the gangs ( no apologies for stating this- people need to know) leaves me quite lost for words.
I’d recommend Sammy Woodhouse’s powerful accounts of her experiences
Now there’s a brave woman

Where are you getting that information from?

www.thelawpages.com/court-cases/Eleanor-Williams-36599-1.law#google_vignette

Total sentence: 8 years 6 months
Parole eligibility date: 12/2/2027

I signed up because I could not tolerate seeing a hugely respected women’s forum that has done so much for the world, fall ever more closer and closer to the cliff in regards to courting the far right.

That does sound like a complicated case, and very unusual that the man was convicted and jailed.
I hope he’s managed to rebuild his life.

On the whole though I stand by what I said. I’ve known too many women and girls destroyed by rape and societal attitudes towards them. I lost a friend to suicide due to the gang rape she was subjected to and the justice system that more or less smacked the wrists of the men involved, who have all gone on to live their lives unaffected by their actions.

Eleanor Williams
Resident of Barrow
Beat herself up with a hammer to fake injuries
More than £20k donated to Gofundme
Sentenced to 8.5 years in prison

You are all over threads discussing the historical and current crimes repeatedly trying to play down the sheer scale of the rape and abuse of children.

Why ?

People are talking about men being affected and hand waiving it off but in this scenario men as well as women and children in the Pakistani community will have been adversely affected by this horrific scandal and the false accusations that were laid upon them.

It’s already bad enough for people of ethnic minority status in this country, but accusations like that have really fooled working class communities by making them believe insidious narrative likes ‘they are coming after our girls’.

Sounds like she got a longer sentence than most rapists (the tiny minority that get reported, identified and convicted) so I'd hardly call that getting away with it.

@AllTheMiceGoClang

"I’m also willing to bet my right arm that the lives of the raped girls (in their thousands) are ruined beyond the lives of falsely accused men. It’s laughable that anyone believes men are deeply impacted by this."

I have a relative who spent 5 years in jail after a false accusation, so yeah, I think his life was pretty much ruined. His wife had remarried, he has never rebuilt the relationship with his children, he lost his career. Everything. And no amount of compensation can help.

This does not take away from the pain and suffering of people who have been abused. And he is just one person - as others have said, the number of false accusations is shockingly low. And this was a complicated case - the girl was being abused, but the abuser convinced / groomed her to say it was someone else.

No, it's the inherent misogyny found in society, the police and the justice system.

Fake reports of rape are vanishingly rare. That's the reason why so many different programs have been made about one individual.

25% of women have been raped or sexually assaulted. That's 8.6 million women.

If every woman was the focus of a 3 part documentary, like Williams is, it would take you over 2953 years to watch them all, providing you did nothing other than stare at the telescreen.

5 in every 6 women never report their abuse to police.

Of those that do, only 3 in 100 alleged perpetrators are charged, never mind convicted.

But let's focus on the one woman who lied, was caught, and punished for it. (As she should have been)

I mean, I now know Ellie’s name.

I do not know the names of the many, many men found guilty or of any of the men she falsely accused. What does that tell you?

You know, this woman has absolutely no part in the systemic lack of credibility afforded to vulnerable working class girls over the decades that they have been harmed by raping gangs. None. In fact, Ellie, wasn't even born when I had classmates picked off by grooming gangs in 1994 in a town that barely gets a mention when it is being discussed.

No, people like you and other people for whom defending men is the highest priority are the reason the system is stacked against ‘genuine’ victims and women don’t come forward.

Honestly, even the phrase ‘genuine victims’ belies your focus.

No it’s not.
It’s because so many women are accused of lying, or back out of reporting so by default are seen as liars, or their behaviour deems them liars (been drinking, wore lacey pants, we’re on a date, we’re married and in bed with their rapist husband etc etc etc)

The number of women falsely accusing is tiny, yet for people like you is the main problem in rape cases. Like I said, sickening.

I think it would have been good to put a trigger warning on your post.

Those papers (if you mean the ones circulated on social media) relate to the vile members of the Oxford grooming gang. They are all now in prison, all serving long sentences.

The thing is, there will always be people who lie about these things, especially when it’s such a high priority case.

Whenever there is a high profile sex abuse scandal involving multiple victims there are people who jump on it for the compensation. There will absolutely have been people who claimed they were abused by Jimmy Saville as well.

But the things is, if we concentrate on those, then we lose sight of the real victims. It’s easy to become fixated on someone who has lied because we know that it’s wrong and two wrongs don’t make a right.

But the more attention we pay to those who aren’t being truthful, the less attention is being given to A, the real victims, and B, bringing the perpetrators to justice.