You are correct - why was this not news at the time?
The media are utterly complicit in covering this up.
It was news but only in a word of mouth way among ordinary people. The media stamped on it in exactly the same way as they and the woke screamed people down for pointing out that the Calais "child migrants" we took in a few years ago were mostly male and already using razors. The best the Guardian could do was a picture of a 16 year old boy. An adult male was put in a secondary school class and ended up harassing a 15 year girl but people were told they were a bunch of bigots for even questioning it. The parallels are striking. You must ignore the evidence of your own eyes and go along with the agenda or be cancelled as the emperor's new 'phobes.
I still don't know what the agenda actually is but I am noticing one overarching theme. If you point out a difference, a segregation, a boundary, you attract woke vitriol and condemnation.
Anything that aids the blurring or mixing of humans or human qualities is the agenda that is pushed.
So:
Segregation/Badness: pointing out men aren't women, pointing out that men aren't chldren, voting for political divides (Brexit), pointing out crimes associated with specific cultural groups (Rotherham, Cologne), wanting the tiniest of immigration controls into the UK, and wondering why the Royal Navy can't stop dinghies.
Mixing/Goodness: Pro-EU, open borders, pro trans, pro the quintupling of immigration into the UK, the BBC pretending 50% of the population is black when it's 5%, pro multiculturalism and hijabs on UK primary school girls, the primacy of gender identity, drag queen story time, sex education for toddlers down a dice game fetish rabbit hole.
It's ALL open society, open borders, no-boundaries-allowed, isn't it? Stirring us up into one amorphous mass so that we no longer have any allegiances and hence no lines in the behavioural sand. It's not divide and conquer, it's blend and conquer the indistinguishable mass while they're so confused they don't know their multicultural arse from their transgender elbow.
This is the pattern of gaslighting that I see.