Three Girls – a BBC TV drama based on the true story of the Rochdale sexual grooming and abuse scandal. Screened on 16 May 2017.
Episode one
just watched, how to begin to speak about it?
Gasp inducing … what’s ‘appropriate’, what does
it mean? … staggering lack of competence and imagination on the part of police
and social workers. Or is it rather a staggering response from people employed in
these big institutions? The people become almost like robots, ‘dead from the
neck up’, if you like.
Thank god, we find ourselves thinking, for the one person who was able
to think and act, in this case one person in the Rochdale Sexual Health Clinic.
One person. One. She got her team to document and build a file of evidence
based on what the girls said when they came for their condoms. She and her
colleagues pieced it together, drew a chart showing how one man was the ‘boyfriend’
of many girls at once. They drew a picture of pimps and their … but this is the
language of prostitution (which would be tough enough), but one line leaps out from
this episode: “There is no such thing as a child prostitute. There is child
abuse.” That’s it.
The girl at the centre of this episode, Holly, seems to be part of a
fairly ordinary family: mum, dad and a couple of younger siblings. The house is
unremarkable, shabby, but too small, really, for such a number in the family. Not
much more information than that at the start. Gradually as the episode unfolds
more little details leak in. There are, for example, several mentions of ‘vulnerable
young girls’. Vulnerable? What does that mean? It is not really explained. Is
it just the absence of money? This is a point that needs exploring. Otherwise the
girl is left to be nothing but a victim. But this particular story, the one
unfolding on BBC1, is taking a different tack. We see Holly appear to walk
wilfully into a tragic trap. The drama takes as its focus the trap itself. It
reveals the apparent willingness of so many other people to close this trap
around a young girl and so to make it deadly. She starts looking like a sacrifice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
We start to talk about groups. Belonging to a group. Identifying with a group. This line of
comment began a few minutes ago as we read the Wiki entry on the Rochdale case.
It is very clear that everyone is nervous of saying something in terms of a group
identity of the men, and a group identity of the girls. The tentativeness is
because the very first word that leaps out of the script is “Pakistani”. And
with that, the nomination miraculously returns to you in the mirror, defining
you in your turn as … English, presumably ... then white (as opposed to black),
and thirdly – whisper it – Christian (as opposed than Muslim). Boom, boom, boom. Three
monumental names line up and freeze us, stop us thinking. Interesting. And in
episode one these words (white, English, Christian) seem also to identify the girls.
Seems simple, but then actually it is complicated. What you need,
however, is a few little tricks and enough courage to push on through the … xxx
… what word can we use here? Push on
through the Mud? Horror? Grime? No, none of these words really work. But
what they do is remind me of an early scene in the film: Holly comes home from
school, (about 10 minutes into the episode) and her father, unshaved, is watching
out for her return from behind the net curtains. What is the first thing he
says to her? “Put on your rubber gloves and clean out the bins.” What? What did
he say? He said “that waster from next door has been leaving all his crap in
ours.” From these small fragments we begin to piece together some details
about Holly’s family: they live in an area they don’t ‘identify’ with; her
father must have lost his job. He has lost his place of
identification and his means – and you can take this literally – of making a living. Consequently, apparently, his
daughter, Holly, has ‘no friends’ at school. She doesn’t 'belong to a group’. “He
doesn’t know what it’s like to rock up to a new school where you have no friends.” She reproaches him. They
live in an area where the possibility of hating one’s neighbour is an easy
option. From both sides of the fence.
This is the angle I propose to take, the way in
to analyse this TV dramatisation of the shock of the Rochdale sex scandal. Stay
tuned!
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