What do they all have in common?
They were too old to be having sex with minors.
Beyond that, not much. They’ve from different backgrounds, going by their names, but if you erase the line between India and Pakistan, you could say they’re all Indian.
Or Pakistani. Whatever. Point is, they were too old to be having sex with minors, no matter how well they treated them. The girls had attention lavished on them and they liked the attention and likely tolerated the other parts because of being treated like royalty.
It’s classic grooming. Happens in every country. It’s be romance, wine-ing and dining if they were of age. But they weren’t. It was wrong, and they will be justly punished.
In America, unfortunately, we’re taught an old stereotype of pedophiles. “Get in the van!” or, “Free puppies and hugs!” or a guy with an overcoat and a mustache driving creepily down the street, leering at kids.
But while there’s probably _some_ strange basis for that somewhere along the line, I suspect it’s more along these lines. Treated like queens – treated “like adults”… being treated with all the adoration their narcissistic heads can endure, and the other stuff is akin to “payment”.
It’s easy to see how it happened. I’m just glad they’ve been gathered and are being tried for what they’ve done. The kids were too young, the laws in Great Britain (rightly) do not condone that behavior and they will be punished as they should be.
I suspect such things were far more common in the past. Many stories untold. With increasing surveillance, I believe things are better now. I don’t mind small loses of privacy in exchange for a safer place to live overall, as long as someone is watch-doging privacy rights. There’s plenty of perfect crimes – in woods, graveyards, stories no one has ever heard, people walking around with tales they can tell no one, and otherwise appearing perfectly regular. Rape was once a shameful thing to the victim; now it can be talked about more openly, allowing for things like this to be exposed and prosecuted.. as long as they watch out for the liars too, who also exist. This tale is believable because of the grooming and the “seeming perfectly normal at the time” from the girls’ perspective.
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