Alex Phillips: We need to talk about grooming

How long in prison for a monster who has beaten, raped and trafficked vulnerable girls, treating them with greater disdain than an abandoned dog, with more casual contempt than livestock headed for slaughter, abused, discarded, threatened, assaulted, passed around like a bottle of whisky in tawdry bedsits between bestial brutes, conspiring and mocking their piece of meat using their mother tongue, regarding the child under their imposed property as more worthless than vermin.

Inflicting lifelong trauma, physical, psychological, social. How long for such a vile creature? What if I told you the answer for one such disgusting abuser was just four years.

An eight year sentence, but out on parole in half the time, to stalk the streets where he had worked as part of a gang to find the perfect victims, the forgotten girls, the ones who had already had to face so much trauma and tragedy in their young lives that they too struggled to see their own worth.

What if I now told you that the perpetrator, a callous and warped sociopathic subhuman, also a father of 5, has subsequently bleated about his rights, his lack of sufficient welfare payments, his being stripped of a driver's license and threatened with deportation? Are you sympathetic? I would imagine not.

If you’re like most of the people in this country, you would be horrified that such a degenerate served merely 48 months in prison and is now free to audaciously challenge his punishment.

From Oxford to Rotherham to Rochdale to Leeds to Huddersfield to London, desperately vulnerable, rejected and deprived little girls were hunted to become the prey of depraved individuals on an industrial scale.

The extent and spread of the abuse, and shocking cowardice of the authorities in acknowledging and tackling the sickening crimes, stunned the country.

The utter disregard of those who were entrusted to protect the victims appeared as if the value of the little girls coming forward, already flotsam and jetsam tossed about and falling between the cracks, was deemed lower than the prerogative to not be seen to be causing offence to any one community.

Yet here we are again today with grave concerns that thousands of girls are still being trafficked, tortured and treated like sex slaves.

How on earth can these crimes still be committed in the cold light of day? Scratch below the surface and the problem runs deep. Distressingly and sickeningly so.

Violent gangs in London forcing children into becoming drugs runners by using premeditated rapes to intimidate their victims into the arms of what claim to be protective rackets but are networks of hardened criminals, paedophiles in every corner of the internet, communities turning a blind eye to horrifying and degrading attitudes and practices, and some sentences so short so as to reinforce the feeling that their victims had fewer rights than animals.