Provincial entertainment
Children as young as 11 have been subjected to brutal attacks by teenagers in a Lancashire town – with the assaults filmed and shared on social media.
Victims’ mothers say police aren’t doing enough to stop the group and have taken matters into their own hands.
They shared the videos with the BBC and urged showing them.
The videos show children being dragged to the ground – squealing and crying out as they try to shield their heads from kicks and punches. Voices of others can be heard, off-camera, egging-on the attackers.
Filming such violence and humiliation, and then sharing it online, has become known by the term “patterning” – with the aim of embarrassing victims even further by forwarding the videos across the web.
One woman called the police while her daughter was being beaten up, and nothing happened.
It’s a depressing story. It’s not clear whether the police don’t have enough people to deal with the problem, or don’t think it’s serious, or don’t care, or what, but it’s a depressing story whatever the reasons are.
Maybe if parents told the police the people beating up their children were using the wrong pronouns they would come faster.
The story I heard yesterday on Newsnight is that the police say they are very sorry but they don’t have the resources. And that’s probable, considering the reporting I’ve also seen on the wait for ambulances, even for heart attacks. The social services have been starved in GB, and the next prime minister thinks that tax cuts will fix everything.
Kind of the way Brexit fixed everything.
What a dismal mess.