It turns out lots of men like to do the mass rape of drugged women thing.
Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.
The National Crime Agency [NCA] has said online networks, “many as yet unidentified by law enforcement”, were allowing offenders to arrange to rape and abuse victims or arrange for sexual assaults to be filmed.
In many cases, these crimes were being perpetrated by those who “utilise the existence of committed, trusting and often long-term relationships to perpetrate and facilitate offending”, the agency said, giving the example of the high-profile Gisèle Pelicot case in France.
I can’t help noticing that the Guardian doesn’t mention that it’s men doing this. Maybe the Guardian would say that’s because it’s obvious, not least for the obvious physical reasons? But in journalism nothing is obvious. The elephant in the sex dungeon has to be mentioned.
Since it began investigating an online forum in October last year, the NCA has identified more than 270 individuals linked to that forum and its successors.
Nigel Leary, the NCA’s deputy director, said it had disseminated more than 210 “intelligence packages” relating to suspects and potential victims to law enforcement partners in the UK and overseas, with more than 90% of those being sent abroad.
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“We’ve seen users actively engaging with other like-minded individuals discussing in graphic detail how they want to drug their victims to commit the most heinous sexual abuse,” Leary said.
“Discussions include inviting other people to take part in the sexual assaults, seeking advice on the best drugs or sedatives to use and how to administer them, asking for specific abuse to be conducted and filmed, and also coordinating offending, arranging to rape and abuse victims, sharing methodologies and developing tactics to avoid detection.
“In many of the cases we’ve seen so far, individuals have become victims of sexual assault crimes while sedated,” he said, adding that people may not even be aware it had happened.
There is such anxious care to avoid the words “men” and “women” that the language becomes contorted. Users, like-minded individuals, people, victims, people.
Helen Millichap, the director of the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, said “organised drug-facilitated sexual assault represents a serious and evolving threat”.
She said the offending was “rooted in domestic abuse, controlling and coercive behaviour and sexual offending”. While these crimes were “certainly not new”, she said, “the evolving profile reveals how the online and connected nature of the abuse is occurring, the dimensions are changing and therefore so must our response”.
She said that many people affected might not know they had been a victim until they were contacted by the police or saw digital evidence. “We recognise how confusing and distressing that could be, particularly where the person responsible is somebody known and trusted,” she said.
The Guardian even manipulates her language so that she doesn’t say “many women affected” or “the man responsible is someone known and trusted”. I wonder if they just plain changed her actual wording. They couldn’t change the name of her organization, but everything else appears sanitized. I suspect they did in fact change her wording. The question is: why?
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