BARBARISM BEGINS AT HOME
We all know the story, or think we do.
The story of Charlene Downes’ disappearance has now entered into local folklore: a racism-tinged lament conjuring up images of evil Asian grooming gangs predating on young white girls, offering cigarettes and alcohol, fast food and drugs in exchange for sordid sex acts; a sensationalist tale that reaches it’s gruesome climax with the image of Charlene’s dead body being fed into a mincing machine and sold to unwitting drunken customers in kebabs at the Funny Boyz takeaway on Dickson Rd.
While some of this tale may have a basis in fact, we must remember that is only part of the picture – the final denoument , the third act in a fourteen year-long tragedy of abuse and neglect that comprised the brief life of Charlene Downes.
If we take a step back and ignore for a moment the shrill sensationalism and the skewed agendas of those who wish us to focus only on the Asian sex gangs, then a different, more complex picture emerges, one which reveals how barbarism begins at home….
SOCIAL SERVICES
From an early age Charlene was known to social services in the West Midlands; child protection officials had identified her as ‘vulnerable to sexual exploitation’. In 1989 – the year of Charlene’s birth – a convicted rapist, jailed three times for buggery and indecent assaults on two young girls, became a regular visitor to the Downes’ house and was allowed “unsupervised access to a child”.
A joint police and social services operation was launched and Robert Downes was “strongly advised” by social services not to allow the man inside his home. Visits were thought to have continued however. A witness told the authorities she saw the rapist “fondling [a child] in the house and that the parents were present”. The Downes’ deny that this took place.
In 1998, when Charlene was 9, she and another girl alleged that they were being sexually abused by a man “trusted by Mr and Mrs Downes to take them to school”. He was charged with rape but the case collapsed when the other girl failed to give evidence. Charlene’s parents later told The Times newspaper that the man seemed trustworthy because “he had a girlfriend”. A police officer’s report stated that they“had some knowledge of the abuse but failed to act”. The Downes – of course – denied this.
BESIDE THE SEASIDE
The following year the family moved to Blackpool after Walsall social services threatened to prosecute the parents for wilful neglect and to have the children taken into care.
In the resort Charlene was soon registered as at risk from sexual abuse. Reports were logged “of violent incidents in the home, lack of adequate supervision… and some incidents… very suggestive of a risk… of sexual exploitation”. A hospital report when she was 11 described signs of sexual abuse. During the last two years of her life NHS recorded 13 visits made by Charlene Downes to a walk-in sexual health clinic.
An enviromental health officer had a particularly memorable visit to the Downes’ residence in 2001. While there on council business he unwittingly waked into a downstairs room at the house and witnessed Charlene – just 12 at the time – lying on a bed in a ‘skimpy’ nightgown next to a man in his sixties. Charlene was scooping up pound coins from the mattress, the man hurriedly buttoning up the flies of his trousers and, according to the council worker, “shaking and trembling” following his unexpected entry.
“It’s OK — he’s my uncle” Charlene explained. Robert Downes then entered the room and, gazing on the scene with apparent insouciance, explained that the man called “Bob” was “a family friend”. The incident disturbed the environmental officer enough for him to report it to social services but the outcome was inconclusive, partly due to to lack of evidence and in part a lack of co-operation from the Downes’ family. Karen Downes said the council were being ‘nosey’.
THE MEN WHO PUT THE ‘ASIAN’ IN CAUCASIAN
This wasn’t thought to be an isolated incident. Social workers were of the opinion that Charlene Downes was exposed to frequent abuse by middle aged white men invited to her home by her father- some staying overnight, others longer.
That’s WHITE men of course – not Asians, not Arabs, but – to use the spurious Nazi racial terminology – Aryans. For all of the BNP’s racist assertions, the people that either initially abused or failed Charlene Downes were of her own race, her own culture, her own family.
On two occasions officials decided Charlene should be looked after by the local authority. On the first no available place could be found. On the second she was allowed to stay with her family. A serious case review concluded that a plan “to commence care proceedings should there be a continued lack of improvement to the quality and effectiveness of [her] parenting was lost sight of”.
Clearly it wasn’t just her parents that were failing in their duty to protect her.
THE SEX FILES
Corrobarating this litany of abuse and neglect, police files contain an admission by a 40-year-old friend of the Downeses, that he had paid her to perform a sex act on him. Another man in his 50’s creepily described the 13-year-old Charlene as his ‘girlfriend’. Another report worryingly revealed that a man later jailed for sex offences against young girls was staying with the family at the time of Charlene’s disappearance. He later admitted to indecently touching Charlene.
It seems that wherever Charlene might turn there was always someone ready to sexually exploit her. Even her own home – especially her own home – wasn’t a safe refuge from the paedo predators. All told, at least 16 men with convictions for rape, assault and violence were known to have visited the family in their home.
Once again, that’s sixteen WHITE men. If Britain’s immigration policy were such that it had barred any dusky-skinned foreigners from coming within 100 miles of its shores for the last thousand years, Charlene Downes would still have been a long-standing victim of sexual abuse; still, perhaps (and there is reasonable conjectural basis for this given that no one has yet been convicted), have been murdered.
DOWN “PAKI ALLEY”
It is against this bleak backdrop then that we must view Charlene’s subsequent contact with Asian grooming gangs: those gangs that loom large in the mental landscapes of both racists and the wider public
In an important sense Charlene didn’t need grooming as her formative experiences with the ever-shifting grotesquerie of her father’s ‘friends’ and house-guests had already done the devil’s work – normalizing sexual abuse and the exchange of sex acts for petty cash; innocence for cigaretttes.
If sexual abuse had already expelled Charlene from her own childhood then maybe being expelled from school – St George’s – didn’t seem that big a deal.
It was during these chaotic days spent hanging around Blackpool’s central promenade area that she first came into contact with the sex grooming gangs. According to an unpublished police report she was just one of at least 60 underage girls groomed by the local gangs which centred around 11 local fast food outlets.
One of Charlene’s regular haunts was what she and other young girls called ‘Paki alley’ – a grubby, litter-strewn passageway that abuts the backs of several food outlets and takeaways. It was here amid the industrial-sized waste-bins by the dim light of a solitary streetlamp, that the base business of a blow job might be alchemically transmuted into bags of chips. alcohol or cigarettes. This sordid alleway was one of the places Charlene is thought to have visited on the last night she was seen alive.
NOVEMBER SPAWNED A MURDER
It was on a dreary night of November that in 2003 Charlene went missing. During that day Charlene had visited McDonalds and Coral Island. She was in the Carousel Bar on the end of North pier where someone bought her a vodka and coke.
The problem for the police when investigating the disapperance of Charlene was that they were daunted by by the sheer number of men that Charlene had contact with – both Asian and white. Gradually they began to form a picture of her last months, weeks and days. Three months before she vanished, she was one of two girls driven by Asian men from Blackpool to a lay-by in Blackburn. There, at midnight, she walked down an alley with one of the men, returning an hour later. Back in Blackpool, she was handed an envelope. Her friend asked what was inside and was told it was “what I got for what I did in Blackburn”.
There was another trip to Manchester with another Asian man in an old BMW the week before she went missing. Another (white) paedophile had given her £40 the week before her disappearance and had again seen her on the day she went missing. A police report described him as a “compulsive, perverted paedophile” living in “a squalid flat knee-deep in pornographic material of all types including those featuring young children”. He was a suspect with a motive. But in December 2004, detectives thought they had a better lead…
FUNNY BOYZ
Iyad “Eddie” Albattikhi was a Jordanian immigrant and joint-owner of Funny Boyz on Dickson Road . In 2004 he’d had a dispute with his brother, Tariq, who allegedly then told a witness – local businessman David Cassidy – that he knew what had happened to Charlene – “she had been killed and chopped up and there had been a lot of blood”. It was claimed later that some of Downes’ remains had been made into kebabs. It was this lurid claim that would capture the public imagination.
Police launched an investigation but crucially bungled the job. Surveillance techniques were ‘handled poorly and unprofessionally’ an IPCC report later concluded. Frankly it seems that Laurel & Hardy (who were depicted on the Funny Boyz signage) could have conducted a more professional investigation. Everything they could potentially mess up they – with unswerving incompitence and startling ineptitude – DID mess up:
Proper records were not kept; material was not fully transcribed; the overall integrity of the material was not ensured; untrained and inexperienced officers were used; David Cassidy – fitted with a wire-tap device to secretly record conversations with Albattikhi’s brother – was given no instructions about what line of questioning to pursue (i.e. don’t ask leading questions)
Meanwhile Mohammed Raveshi, the co-owner of Funny Boyz, who was suspected of having helped dispose of the body, had his home and car bugged. It was claimed that he could be heard on tape talking about the murder but the sound quality was atrocious and in court the police, sound experts and translators all disagreed over what was being said.
Add to this the witness’s criminal record for dishonesty which the defence capitalised on, and it is hardly surprising that the jury were unable to reach a verdict. A re-trial was ordered but cancelled when serious misgivings regarding evidence the police had presented led to the CPS to abandon the case. Both defendents were later awared £250,000 each for malicious prosecution.
THE AFTERMATH
Nature abhors a vacuum and in light of police inactivity and incompetence the case quickly became a cause celebre in right wing/nationalist circles.
The seeming involvement of Asian grooming gangs and the macabre method of the alleged disposal of the body struck just the right emotive chord. On Saturday 26 March 2011 the EDL held a third demo in Blackpool to demand justice for Charlene Downes.
Undeniably Charlene had been let down by the police and the EDL and other right-wing organisations were quick to exploit the opportunity. 2,000 protesters turned up to a rally on the promenade during which members of the family made speeches. Some of the anger was justified. Asian grooming gangs are a disturbing facet of modern life in many Nothern towns and the police comprehensively failed to do their job properly. The idea however that Charlene Downes might mave been killed by a white paedophile – many of whom she was familiar with – was not something that racists wished to contemplate.
Despite Charlene’s meetings with paedophiles of different ethnic backgrounds, the idea Asian men were responsible was an a priori assumption. Not just with regard to the Downes case but that of missing schoogirl Paige Chivers. To enter this warped mindset you only have to read some of their Facebook status updates. This from 2013 from the ‘English Defence League Sikh Division’ page :
“Re: Charlene Downes and Paige Chivers. We all deep down know what happened, we all know which males from which particular community groomed these girls and sexually exploited them. To silence the girls we all deep down know they were murdered for it.”
A deep down ‘knowledge’ based on your own prejudices is apparently enough to convince the feeble-minded. Not for them such trifles as evidence. Of course, incapable of seeing anything beyond their own idée fixe, they didn’t know a thing and Page Chivers’ murderer, Robert Ewing (a not very Asian name you’ll notice) is now behind bars. In a particularly grim irony which speaks volumes about this whole issue Ewing was an EDL/BNP campaigner who hated Muslims.
EDL//BNP
EDL/BNP…. How it must have rankled Nick Griffin to see the two organistaions yoked together in reports like this, seperated only by that solitary slash. For in Griffin’s view they are world’s apart – like Chalk/Cheese, Good/Evil. The BNP are, by his lights, the true nationalists, valiently defending the cause of British patriots everywhere. (though by definition mainly in,er, Britain) The EDL on the other hand are low vermin: a bunch of paid Zionist shills representing the interests not of Britian but Israel. And if there’s anything that nationalists hate more than Muslims its Jews… True, the rank and file of both of both groups might seem indistinguishable and interchangeable, but the leaders will tell you differently. We need not let the febrile fantasies of fascists and their internecine squabbles detain us too long however. For our purposes it is enough to know that they are like two skinheads fighting over a comb – locked in an ongoing struggle to attract the same support base of bone-headed knuckle-draggers that no other party would want. One of the main focal points for this continuing battle has been the case of Charlene Downes.
BNP Vs EDL
In an article on the BNP website entiled “How the EDL Leaders Stabbed a Grieving Family In the Back” Blackpool Patriot writes:
“When the leadership and their ‘advisors’ found out about Karen Downes working with the British National Party, they took steps to punish her…They found that a woman-bullying, drunk called John Riley had already been spreading rumours concerning the Downes family, wrongly accusing them of being child abusers and paedophiles. The tapes by her alleged killers are supposedly faked, innocent Muslims are supposed to have been framed! The family are the guilty ones! Just how sick must someone be to come up with such lies? And how cruel and ruthless must they be to be willing to add to the appalling suffering of Charlene’s family by spreading such poison? Because, needless, to say the claims were backed with no evidence, just fake stories about anonymous friends in the child protection services”.
In the early days of the demonstrations the EDL Casuals were fully behind the Downes family. They raised money at demonstations; you could buy fridge magnets bearing Charlene’s face on eBay. It seems that the EDL got cold feet when leaked police documents began circulating which showed that Charlene had been abused at home and alledgedly been put into prostitution by her family. The idea that they were supporting a family complicit in their own daughter’s abuse didn’t go down well with the local EDL leadership Though Karen Downes was invited to the next EDL ‘Meet and Greet’ event in Blackpool, many made it clear she was unwelcome. In response Karen Downes and Jenna Hines aka the BNP’s Jenny Murphy, issued online threats to sue anyone who mentioned the allegations and threats to attack the meet and greet, or “Meet and stab” as Murphy delicately re-named it.
As the one nationalist group backed off in disgust (or, if you prefer the BNP version, jealousy), the other rushed forward further into the arms of the Downes family. The BNP loudly claimed credit for the police re-opening the case in November 2013 – ten years after Charlene’s original disapearance. It was a brief moment of seeming triumph that quickly soured. The credibility of the group suffered a large blow in 2015 when two men who had links with the BNP and EDL – Bob Ewing and Gavin Dewhurst – were convicted with regard to the murder of Page Chivers – the murder that the BNP had laid squarely at the door of Asian immigrants. Thing is, when your handing out leaflets alerting the public to the dangers of Asian paedophiles murdering vunerable white teenagers it doesn’t really do your cause any favours if one of the people handing out leaflets turn out to be a paedophiles responsible for murdering one of the teengers the leaflet refers to . “Ironic” doesn’t cover it…
BRITISH NONCE PARTY?
The conviction of BNP/EDL campaigner Bob Ewing raised an interesting (if slightly tenous) propisition: Charlene Downes’ parents were long-standing menbers of the BNP. Could Bob Ewing therefore have been the man referred to as “Bob” that the council worker had seen on Charlene’s bed hurriedly doing up his flies? He certainly fits the profile of the kind of person that Robert Downes might befriend. This is a possibility not lost on contributors to the website ‘EDL News’ (“Keeping an Eye on the Far Right”) who have talked up suggestions of a possible paedophile sex ring within the BNP. In support of their case they draw attention to the convictions of Michael Kinnear, 41, and Nicola Kinnear, 40, both from the North Shore area of Blackpool who were convicted of luring a 13 year-old girl to their house in April 2014, where Micheal Kinnear groomed her for sex with the promise of food and shelter after she ran away from her foster home. “Again, like Ewing, our investigations revealed that he had extensive links with Blackpool BNP and was a supporter of the English Defence League.” they write on their site. Is there some traction in this idea or is that, once again, the Charlene Downes case being used as political football between different political factions?
JUSTICE FOR CHARLENE DOWNES
Police meanwhile still seem no closer to resolving the disappearance of Charlene Downes. One thing is striking however. During Charlene’s life she was used by some and failed by others. Used by the men her father invited home, used by Asian takeaway workers. Failed by her parents, failed by the social services. In death nothing much has changed apart from the faces. Now she is used by the BNP and EDL, failed by the Police and the CPS. When Charlene was raped as a 9 year old she recieved no justice. In death too, justice still eludes her. Hopefully one day she will recieve it.
blackpoolcrimetour 
brilliant piece
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