Whoever cared about underclass girls?

Everyone suddenly cares so much about sexually abused working class girls that they are driving themselves quite insane. The government must fall. Jess Philips must be taken out and shot. All Muslims should be deported. I find the current hypocrisy of most of the politicians and journalists manipulative, gang like and self-aggrandising . I don’t believe they ever cared much about the victims.

Unlike a lot of them and long before I became a writer I had proper jobs. Too many to mention. I worked with children in care, often with children who were abused sexually and physically at home and then again when put into residential care.

When 13 or 14 year old girls did not come home at night, it was my duty to report them missing to the police. When this happened night after night, nothing happened. This was the 80s. The police would merely tell me that these girls were “on the game’. They were children. Their pimps were both black and white. They barely attended school. Some wanted babies merely to have someone to love them. I worked alongside Adelaide Tambo the wife of Oliver Tambo, the exiled head of the ANC. That’s a story for another day. But as different as we were ,we both knew that there was so much that was going wrong for these kids.

They were the underclass and people started to use that language. No one had much hope for them.