23 February 2024 , 12:22
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If she was blonde and blue-eyed, she'd be a 15-year-old child brainwashed, trafficked, raped and traumatised.
But because Shamima Begum is brown, she knew what she was doing. She made her choice. She consented to it all and seems absolutely fine now.
The same happens to brown women in childbirth, who don't get the same pain relief; to brown teens who get stripsearched while on their period by police; to brown girls who are victims of sexual assault. In a mostly-white society, they are considered to feel less and be worth less.
There are only two differences between Shamima and, say, the 12-year-old British girl who ran away from home in 2003 after being groomed online by a US marine. One is skin colour, and the other is the response.
A photo of Shamima at Gatwick Airport in 2015 with friends Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase. (PA Media)Shevaun Pennington disappeared, like Shamima, under her own steam. She took her passport, lied to her parents, and used money she'd saved up to catch a cab to meet a paedophile who'd been grooming her online for a year.
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It was five days before she was returned, five days of grotty hotels, rape, and public appeals which eventually meant her abuser, Toby Studabaker, put her on a plane home. He was arrested in Frankfurt and served a total of 14 years in UK and US prisons. Her name was public from the outset, and she bravely told her story in 2008, aged just 17, and received media and public sympathy for having fallen victim to a sicko.
When Shamima disappeared, it was with two friends who like her were groomed online. Excited by the promise of a perfect world, they took their passports, organised flights, and were trafficked into a war zone by men who knew these children were to be given as sex slaves in reward to ISIS fighters. Yet this girl was demonised from the outset.
There were border alerts and appeals, but it was far too late. It was four years before Shamima was found, a 19-year-old widow who'd lost two children and was about to give birth to a third, who later died. She has told her story, accepted the likelihood of jail for breaking the law by joining ISIS, but is banned from coming back to the only home she has ever known.
The cushion doesn't make up for the headscarf, to some people (James Longman/ABC News)You're also not allowed to travel alone on a child's passport without the written consent of your guardian. You're not allowed to smuggle children, or be smuggled. Border controls, for both girls, failed to spot they were children who should have been at school.
But while Shevaun was abducted by a lone paedophile, Shamima and her friends were sucked into a cult of thousands. They weren't 'brides', given a choice of who to marry. And the man who helped them across the border from Turkey to Syria was also a paid agent of the Canadian intelligence services. Mohammed Al Rasheed met them at a bus stop in Istanbul, where he was smuggling people to ISIS while feeding information to the West. He shared their passport details with his handlers, and the British government knew soon after.
Had she been white, word would have been sent to Rasheed before or soon after he got them to the border. Efforts would have been made to bring the girls home. Instead, the authorities decided they were not children, not victims, but just more brown people heading into enemy territory. No doubt someone was glad to have a more phone lines to tap, extra bank accounts to watch, and more intelligence to gather.
Shevaun was raped for four days; Shamima for four years. Studabaker was jailed; Shamima's abusers, including two 'husbands' who were nothing of the sort, are dead or in jail. Shevaun has had help, while Shamima has been stripped of citizenship. Now the Court of Appeal has issued a final verdict that a girl born in Britain, groomed in Britain, and failed by Britain, is no longer British.
If she were blonde, she would be "a victim of brainwashing", which is the story told of several white men and women who followed the same path to Syria. If she had blue eyes, the fact she was living off aid parcels in a refugee camp would horrify the masses. If she was white, the fact that she is surrounded by ex-ISIS wives and fighters, her life is still in danger, and she was damaged by regularly seeing decapitated heads in dustbins would explain some of her unrepentant comments when she was first found.
If Shamima looked different, the fact she had taken off her veil and gone back to Western clothes would be seen as a sign of hope, not deceit. The fact she's not blonde is the fundamental reason why she's not allowed to be British - even though she has no other family, no other home.
Bringing her back would mean admitting we failed. That the borders aren't properly controlled, that brown girls are treated differently, and that our intelligence agencies happily let British citizens go to fight ISIS because knowing who they were provided valuable information. Our politicians passed laws declaring it illegal to join a cult, even though that's never stopped a single cult before, while government employees did nothing to stop that law being broken.
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Shamima is as British as fish and chips: she was made here, even though her roots may have arisen elsewhere. If she's a terror threat she's our terrorist, just as much as the IRA or a gay-hating nail-bomber. Any penance that is due should be paid here, and if there's to be any rehabilitation that will only happen if she's near her family in Bethnal Green, not stuck in Syria.
Almost a dozen children have been repatriated from the camps, because they're British children. So was Shamima, once. So were we, once. And if the Islamic State had done what it did to Shamima to a white girl, and the British state had then done what it has, we would look at our leaders as though they were no different to Jihadi John: trafficking girls just to win a war, and pretending later that it was all her fault.