Abduction of children for sexual purposes Film TV and in reality

My interest in the subject of captivity and isolation commenced when in 1960, because of my age, I was kept locked in a prison cell  between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning on remand having refused bail and with only two half hours of exercise with another nonviolent protestor, against weapons of mass civilian extermination, in an adjacent cell in Bedford jail and where we had to walk  round the yard with distance between us while the adults later reported having a grand time by comparison kept together on mattresses in the prison library. I hated very second without a book, writing paper or anything to do. My approach when spending the last four and half months of the six months’ alternative chosen to promising to stop protesting was to separate myself from other protestors and fit into the regime of prison life with everyone else.  That did create problems when I left, so I learned a little of the impact of being isolated and of the subsequent adjustment required when you have accepted and adjusted to the situation which in my instanced I had placed myself in. The book edited by George Mikes called Prison, includes chapters by a survivor of Auschwitz, by Rusell Braddon, Arthur Koestler and Paul Ignotus, and an older first cousin returned from his participation in World War II and prison camps in North Africa, Italy and central Europe as a man damaged, dying prematurely from his persistent need smoke.

Works of fiction only reflects the impact of reality and over the past decade there have been accounts worldwide about the experience of girls adducted and kept imprisoned for sexual purposes. Elizabeth Smart suffered for only 9 months compared to Natasha Kampusch 8 years, Michelle Knight, 12 years Jaycee Duggard 18 years and Elizabeth Fritzel for 24 years by her father with whom she had seven children and where in some instances the abductors have been a married couple.

Recently, possibly because of the commercial and artistic success of the Canadian film, The Room in 2015, there has been a sudden flux of new material, with the BBC making available on its I player all five episodes of Thirteen with the showing of the first, the second series of Missing with Donal Morrisey as the father, has 10 episodes and where James Nesbitt was the male lead in the award winning first series of the British American drama. An adolescent boy has so far been rescued in the first three episodes of the Australian series the Code which features the dark net where individual children are abducted for on demand bids, and where the main story appears to be the international UK/USA capitalist exploitation of the mineral resources of an island people involving corruption, murder, torture and political complicity.  

I saw 2015 The Room in theatre at Bolden Cineworld on January 26^th at 16.50 screen 4 and seat J3. The film stars Brie Larson in the role of the abducted teenager who survives captivity in a room with the son born through the enforced union. She is abducted and kept in a purpose created room for seven years which has a bed, toilet, bathtub, television and basic cooking area. The window is a skylight and one of the ways Joy copes is to pretend to her son that TV is all fiction and that their life is normal with the child as he has got older having to sleep in a wardrobe when the captor visits for sex. When the captor loses his job, and says he cannot continue to provide the same level of food and clothing as previously Joy devises a plan to get the son out by faking that he has severe fever and pressing their captor to take him to hospital, he only offers to bring antibiotics and the next step is for the boy to play dead and for him to be removed from the room in a carpet from which he escaped, is escapes and come into the hands of the police.

Understandably the boy is overwhelmed and disorientated by a world in which he had no previous knowledge and the police find there is no record of his existence. The police are able through credible work to locate the property and rescue his mother and reunite her and the grand child with her mother who is now divorced and in a new relationship and where the girl’s father lives at some distance. He returns but cannot accept the grandson and leaves. While the authorities do everything, they can to prepare mother to return to normality and Jack to adjust to life, both find the challenge exceptionally difficult as do all the other family members. Controlling and dealing with media is an issue which occurs in real situations and where victims have written books, given interviews and participated in documentaries.

Jack who at first refuses to communicate with anyone other than his mother and refuses his hair to be cut and for the first time begins to adjust with the help of a pet dog and boy of his own age, learning to play with other boys and to go to school.  His mother finds it more difficult to cope especially when challenged about having become complicit in the situation something with life victims have all had to face. Mother becomes withdrawn, depressed and attempts to take her own life. The grandmother can cut his hair and sending this to his mother as a reminder of his existence and adjustment so far, help the mother to survive. They both decide on the need to visit the place where they live and Jack comments that the place has shrunk. The both say goodbye to the Room leaving the audience upbeat with a sense that they will survive

Thirteen. I missed the original BBC showing of the five-episode showing of Thirteen, the fictional account of a young women who at the age of 26 escapes after 13 years of captivity for sex. The episodes are available on the BBC I Player. She is found  by the police and DNA confirms  she is the missing daughter of a couple  who have separated, the husband living with his personal assistant at work and a young daughter who  is about to marry and lives with her fiancé at the family home, Despite warnings that adjustment  back will be difficult daughter and her mother and mother insist on an immediate return  home and mother also insists on the husband moving back into the household in order to re-establish a normality as things were 13 years before. Ivy, the victim, appears as determined as her mother to recreate the situation before the adduction.

The police have questions, not the least to identify and apprehend the perpetrator and are concerned what appears to them to be a reluctance rather than an inability help find the location. When they do they find evidence of inconsistency in the story presented that Ivy was never allowed out of the basement where she was held and which has been cleared along with the rest of house to provide no evidence or clues of what has happened and where the captor could now be. Then the discovery of female clothing in any upstairs bedroom suggests that she was allowed out of the basement and then the discovery of torn passport size photo indicates she was out of the house. Ivy claims that although this happened there was never an opportunity to get help or escape.  CCTV footage from a shopping mall demonstrates this also was not true.

The next development is the identification and location of the captor’s mother to a residential home where it established she died sometime previously but had another son. The finding that there was a younger half-brother adds to concern about the story Ivy has given.  The female police detective has been the most sceptical about the story presented and works out there is more space in the cellar area that what appears and discover a false wall behind which is the skeleton of the half-brother. The evidence of his age confirms that he was present in the property during the time Ivy was captive and it is her DNA on the covering of the remains. She admits she was present when the captor killed his half-brother and is charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Through social media Ivy had contacted a boy with whom she had been close when she disappeared. It is evident she had hoped he had remained faithful in his commitment at the time to her. He hides the fact that he has married and is guilty about establishing a life for himself and where he fails to share his developing contact with his wife and which causes Ivy and his wife to distrust him when the truth emerges. Ivy was on her way to meet up with two school’s friends on the morning she disappeared and one of the friends returns, guilty at the decision not to attend the meeting and at first is forgiven by Ivy because of all the other if only events had not happened that day. What is not forgiven is failing to disclose she had stayed with the former boyfriend and his wife on returning and knew he was married.

It has emerged that the captor had worked at the school but does this fact alone account for the panic by the Headmaster at the news that Ivy has returned and over the series we discover that the cause of his guilt is that on the morning on her disappearance he was having a secret assignation with the girl’s mother.  The younger sister at first convinced the returning young woman was not her sister changes and the two become conspiratorial and this undermines the relationship with the fiancé. The programme highlights the anger victims feel with their families over having found ways to move on.

Concern by police mounts when another young girl is kidnapped and by the same captor and because of having killed his half-brother the welfare of the kidnapped girl becomes urgent and paramount. The captor contacts the police asking for a meeting with Ivy. Everyone is reassured that Ivy will be protected at the meeting in a shopping centre with 50 plain clothes officer monitoring. Despite this the captor has contact undetected and makes his escape with Ivy on the basis the new kidnapped girl is released which she is unharmed and reunited with her parents[CS1] .

Worse is to follow because the captor can escape further to an unknown destination by causing the chasing vehicle with the two detectives to crash, seriously injuring one. We switch to house where Ivy is being half again and we learn that she had been pregnant at one point and the man appears determined to reinstate their previous relationship. She manages to escape from the house which explodes in a burst of flames in a planned suicide attempt by the captor as the police who with the help of the recovered girl have located the property. What is also clear is that the substance of Ivy’s story is proven. The outline of the story fails to convey the insight into the complex impact of being taken, raped and held for years has had on Ivy and need to block out and go back to the girl and situation as before. While there are some credibility issues in the storyline there are several excellent other performances. I am still left with the question Entertainment no so what has been the point?

I remember well the first series of the British American Missing with James Nesbitt seeking to recover an abducted boy so I decided to watch the second series which commenced on October 12 with the 3^rd episode on October 26th. I am covering some of the work of James Nesbitt when writing about the latest series of Cold Feet after an absence of over a decade.

As with Ivy in Thirteen, a daughter Alice, aged 11 years who disappeared while her father, an army officer was stationed in Germany in 2002, dramatically reappears when she walks out of a forest 12 years later and where it emerges she has held with another girl Sophie Giraux, a crime investigated by a French Police detective Julien Baptiste. He had promised to do everything to find the child but without success, he had failed to prevent Mrs Giraux committing suicide from a building in the presence of her husband who understandably has never forgiven Baptise for his failure, something which Bapriste has also failed to do.

Alice is disorientated and in bare feet when she is discovered and from the outset there are questions about her and her story. The father is played by the established actor David Morrissey who has had a long and outstanding stage, TV and film career and plays an officer no longer on active duty because of incident which has left him disfigured from burns. While he is immediately convinced the girl is Alice, his partner is not convinced.  As with Ivy the father and the victim want to return to their home but her behaviour is intended to alert us that something is not right. She persuades her brother to lock her in the garden shed at night she cannot cope with the normality of heated room, soft bed and family sleeping times. I briefly had a similar experience after months of hard bed in a cell with a light always on so a check could have been at intervals throughout the night. It also brings back the hours I spent as child kept in room and told to be silent while visitors from the homeland of my birth and care mothers were in their home and were not to know of existence.

With help in which the Amy can join forces with the German police the place in which for a time the two girls are believed to have been held together in a WWII bunker. There is a private meeting at one point between Alice and the commanding senior officer and from their conversation it is possible to say that he was somehow involved with the disappearance. A receipt discovered at the bunker leads them to a local butcher whose wife had served in the army with history yet to be revealed but where the commanding officer appears to have some hold over her. Alice identifies the butcher from a series of photos. The man is arrested and subsequently convicted and imprisoned.

The French Detective retired and suffering from terminal cancer abandons his wife determined to fulfil his promise to Mrs Giroux and her husband and persuades the parents to allow him to talk to Alice and given the similarity between the two girls when they were abducted he begins to question which girl has reappeared, doubts which the mother has already tried to voice. He speaks to the girl in French but she appears not to understand. He suggests to the mother a DNA test which Alice overhears. Baptiste contacts Mr Giroux to persuade him to go with him to Germany. Understandably he refuses.  Alive kills herself by setting fire to the garden shed with herself inside.

The series switches between 2002, 2014 and the present when the son appears to have become embittered and right wing carries out a request from Alice to visit the man she accused in prison and say sorry on her behalf. Baptiste is in Iraq in search of an army officer who he had met at the time of the original disappearance and who has joined one of the warring groups.  He persuades a journalist with connections to take up into an area of conflict and on their way from a deserted   village where there was evidence the army officer had been present they are taken by the Peshmerga soldiers and brought to their frontline where they meet up with the army officer who although appears to know something refuses to help. Back in Germany the mother comes across a video which appears to show her daughter, alive. The first series had eight episodes.

The Code is an Australian drama series taking over the Saturday evening BBC Four slot usually reserved for a drama in another language than English. We are now midway through the second series of six programmes which features a computer technocrat genius on the autism spectrum, Jesse and his journalist brother Ned. Both series cover the same basic issues of government complicity and duplicity, turning the blind eye and cover up, as officials engage in crossing the line activities to protect the interests of International corporations who are not opposed to using, often at arm’s length, killing, violence, intimidation, blackmail, corruption and cover up to protect and further their commercial interests.

I am including the Code at this point because the first three episodes of the four shown to-date of the second series involves a dark net service in which children are kidnapped and trafficked for sex. The computer code break skills of Jesse is demanded by the Australian government when two of three male Australian citizens are murdered in West Papua, New Guinea, controlled it is alleged by the Indonesian Government through the tactics of a police state, opposing demands by the indigenous people for independence and freedom from exploitation by an international mining consortium with Australian, British and USA financial interests and where the ability of outsiders, particularly journalists to visit is strictly controlled.

This aspect of the fictional drama series is accurate as in the early 1960’s the Netherlands gave up its control of New Guinea with West Papua absorbed by the Indonesian Government during a period when Indonesia conflicted with its enforced involvement in the proposed new Malaysia. The conflict resulted in the defeat of the left of centre political movement and decades of right wing military dictatorship during which time the population has more than doubled to over 200 million with nearly 60% on the largest of its 13000 islands, Java, and to becoming one of the more prosperous world economies (16^th). There is no political freedom of expression allowed in West Papua with anyone opposing exterminated and the rest of the world tolerating because of its capitalist interests, including arms sales.

The Australian government coerces the involvement of brothers with the threat of agreeing to extradition to the United States because of  the hacking involved  in the first series but then gain the willing participation of Jesse when he learns that the survivor of the three men attacked by the militia is the fugitive founder (Roth) of a dark net site part of which includes the children kidnapped on demand and trafficked for sexual purposes and that a male adolescent has been kidnapped and was available for the right price. Jesse contacts the service with help of the government cybercrime chief and team and offers to provide Roth with the encryption key to the Government’s internal network which enable Roth to find out the names of the undercover intelligence people after him. There is agreement to meet in the far north of Queensland  and Jesse is accompanied by his girlfriend Hani Parende, a student computer expert who in the first series is blackmailed by the national cyber unit to befriending Jesse to protect her father (whose visa is under threat and where a return to his homeland would mean torture and death) and where he was and remains opposed to her friendship with Jesse and a proposed marriage.

The couple are taken by Roth in his boat to his base hideout in the jungle of West Papua where they meet up with Roth’s indigenous wife and daughter and whose brother in law is an activist in the freedom movement. The purpose of Jesse’s visit is to plant a programme which opens the back door which all computers have and which enables direct control of content with permission, which I had once agreed and witnessed, and which can also enable authorised government operatives to use, even when devices are turned off, to turn on and monitor content. 

The two brothers, the elder Ned, are first contacted at the funeral of their mother and where the funeral also brings contact with their estranged father who previously had abandoned his wife and children. A feature of contemporary TV and film series is the dysfunctional family as the norm of family life, and which together with the increasing worldwide mobility, as much for work as leisure, means that the several generation of care and support family networks used to provide have broken or are breaking down further at the very time public service provision is being shrunk and the availability of other forms of community support is very much a lottery of geography and who you know.

Ned whose required support role for Jesse throughout the first series has been replaced by Hani, is nevertheless concerned about the disappearance of his brother who fails to return from the North Queensland meeting and starts his own investigation with the help of an estranged former girlfriend who works within the government structure. Obtaining the names of the two murdered men he notes the connection with a photographer and activist who is in fact working undercover to expose the role of external governments, the Indonesian government and the Mining Company.  She lets Ned know that Jesse is on the island and safe. Although this may have been true at the time, Roth, the undercover journalist, Jesse and Hani go into town to view the body in the morgue of a colleague who has been killed and framed for the murder of the two Australian citizens thus officially closing that aspect of the case. As they leave they are attacked by gunmen on a motor cycle but escape unharmed.

However, Jesse is psychologically affected and it is Roth who gets him back to his encampment safely. Therefore, Jesse discloses the purpose of his mission and Roth appears to be horrified that his services are being used for the paedophile network and offers to help by returning to Queensland where an associate looks after a mirror/branch server on Roth’s family farm. As they are about to arrive the boat is intercepted by the Australian border patrol and they jump overboard to go in search of the missing kid. The second episode ends.

The third episode begins as the two survive the swim ashore, recover and make their way to meet up with Roth’s associate who has effectively kidnapped the boy through grooming using a non-existent female friendship and has taken him to a property where the buyer is arriving to rape and murder and which appears to have been the fate of other children in the past. When Roth meets up with his partner he rages about his server being used for paedophilia, demands to know the location of the boy and then brutally murders the man in front of Jesse who runs off in horror and panic but can return to Canberra, the seat of government and assist in locating the premises and rescuing the boy who is reunited with his parents, and the buyer having been identified is arrested on arrival at the airport.  At this point, everyone should be congratulating themselves over a job well done. Certainly, the Foreign Minister is reassured that a politically difficult situation has been sorted.

Then three actions by the government change everything. The visa of Hani’s father is revoked and he is taken into custody. Jesse and Ned are told that the extradition to the USA is back on the agenda. The leader of the West Papua freedom movement and his family are arrested and deported from the island and the only chink in what appears to be a cover up process by the government is that Ned with visual information provided by the undercover friend on the island (Meg Flynn) is able with the help of his former girlfriend to gate crash a meeting and make direct contact with the female Foreign Minister.

Ned Jesse and Meg flee Australia and go to West Papua by plane where they head for the Roth compound. Forces who do not want the Foreign Minister making further inquiries arrange for her daughter to be given a university scholarship when all the Minister has done was to plead with the university to be flexible when the girl misses the registration date. At a subsequent meeting between the Minister and the cyber unit head, knowledge of the scholarship is mentioned and we interpret this as one other measure to stop investigation to what is going on.  Back at the compound Roth is surprised by their arrival but accepts the reasons and after getting Jesse stoned gets Jesse to break the Code for a USA security programme which enables them to affect the digital system including cameras operating in the prison where his brother in law is being held. Roth heads off to town to rescue the brother in law whose wife is already there with Ned and his daughter protesting at the imprisonment.  A motor cyclist then arrives shooting indiscriminately at protestors and Ned witnesses the shooting of Roth’s daughter as the episode ends. I will complete the review after the conclusion and say more about the first series and more about politics and big business in land of Rupert Murdoch

Although the three series The Fall is about the capture of a brutal serial killer of young women in Northern Ireland as the series reached its conclusion it emerges that the killer had been placed in children’s home where he had been selected to be sexually abuse every day for year until another victim was selected and in a situation where the boys had to strip at assembly masturbate themselves and the staff. I became interested in the series only recently when I recognised that the lead female role was being played by Gillian Anderson who made her name in the over 200-episode TV series the X Files along with David Duchoveny and which led to one off cinema films and a short season (11) resurrection 14 years later of six episodes earlier this year.

Gillian plays an investigative senior police office heading a special task force on the track of  Paul Spector played by Jamie Dorman and from the episodes viewed there is an emotional and psychological intensity which is powerful and extraordinary in the  two lead performances and also the head of special psychiatric unit in which the killer is placed in very secure condition in order to establish if he is faking  short term amnesia allegedly caused by being shot when in police Northern Ireland custody and being transferred. The series is very disturbing and not for those likely to be triggered by scenes of great physical violence. Jamie Dorman is brilliant at communicate a man who is adored by his daughter supported by his wife, able to attract the obsessional devotion of a teenage girl who assaults a young woman claiming to be in a relationship with Spector, who is also able to gain sympathetic attentions from medical and nursing staff who save his life hospital, and sympathetic attention for a female lawyer assisting someone who revels in the opportunity to represent the killer and beat the state. For her persistence in proving he is faking his memory loss he made to inflict physical pain and damage on the senior police woman, kills someone at the secure unit who he manipulates to cause a riot so he can almost kill the psychiatrist in charge who has also penetrated his psychological defences. Spector can cheat years of imprisonment, psychological probing and having to face the reality of himself by committing suicide.

There is no single response in terms of later behaviour by those who have been sexual and physical abuse in childhood with Spector at one end of the spectrum. To be able to get around the alleged memory loss, the team are provided with information about a crime he has committee several years previously and for which someone has confessed and imprisoned. The explanation for this extraordinary behaviour is that the individual in question had been with Spector in the home and when Spector was asked to select the next victim to replace himself he had walked passed and selected another, although the boy new he was the likely target. He owed Spector in a way only victims who have been in similar situations can understand and akin to those in the Nazi concentration camps who could survive by assisting in some off the chores involved in the camp which included harvesting hair, gold teeth, spectacles. and anything of value from the prisoners before their extermination.

In complete contrast, I consider very funny in a healthy kind of way, the Comedy Series Damned set in the Children’s Services Department of the fictional Elm Health Council with Jo Brand and Alan Davies among others coping with the realities of their own lives. Jo’s mother has psychotic severe recent memory loss, there is a receptionist straight out of the Vicar of Dibley, a questionable acting senior and a team head under constant pressure from them above.

Damned is shown well after the watershed at 10pm which is welcomed and deliberate because of the understanding Jo has about triggering.  Jo Brand is the daughter of a social worker and she studied for a combined social science degree with mental health nursing and practiced for ten years before becoming a stand-up comedienne, writer and starring in TV shows, a personality and a minor national institution for her acerbic put downs of those who take themselves too seriously in terms of attempting to project an only one sided presentation of themselves. Her republican views and open support for the Labour Party means she is unlikely to graduate into a major institutional figure. She visited South Shields before David Miliband decided to leave Parliament and the UK to give his annual” lecture” to Party members.

She is perfectly partnered in the series which ends this evening (November1st) by her co-writer Morwena Banks and Alan Davies, another with stand-up comedy experience, best known for his role as Jonathan Creek and a permanent member of the QI team.  I was reminded that their strength is acting as mirrors to funny side of human frailty while watching a splendid TV biography of the Mr Stand-up himself the unique and brilliant Peter Kay, another who writes, plays and directs his work and continues to live in the lace(Bolton) where he was born with his family.

However, the short series of damned is unlikely to change the need for a radical think again about how we provide child protection on behalf of the state but is does gently draw attention to the dangers of overreaction and the limitation of the case conference with its inherent problem of bring together people with a range of abilities, understanding and training and whose everyday focus is very different and at times incompatible.  In one episode, a teenage girl admits to having made up accusations against a teacher for media cash while the police want to engage the anti-terrorist squad when girls disappeared and it is the Vicar of Dibley innocent who works out the that the text of a note found t at the home of one of the girls is that of a current song of band and where the girls are identified from CCTV waiting to get into a concert after Alan Davies uses the Internet. There is a splendid last series episode with a wonderful outburst at the impact of a hundred George Osbornes on the ability of the department to cope with all the demands being made. The boss scares a teacher at the son’s school who texts him inappropriately and the mother forgets where she puts down her child in the supermarket from tiredness is given a warning (being middle class).

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