There was, of course, a public inquiry. It concluded that most of the diagnoses by Higgs and another paediatrician, Geoff Wyatt, were incorrect. Higgs was subsequently banned by her local health authority from dealing with child sex abuse cases. But this scandal is not what it seems, and it destroyed far more than the careers of two medics. It baked into child protection services a scepticism of children’s accounts of their own experiences.

The campaigning journalist Beatrix Campbell has followed the Cleveland case since it broke in 1987. A year later, her first book on the scandal, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse — The Cleveland Case, was published. In it, Campbell examines how Cleveland council made child sexual abuse a priority, engaging with medical experts and innovative diagnostic procedures, only to be met by a backlash from statutory services. Children had not been abused, it was decided. Rather, the scandal was a witch-hunt against parents.

Now, her new book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Legacy of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Case, revisits the scandal — with the proof necessary to back up her earlier suspicions. The 30-year rule allows certain government documents to be released publicly three decades after they entered the National Archive. Thanks to this, Campbell found evidence that “there was a cover-up, and that the doctors and social workers were not wrong about so many of those children having been sexually abused”.

Shocking failures led to the government inquiry coming to a completely false conclusion. For instance, the only international expert consulted was Dr Ralph Underwager, who in 1992 helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — an organisation that claimed counsellors and parents were manipulating kids into believing they had been abused. Underwager became mired in controversy when, a year later, he gave an interview to a Dutch paedophile magazine in which he said that paedophiles should “boldly and courageously affirm what they choose”.

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Campbell also found evidence that the Government knew at least 80% of the diagnoses of these children were correct — but hushed it up because the Treasury had warned that dealing with this abuse would be expensive. Saving money was more important than saving children. Local MP Stuart Bell set the agenda, saying it was simply “not possible” that all these children could have been abused. He became, says Campbell, “the advocate for accused adults”. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister at the time, made clear her deep mistrust of social workers, and of feminists. Two days before the inquiry was announced, she was asked if she would “allocate extra funds to deal with the rising rate of child abuse referrals”. She replied simply, “no”.

Support fell behind the police — who, Campbell argues, were the main culprits in enabling abusers to evade justice. “Cleveland had a macho, misogynistic police force,” she says. And, as has been proved time and time again, “asking a patriarchal service to police patriarchal behaviour is pointless”. Cleveland was unlike other authorities, “for example in Leeds, where there was a very well-developed, collegial culture between police, paediatricians, social workers, rape crisis centres”. In Cleveland, by contrast, police “were pretty much told they didn’t have to liaise with other professionals over child sexual abuse, and that was a complete disaster, and one that was repeated in many subsequent child abuse scandals”.

The media also failed, quickly falling in line with the government. National newspapers called for the blood of social workers, and the local Evening Gazette ran a “Give Us Back Our Children” campaign. Ultimately, no perpetrators were identified, let alone charged or convicted. Following the inquiry, 27 families sued the NHS, as well as the council and individual medics, costing the state £1 million in out-of-court settlements.

Campbell tells me that what she finds most cruel in this whole story is that the children at its heart — whose difficulties had prompted responses by professionals — were then subjected to a very public inquisition. Only a handful of those children have ever come forward to tell their stories, and just one has done so both before and after reading her social service records. When, at the age of 40, Minnie* first approached Campbell out of the blue, she asked: “Are there a few of us, like me?”

In Minnie’s eyes, Marietta Higgs — who one journalist at the time of the inquiry described as “the most hated woman in Britain” — was a hero. Minnie met her after being referred to social services at the age of 10, following her brother’s revelations about child sexual abuse at the hands of their sadistic stepfather. Minnie was examined by Higgs, who found signs of rape. Higgs made Minnie feel safe. “She was my saviour,” she says.

For Campbell, this is what a good child protection system looks like: “The abused child who describes an experience of feeling saved.” And yet, the name of Marietta Higgs has long been used as a warning against overactive imaginations in social workers, doctors or other advocates for children. It has been evoked to discredit victims who choose to speak out later in life, as Minnie has.

The disgrace of it is that, when her name was first being dragged through mud, secret documents that vindicated Higgs’s conclusions were circulating around Westminster. A confidential dossier put together by the Northern Regional Health Authority was sent to the Ministry of Health in 1988 and presented to Parliament. It exonerated Higgs and accepted that around 70-75% of the diagnoses were correct. Campbell got hold of the document while updating her original book on Cleveland. She assumed that Higgs had read it, but when she visited her at her home in 2017, discovered she had not. Higgs has since retired.

One of the many disappointing things about the Cleveland scandal is that it had been preceded by a moment of enlightenment, largely triggered by feminist activism: people working in health and social services had been paying better attention to testimony about sexual abuse. Campbell sees the scandal as “a devastating example of a backlash against what feminists had achieved: as a result, all of that learning was thrown away, squandered, and condemned”.

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As a result, the campaign by Cleveland parents, and the public humiliation of the doctors at the heart of the scandal, focused on the accused adults, rather than the vulnerable children. Jean La Fontaine, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics who specialised in the study of sexual abuse, told the inquiry:

“Whenever we come to consider this issue, the children seem to get lost in the system. In the public inquiry, and before it, we heard a lot about parents’ rights. Perhaps it’s one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children’s voices have not been heard.”

The legacy of this, which lasts to this day, is tragic. “It shaped the entire approach to child protection politics for three decades, and was completely catastrophic,” says Campbell. Services today are still heavily influenced by what happened in 1987, in that few children are believed, and it is almost impossible to secure a conviction when they are. We just have to look at the so-called grooming gangs scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere to see how children are routinely disbelieved. “We now have a situation where, if you want to sexually abuse children, you can just do it, because you will get away with it,” says Campbell.

This could have been stopped in 1987, when there was a unique opportunity in Cleveland to bring the prevalence of child sexual abuse out of the shadows. Instead, it set back the issue significantly. It plunged Britain back into a dark age, by telling future generations of abused children that if they spoke out, they would not be listened to. It also created professional anxiety among doctors and social workers, who feared being treated as Marietta Higgs was.

Campbell met endless obstacles in the course of her reporting, from unobtainable documents to the influence of “false memory” organisations on the general public. Campbell even found herself arguing with her publishers’ “sensitivity readers”, who were offended by the description of “anal dilation” being used to detect whether the children had been anally raped. “I am offended at child rape, and those that seek to cover it up,” she tells me. The truth is gruesome, but that doesn’t mean we should hide from it.

As for the Cleveland children, they are now well into adulthood. Aside from the small number that have ever spoken out, where are they now? “We don’t know what happened to them because there was no follow-up,” says Campbell. “It would be like 121 children falling off a cliff in a bus and surviving terrible injuries, and nobody was interested in how they managed.” We can only hope her reporting is the first step towards the public hearing these children’s stories again — and, this time, believing them.

*This name has been changed.

When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”

In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.

As the grooming gang scandals erupting in the UK have shown, this permissive attitude towards CSA seems to be spreading. A new documentary by GBNews attempts to uncover why the abuse scandal in Rotherham — in which more than 1,500 underage, often impoverished, white girls were groomed and raped by gangs of Pakistani men — was allowed to go on for decades without the authorities intervening. One obvious reason is that these authorities were afraid of being seen as “racist” for focusing the investigation on the predominantly Pakistani men who are running these rings. But it’s equally important to recognise that these crimes were covered up by the Pakistani community itself, which allowed abusers to continue with impunity. The documentary shows how Pakistani-British policemen and Rotherham city councillors either tried to suppress reports about the scandal, or deny it was happening at all.

To reject the uncomfortable truth is the modus operandi in Pakistan, where more than 12 children are reported to be sexually abused every day. In the tight-knit, working-class communities where it’s most likely to take place, fear of bringing “shame” on the family is prioritised over safeguarding individuals, even if they’re children. A conservative attitude towards discussing topics of a sexual nature doesn’t help. A 2013 report by Save The Children offers an insight into how family dynamics play out when CSA is uncovered in Pakistan, where its prevalence “appears to be high”. Of the 99% of mothers in Pakistan who were aware of CSA, around one-fifth either considered children as compliant, or blamed them for the abuse. Confronted with the grizzly details of such crimes, it is common for Pakistanis to downplay their severity, with men often seeing it as “a part of life”, to use the report’s phrase.

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In Rahim’s family, when the eldest sister finally told their mother that an uncle had regularly raped three of the four children in the house, Rahim’s mother didn’t believe her, instead accusing her of “being hysterical and dramatic”. When her siblings insisted that the abuse was, in fact, happening, their mother finally confronted the uncle — but didn’t mention it to Rahim’s father, a marine engineer who was away from home for up to 10 months of the year. The uncle apologised, and the abuse stopped — but just for a few months. It was only when the uncle got married and moved out that the children’s five-year ordeal finally came to an end. By then, Rahim says, the eldest sister’s “problems started manifesting because of the trauma and she started rebelling”, eventually running away from home and telling the authorities about the abuse. When Rahim’s father was told, he didn’t believe any of it was true.

We have to recognise that these attitudes are cultural, if we are to understand what happened in Rotherham. Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation UK, has often commented on the over-representation of Pakistani men involved in grooming gangs in the West: “They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.” In communities where parents are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to “keep the peace”, it’s rare for anyone to stick their neck out to speak up for the rights of poor and vulnerable white girls, who are considered outsiders. The general attitude seems to be: those non-Muslim “white slags” had it coming.

Predators exploit the high-trust environment enjoyed by citizens in more developed nations, such as the UK and Canada. Girls outside the Pakistani community are more accessible to predators because they have greater social freedom; the most accessible are those without reliable carers. One of the eeriest moments in the documentary was when a victim of the grooming gangs described what happened to her as “normal”. The sexual abuse of young girls like her was so commonplace in these towns, they didn’t think it was unusual to be drugged, gang raped, and trafficked by young men who passed themselves off as the girls’ boyfriends. Is this what a multicultural society is supposed to tolerate under the guise of “social cohesion”?

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Unfortunately, the Pakistani community is still not ready to talk about CSA — a fact recognised by those few British Pakistanis who have spoken out against it. Shame and honour codes hold too much power, and those codes are hard to change. Shafiq, of The Ramadhan Foundation, notes that “for years some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand about these predatory grooming gangs”. When family members of perpetrators were interviewed, they described white girls as “filthy”, commenting on their clothing, and saying, “they have no shame, no fear of Allah”. When asked how she would feel if her own daughter were abused, the Pakistani wife of one of the predators replied: “It can’t happen to our children because they are not in the streets. We look after them.”

When Rahim’s uncle was finally arrested, following the revelation that he had abused other children in the neighbourhood, the Pakistani community came together to do damage control. By this point, the abuser had two young children of his own. Rahim’s parents were advised by other Pakistani immigrants not to talk about his crimes because “they didn’t want the family’s image to be tarnished in the community”. They put pressure on Rahim to write a letter to the judge asking for a lighter sentence, their logic being that his cousins shouldn’t be made to grow up without a father.

“I was young at the time,” Rahim reflects. “I just did whatever the adults told me to do, so I wrote it.” His uncle went to prison for two years. When he was released, he and his family moved to Alberta. “His wife never left him, and his kids have no idea,” Rahim says. Rahim’s father forgave his brother, and even flew across the country to meet with him. “When he was in prison, everyone asked where he was, and we just lied and said he got a job up in the Northwest Territories and he’s making a lot of money up there. It was the community convincing my parents to cover it up.”

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Tragic as it is, Rahim’s story is not unusual. It illustrates how sexual abuse goes unchecked within Pakistani communities. Rapists know that the community will not ostracise them. They’ll never be without a home or a job. Their mothers, siblings, wives and friends will actually cover for them. Even if they are convicted, they will most likely spend only a few years behind bars before they’re free to re-offend. They may even be encouraged to see themselves as victims of a racist criminal justice system that treats minorities unfairly. In Shafiq’s words: “They believe it is they who are victims of a racist witch-hunt — despite the fact that Pakistani gangs were allowed to rape their way around Rotherham for so long because, in part, politically correct officials were terrified of being accused of racism. They see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’.”

Sadly, there is little hope of justice for the victims of grooming gangs in the UK without the cooperation of the Pakistani community. And unless Pakistanis find the courage to shine a light on what is an atrocious open secret within our communities, I fear what happened in Rotherham will continue to happen, devastating the lives of countless children and women, immigrant or otherwise. It pains me to think that what has recently been discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, there is plenty more abuse taking place across the UK within insular Pakistani communities. And change can only come about if we set aside the tribal instincts that have enabled one of the worst cases of child sexual exploitation in modern history.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the victim.

Whenever these gangs reappear in public view, responses tend to fall into two categories. The first laments the youth and vulnerability of the victims and wonders which public-sector measures could be implemented to stop such things happening again.

The second type points out that the safeguarding lot are keen to talk about anything but the ethnic disparity between the victims (usually young, white, and working-class) and the rapists (usually of South Asian heritage, often though not exclusively Muslim). The implication is usually that if only we stopped bowing to political correctness, and allowing mass immigration into the country, nothing like this would ever happen.

One side blames poverty, inadequate sex education and institutional safeguarding failures; the other, immigration and political correctness. But there’s another aspect that neither side wishes to acknowledge.

That is, a subset of adult men takes an intense sexual interest in very young girls. This isn’t specific to one culture or ethnicity: today’s report from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial describes the grooming and abuse of a 14-year-old in a setting with different sociocultural traits and far more money, but which otherwise follows much the same pattern as that suffered by the girls in Hull and other UK towns. And we’ve embraced a culture that normalises extreme and ‘kinky’ forms of sexual self-expression — including for adolescents — while our medico-legal and cultural frameworks blur the official age of consent.

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Taken together, this results in a culture where even lovingly parented and closely supervised girls routinely encounter opportunistic pervs. Meanwhile, girls who are neglected, unloved or otherwise vulnerable are left with few defences against their attention. Why do neither the anti-immigration side nor the safeguarding hand-wringers want to confront this? Because sexual freedom is of net benefit to everyone who’s already empowered — including most of the angry editorial-writers on both sides.

This worldview holds that all forms of sexual activity are legitimate, and our freedoms on this front should be constrained only by consent. Perhaps the central contributor to this worldview is the cultural theorist (and paedophile) Michel Foucault, who made the case in History of Sexuality that there are no sexual crimes as such. Rather, there are only acts that we choose to construct as harmful.

Foucault took this up to the point of suggesting that children can in some circumstances participate in sexual activity without being harmed. We find traces of this argument in, for example, the Seventies campaign to cut the age of consent to 14 or in some circumstances 10. Further traces can be found in the Gillick v Wisbech 1986 legal case that blurred the legal age of consent by establishing doctors’ right to prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without their parents’ knowledge, where the girl was deemed mature enough.

Even as Foucault blurred questions of childhood sexuality, and Gillick opened the door to doctors condoning (safe) underage sex, pop culture was full of the voices of men pushing at legal restrictions on sexualising under-16s. It was 1981 when Ted Nugent released the song ‘Jailbait’, which includes the line “I don’t care if you’re just thirteen”. There are plenty more such works.

As an adolescent in the 1990s, I recall being beeped by van drivers from some time before 16. In 2002 a 15-year-old Charlotte Church took legal action against a website which was counting down the days until she turned 16 and could legally have sex.

And a quick straw poll of my Twitter followers asking for recollections of when they began to be hit on by adult men returned hundreds of replies, giving an average age of 10-12.

Would even more men be willing to admit desiring very young girls if it weren’t frowned upon? One study showed that men took longer to admit finding a female image attractive if he’d been told she was 14 or 15. This suggests that, unsurprisingly, men are more hesitant to give expression to desires they know are socially unacceptable. And the flip side of this is that, implicitly, we should make sure men are vigorously encouraged to go on repressing these darker desires.

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But that’s not what either sex is encouraged to do today. Rather, both sexes grow up to an insistent drumbeat of ‘sex-positive’ feminism, which asserts (with Foucault) that all sexual expression is valid provided it’s consensual. And the bandwidth of that expression is considerably wider than it used to be, because children are exposed to porn around the age of 11 or even younger.

Studies show porn use normalises violent ‘sexual scripts’ for boys, while for girls pornography use is associated with participating in group sex, either voluntarily or coerced, and also agreeing to unwanted sex acts. (Presumably these register as ‘consensual’ and are therefore valid and empowering.)

Growing up amid such imagery, we find young women today expressing a desire for intimacy bound up with violence, such as in this TikTok video where a girl longs for “the type to give you forehead kisses but also the type to choke you”.

Meanwhile, on social media, teenagers claim casual sex is a game, emotional intimacy is cringe and drug and alcohol abuse is something to celebrate. It’s now easier to see why the Hull grooming gang case may have been difficult to prove.

Consider ‘Anna’, one of the victims, who was 16 when the abuse started. The fact that she was over 16 meant investigators reportedly had to show that she did not, in fact, consent to being threatened, bruised, choked and violently raped.

How are police supposed to tell the difference between consensual and abusive choking and rape, when we can’t agree sexual acts such as choking are bad or even reach consensus on the proper age at which someone’s deemed capable of consenting to them?

Scandal after scandal breaks, and we go on pretending this culture is fine and all we need is better ‘consent’ education or more effective policing. But it should be clear by now that ‘consent’ is no protection from predators.

And neither are the police. They can only punish clear and provable violations of commonly-held public norms, which have already taken place. We have so thoroughly stripped sex of norms that it often only becomes possible to demarcate rape in cases where a girl is so grotesquely underage or unwilling that no one could seriously argue she ‘consented’.

No one wants to confront this. Instead, every time the scandal bubbles up again we bicker a bit about racism and safeguarding, then go back to sexual liberation as usual. Because in practice, protecting young girls from the seemingly ineradicable minority of hebephilic predators doesn’t just look like handing out contraception or telling girls not to talk to strangers.

Along with tougher sentencing for abusers, preventive measures might mean restrictions on pubescent girls’ social lives, so they’re less exposed to opportunistic predators. Such an approach might also seek to get skimpy and figure-hugging clothing off the shop rails — especially in outlets aimed at adolescents.  It might call not just for ‘education’ on how to make sense of pornography, but serious efforts to suppress it — not just for children but everyone.

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It might include not just ‘education’ in how and where to ‘consent’, or avoid pregnancy while leading a promiscuous life, but widespread social deprecation of sexual promiscuity. It might even mean re-evaluating the idea that it’s possible have both a stigma-free sexual culture and also public norms that keep predators away from young girls.

And even though all of these measures together might add up to greater protection from sexual abuse, some will claim they’re indistinguishable from the ‘patriarchal’ constraints on erotic freedom that sex-positivity has been working so hard, for so long, to do away with. Others will say I’m victim-blaming, and really what we need to do is teach rapists not to rape. But given that making rape illegal hasn’t stopped rapists raping, it’s hard to see what a few classes would achieve

As long as we keep resisting any constraint on our erotic freedom, we’re effectively asking young girls to be the change we want to see in the world. The cost of our ongoing failure to expunge the dark underbelly of male sexuality and attain liberated, empowered universal erotic utopia is counted on their youthful bodies.

The grooming gangs are a unique evil. The men who commit these crimes should be punished to the utmost. But the racialised atrocities conducted within those gangs are on us too: a grotesque caricature of a sexual culture in which we all collude.

Liberal adults demanded the right to sexual self-expression — including even loveless, violent, commercial, kinky, no-holds-barred or violent acts. Now we have it. And so do frightened, lonely, unloved, impoverished female children in depressed cities up and down the country.

Last week, testimony from pupils at Highgate School, Latymer Upper School, Dulwich College and elsewhere was circulated online from a website called Everyone’s Invited, a name that is bleakly witty. The allegations are posted anonymously by those at both private and state schools and universities across the country: but the media emphasised the private schools, where the cognitive dissonance is more dramatic, and the photographs are better.

There are stories of forced fellatio, emotional bullying and rape, drunken and sober. It is repulsive to read, and the schools had to respond. They will listen to The Times, if not the students, whose parents pay £21,600 a year. Allegations were reportedly ignored or soothed away with conundrums such as: we believe you — but will others? Now Dulwich College has called the police on two of its own pupils and Highgate offered an apology and promised to commission an independent review: the medium guns, then, and they need them, because anger is building.

The term “rape culture” is used to describe what is happening in these schools, and this makes me uneasy. The very phrase seems to offer the possibility of mitigation, for rape is the only crime in which this race for mitigation exists: if everyone is complicit, no one is guilty. Is a culture convictable? Is it punishable? I would be amazed if there were more sexual assaults in public schools than in state schools, even as the word entitlement is also used of these children: why would there be? Who is not entitled when it comes to young female bodies? Sexual assault: the great leveller.

There will be hand wringing and an offensive and cosmetic penance. Let us see how many careless teachers are sacked, how many teenage rapists jailed. There will possibly be a handful of out-of-court settlements, and then — nothing much at all. And that’s for the public school girls. Will the girls from state schools get any justice worth the name? The experience of the victims of the Rotherham grooming scandal suggests not. The victims will carry their burden alone; many will break, not under the burden of the crime, but under the burden of the disbelief: a double abandonment. That is usually the way.

For the private school pupils, though, it is different. Their stories lead the news pages, which may give them hope, but the defensive propaganda has already begun, as it does when these institutions, entwined with the British state for centuries, feel themselves threatened. They can afford skillful PR. They are selling a dreamland, after all; but a dreamland for some is not a dreamland for others. It has begun to roll out already; and there will be more of it.

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My teenage son is not a rapist, wrote an anonymous mother in a Sunday newspaper, of an anonymous son that no one is calling a rapist: call him then a straw rapist. Do not blight a generation of schoolboys with upsetting allegations of rape, they say, ignoring the basic truth that rape is upsetting, and should always be treated as such. I would call these the old guns. There is an element of tribute in the reporting of the crisis for the public schools, even as this is described as “the next major scandal” for the country. But gawping is not justice. It is, quite often, a way of not seeing. It is entertainment.

And people, and journalists, will gawp. I was educated at a minor public school: almost half of newspaper columnists are, which is probably why our journalism on this subject is not better. We circle the fountain of inequality with jealous eyes; we rarely challenge it. Shame can still a pen. So can envy. Even progressive newspapers do not attack private schools as they should (it is not education they offer — if they did it would be cheaper — but social privilege) because so many journalists are educated there, and so are their children. Better to be a hypocrite in private than a fool in public. If you want justice, don’t look at us. We’re banging on the door too.

We do this because they are enchanted castles: it is no coincidence that Hogwarts is quite obviously an English public school, and strictly selective, though all fees are paid by the magical government, magically. Free public school standard education for all and an elite which includes everyone: that might be the most fantastical thing J K Rowling ever wrote.

But that enchanted girdle that public school winds around your future will only extend so far if you are female. The pay gap between the privately educated and state school educated university graduate with the same class of degree (7%-15%) does not exist for women, according to Engines of Privilege by David Kynaston and Francis Green, the definitive polemical book about private schools. Those girls who walked out of lessons last week in protest, might turn to this next.

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But first, there are allegations like this: “In year 9, a teacher said to a class of 13-year-olds that ‘wife’ stood for ‘washing, ironing, fucking etc.’ It came to a head for me when I was sexual assaulted by my then boyfriend and his friend at 17. I tried to confront them about it and was told I was ‘over-reacting’.” That is the race for mitigation, but they wouldn’t call it that. They imbue it subconsciously, completely, and without critical thought. Perhaps it will matter this time. But, again, I doubt it. William Knowland, the Eton master fired for his lecture The Patriarchy Paradox — “saying smash the patriarchy amounts to saying smash human nature and biological reality” (a straw mob now?) — had support for his reinstatement from thousands of alumni, and boys.

It is ageless. What should be a moment of genuine crisis, a catalyst for change, borne on the rising tide of domestic violence under the pandemic and the singular, shocking murder of Sarah Everard and the police’s response, will likely ebb away. The private schools at least have the resources for counselling, if they are minded, which is part of their ocean of privilege; the state schools do not. I grieve for all victims, but will the state school girls even be heard amid the clamour?

Perhaps, if we are lucky, we will learn exactly what has happened in these schools, and whether the privilege they inculcate in their pupils has contributed to something ignoble, and terrible. We will learn what happened in all the schools where girls are unsafe, and how to make them safe. Or will we learn that — as I think more likely — men of all classes like to harm women when they can get away with it, and they can get away with it as easily in an enchanted castle as anywhere? It is a kind of equality: of misery.