A British Underworld: Ex-Soldiers Embedded in a Network of Child Abuse and Murder

This article contains extremely disturbing details. The claims made in this piece have already been published prominently in the public domain. These details have been confirmed by police and/or in court. Furthermore, all of the individuals named as perpetrators of abuse in this piece have been convicted of sexual offences.

Beneath the surface of British society, there are dark things lurking. What is outlined in this article is a network of British child abusers whose viciousness almost defies comprehension; they operated from the 1960s all the way through to the 1990s – although they had historical antecedents arguably tracing back to the early 20th Century – and they targeted both boys and girls; most of their known victims were boys. Key members of this network previously served in the British Army, and there were disturbing echoes of their military service in a number of these crimes, whether it was a murdered boy seemingly last being seen alive in the company of a man in military attire; an ex-soldier terrorising his child victims by beating them with his army belt; an ex-soldier who enjoyed abusing boys being known by the nickname “Army John”; or an ex-soldier hooding a boy on camera, and then flashing his military tattoo before subjecting the boy to rape.

In case after case, there were structural failures in how the criminal justice system dealt with these crimes – in one case, potentially amounting to a cover-up – and moreover, something is revealed here about the nature of a society that can allow such crimes to go on for so long, carried out by a broad network of sadists, with vulnerable children not being properly protected and left at the mercy of such individuals. This network was so prolific that it expanded from Britain into the Netherlands in the late 1980s.

The fact that so many of the key offenders were ex-soldiers should also give one pause for thought about exactly what kind of institution the British Army is that it played a role in producing such individuals, who had connections with each other and were united by the extremely violent nature of the abuse that they carried out; and should also make us reflect on whether adulation should be the default attitude in relation to those who have served in the military, or whether a more sober and rational view should be adopted that goes beyond the simple ‘soldiers as heroes’ paradigm.

This is necessary so that we can see individuals as individuals – and not be blinded by an instinctive patriotism that lionises the military and those who have served in it. In contrast with the popular narrative that soldiers’ values are honour, courage, respect, and integrity, what is illustrated in these cases is the lowest form of human behaviour that one can imagine, with ex-soldiers playing an outsized role in this behaviour; and the British Army has a history of facilitating this kind of behaviour, as I shall discuss.

What these cases provide is a window into a dark side of Britain that stands in stark contrast with comforting national mythologies, and we owe it to the victims to learn something from what they endured, and not to go on clinging to such mythologies that serve the function of allowing hidden horrors to continue.

Sidney Cooke and the Dirty Dozen

Jason Swift was a shy and sweet-natured boy, who was often running away from home. He lived on the deprived Kingsmead Estate in Hackney, and had a troubled home life; his parents were arguing a lot and his house was overcrowded, and on top of that, he was a lonely boy. His teachers described him as “quiet and withdrawn”, and said he was seen as “a bit of a loner”. His shyness was particularly pronounced with the opposite gender, as described by his older sister, Hayley, who stated that he “was timid and shy of girls and would hide his eyes if he ever caught a glimpse of any nude women on TV. He even got embarrassed if Mum gave him a cuddle”. Journalists Ramsey Smith and Ted Oliver noted, based on what Jason’s family members had told them, how kind and gentle of a boy he was:

“Jason was a considerate brother and son despite the family tensions. He always remembered birthdays with cards and small gifts and the prospect of shopping for Christmas presents gave him special pleasure. Mother’s Day was marked with breakfast in bed, a thoughtfully arranged tray of tea and burnt toast for Joan [Jason’s mother]. Jason willingly prepared meals for the family […] mainly pizzas and tinned spaghetti”.

His older brother, Steve, stated: “Jason was the kind who enjoyed his own company and loved collecting things like coins and stamps. He wasn’t into the same things as [his older brothers], like football and fast cars”. In 1985, as Jason increasingly skipped school at the age of 14, due to his loneliness, and went missing from home, he fell in with a group of men, who carefully groomed him. This group of men was led by a man named Sidney Cooke, who served in the British Army between 1945 and 1952; he was part of the Royal Engineers in the Middle East, and later joined the Royal Artillery. After his military service, he began sexually assaulting young boys, and formed relationships with likeminded individuals whom he led in a gang. Cooke’s paedophile gang was later dubbed the ‘Dirty Dozen’ in the press. Jason became acquainted with the Dirty Dozen because, in his isolated and vulnerable state, he had become a child prostitute who was sexually exploited by older men; Detective Sergeant Terry Cooke of the Essex Police noted that “Jason, we learnt later, really, was a lad who was a rent boy solely for the purpose of a free meal, a bed for the night, someone to show him a bit of care and affection really”. Steve and other family members similarly noted that Jason “showed no signs of being gay”; he was simply desperate to feel cared for, no matter where this ‘care’ came from.

The Dirty Dozen was a gang of highly sadistic and manipulative sexual offenders, and they managed to gain Jason’s trust over the course of a number of months in 1985 – giving him the affection that he craved – before revealing the true extent of their depravity one night, in a flat owned by ex-soldier Donald Smith on the Kingsmead Estate. On 27 November 1985, Sidney Cooke arranged an orgy in the flat, in which Jason was to be the ‘star attraction’; Cooke charged participants a £5 entry fee. Jason was first administered muscle relaxants so that he was physically unable to resist, and then, over the course of several hours, he was savagely beaten, raped, and tortured. He was eventually asphyxiated to death. Donald Smith, the ex-soldier who was well acquainted with the Dirty Dozen and owned the flat in which Jason was tortured to death, acknowledged to police that Jason “was a sweet boy”.

When Jason’s fate became public knowledge, his school headmaster, Clarence McKenzie, said the following poignant words about his former pupil: “Jason was a loving, innocent little boy, who was in need of love and affection and help, who perceived certain people as friends and helpers, and suffered for it”. Jason’s older brother, Steve, said he was victimised “for the crime of being a young boy”. Sidney Cooke told a police informant that the Dirty Dozen was responsible for murdering fifteen boys across Britain in the 1970s and 80s. The gang’s youngest known victim was a 6-year-old boy named Barry Lewis, who was abducted in the street in Walworth in September 1985, and who suffered a similar fate to Jason Swift.

The Dirty Dozen has been linked to the murder of Vishal Mehrotra, an 8-year-old boy who went missing while walking home from buying sweets at a newsagent in East Putney, on 29 July 1981 – the day of the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, which Vishal’s parents had taken him to see earlier in the day. Vishal’s remains were subsequently discovered in 1982 on Alder Copse in Rogate; he had been buried naked. A Coroner’s Court inquest determined that what had befallen Vishal was a case of foul play. Chief Superintendent Roger Stoodley, who oversaw the investigation into the Dirty Dozen, has stated that Vishal’s murder was in keeping with the modus operandi of the Dirty Dozen, given that they were abducting and murdering boys in London, in broad daylight, during the same period, and the fact that Vishal was buried naked indicates that there was a sexual element to the crime. Moreover, Sidney Cooke and other members of the Dirty Dozen boasted in prison that the gang had murdered an “Asian boy”. Furthermore, Channel 4 later uncovered that Cooke was in Goodwood on the day of Vishal’s disappearance – around 13 miles away from Rogate. LBC obtained a document in 2015 showing that the Metropolitan Police had concluded that there were “strong similarities” between Vishal’s murder and the murders committed by the Dirty Dozen; however, it is unclear whether this was ever pursued properly.

Vishal’s father subsequently stated: “For 33 years I was not kept in the loop at all. They [the police] did or they did not do whatever they wanted to do… What is apparent to me is that, from the document that I have seen now, that there are too many questions that they need to answer rather than answers in this document”. Vishal disappeared at around 2pm on 29 July 1981; the only clue that turned up after Vishal’s remains were found at Rogate is that at 3:30pm on the day of his disappearance, a “6ft man dressed in Army-style combat jacket and matching cap” was spotted accompanying a little Asian boy at Beacon Hill on the South Downs, not far from Rogate. One of the witnesses said that the man in question was “dressed in khaki, which at that day and age was so unusual. It stuck in my mind. To be dressed like that in England is so unusual”. This military attire is a potentially important detail in light of the fact that Cooke had previously served in the army.

The Murder of Daniel Handley

Thirteen years later, on 2 October 1994, a man named Timothy Morss was driving through Beckton with his friend, Brett Tyler; they were looking to fulfil a fantasy that Morss had had for years and had then shared with Tyler, of abducting a small blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy, raping him on camera, and then murdering him. Eventually, they came across a 9-year-old boy named Daniel Handley, who fit their ideal characteristics. Daniel was known locally as a helpful boy, who was also cheeky and chirpy; he washed windscreens at traffic lights, delivered papers, and did other odd jobs, so that he could make money, which he would spend on food and comic books. Daniel was from a deeply impoverished area, and was suffering from neglect at home. His father was not in the picture, and his mother was dating a violent addict; together, they would spend their days in bed, drunk, while Daniel and his brothers were left to fend for themselves.

Morss and Tyler stopped their car when they spotted Daniel peddling his bike on the street; they asked Daniel for help with directions on a map. Daniel, being the helpful boy that he was, immediately went towards the car so that he could help them with the map; when he was close enough, Tyler bundled him into the car and Morss drove off. Daniel was taken to a flat, where Morss and Tyler took it in turns to rape him while the other recorded it on a video camera. After they were done with him, they drove him down the M4 towards Bristol. After Daniel fell asleep in the back of the car, Morss and Tyler climbed into the back and strangled him to death with a tow rope. They then buried him near a golf course in the town of Bradley Stoke, north of Bristol.

Morss had grown up in an abusive children’s home, and as soon as he was old enough to leave, he joined the British Army, serving as a military driver for 18 months. Upon returning to civilian life, he began sexually abusing boys. After a seven-year stint in prison for beating and raping two twin brothers from when they were five to nine-years-old, he attended therapy, and boasted to his therapist about his fantasy of abusing and murdering a boy who had the same traits as Daniel. Thereafter, he and Tyler – whom he had befriended in prison – fulfilled this fantasy when Daniel fell into their clutches.

Connections with Cooke’s Gang

Morss and Tyler used an identical technique in abducting Daniel that the Dirty Dozen had used to abduct boys – namely, carrying a map and asking for directions. Furthermore, the Dirty Dozen used tranquilisers to subdue the boys whom they abducted, and Morss was found to be carrying a tranquiliser in his coat pocket after he and Tyler abducted Daniel. Morss and Tyler were able to borrow techniques from the Dirty Dozen, because they were friends with a sex offender who had shared a prison cell with ex-soldier Sidney Cooke, who had led the Dirty Dozen. When a Metropolitan Police detective, Ed Williams, tried to locate the files from Operation Orchid – the investigation into the Dirty Dozen’s crimes – during the investigation into the murder of Daniel Handley, as he suspected that there was a link between the cases, he encountered prolonged delays within the institution; Williams stated:

“I said ‘What has happened to all the intelligence from Orchid?’. The answer was ‘Nothing’. No one had been responsible for analysing it. No-one had done anything with it. It was supposed to be on a database somewhere. I spent hours and hours trying to get hold of the original reports. The intelligence branch, SO 11, told me it had been wiped – they just didn’t have it. And then by sheer luck, it turned out that one of our typists in our station had worked on Orchid and she knew where to find some of it. This was the major inquiry into paedophile abuse in London; it should have been ready and available, it should already have been taught to people like me. But it wasn’t”.

It was only months later that Williams was finally able to discover that there was indeed a link between the cases, which put him on the trail of Morss and Tyler; if he had been able to access the files sooner, Morss and Tyler could have been identified as suspects much earlier. In the meantime, they had continued to abuse children. In fact, it was only by luck that Williams ended up gaining access to the Orchid files at all, because a typist in his station had happened to work on Orchid. Another link with Sidney Cooke emerges in the case of ex-soldier Ronald Jebson, who was responsible for the infamous ‘Babes in the Wood’ murders in 1970, in which eleven-year-old Susan Muriel Blatchford and twelve-year-old Gary John Hanlon were raped and murdered in Epping Forest, Essex. Jebson – who had previously joined the British Army in 1958, before being discharged on medical grounds – picked up Susan and Gary while they were going for a walk near their homes in Enfield; Jebson plied the children with cannabis in his car, and then drove them to Epping Forest where he raped and strangled both of them. Twenty eight years later, Jebson confessed to these crimes; he refused to accompany police to the crime scene, saying that it was “inhabited by ghosts”. Jebson was friends with Sidney Cooke and Leslie Bailey in the 1960s; the bodies of 14-year-old Jason Swift and 6-year-old Barry Lewis, who were tortured to death by Cooke’s gang, were found only miles from Epping Forest. Another friend of both Sidney Cooke and Leslie Bailey was ex-soldier William Malcolm, a sadistic paedophile who was shot dead by two unknown assailants at his flat in East London in 2000. The Times’s Oliver Wright wrote this at the time:

“Malcolm, an associate of the notorious paedophiles Leslie “Catweazle” Bailey and Sydney Cooke, was jailed in 1981 for a series of attacks on his six-year-old stepdaughter and nine-year-old stepson. Despite knowledge of the attacks social services allowed the paedophile to rejoin the children when he was released from prison two years later. The attacks continued and he was jailed again in 1984 after being convicted of having unlawful intercourse with the same stepdaughter. The police attempted to prosecute him in 1994 on thirteeen child abuse charges but he was released when an Old Bailey judge ruled that his previous conviction meant he could not get a fair trial. This was despite a psychiatric report which described Malcolm as a sexual psychopath and said that he had paedophile tendencies of a “strongly sadistic nature”. After his release police continued to monitor Malcolm’s movements and he was questioned by detectives investigating the killings of Jason Swift, Mark [Tildesley] and Barry Lewis”.

The latter three boys were all murdered by Cooke’s gang in the 1980s – Mark Tildesley was seven-years-old when he was abducted from a Wokingham funfair by Cooke in 1984; Cooke drove him to a caravan on an isolated field, where he was tortured to death in a similar way to Jason Swift and Barry Lewis. William Malcolm intimidated his child victims by bragging to them that he was present at the murder of Jason Swift. Malcolm’s youngest stepdaughter, whom he began abusing when she was six-years-old, stated after he was shot dead in his flat:

“He sexually abused us and he hit us – he had been in the Army and he would beat us with his Army belt. I couldn’t go to anyone because he threatened to kill my brothers and sisters if I did. Then one day my sister walked in and caught him with me and the police were called. But he was only in prison for a year. He came out when I was about nine and he was doing it until I was about 11, with me and my brothers and sisters. Eventually, when we couldn’t take it anymore, we told and he was arrested again. That time, he was inside for about two and a half years. When he came out, our social worker told my mother that if she had him back in the house, I would have to go into care. She chose him, and I was in care from 11 to 18. Every day, he would hang around the care home, threatening me, and he would follow me to school. Eventually, the social workers had to take me to school. He was an animal and he ruined my life. I was receiving psychiatric help for years; I became an alcoholic and it was only recently that I stopped blaming myself. To me, being put into care at 11 was like going to prison. It was as if I had done something wrong. When I heard he had been killed, I went out and got drunk. It was the best news I’d had in years”.

Upon Malcolm’s death, his brother, Andy, stated: “He was vermin. I am glad he is dead… As far as I am concerned my brother was lower than the rats in my barn… At the end of the call the officer [investigating Malcolm’s death] said: “Do you want to know anything if there are any developments?” I said: “Yes, when you catch the killers I want to come over there and shake their hands and say thank you very much.” That is the reaction of the whole family”.

Torture Tapes and Snuff Films

It is certainly possible that Malcolm was present at the murder of Jason Swift, as he bragged to his victims, given that he was a friend of both Sidney Cooke and Leslie Bailey. Jason was first introduced to Cooke in 1985 by a man named Brian Turner, mere months before Jason was murdered by the Dirty Dozen. Turner was part of the Dirty Dozen as well as another paedophile ring that also targeted boys; this latter ring operated by running a breakaway British scouting organisation, named the ‘Baden-Powell Scout Association’. This breakaway organisation was named after a famous colonial British Army officer, Robert Baden-Powell, who served in campaigns in Africa and India, and after leaving the armed forces wrote in his diary about how he enjoyed looking at photographs of naked boys. In the 1990s, as part of the Baden-Powell Scout Association, Turner and his associates produced videos of British Boy Scouts being subjected to sadistic sexual abuse, which they sold; one video, which was shown in court, featured a sobbing twelve-year-old boy being sexually abused before being tortured with electrodes. Shockingly, the scoutmaster who perpetrated the abuses in the video – a man named Richard Kearns – only received 10 months in prison. Some of the videos that Turner and his associates produced were sold in Amsterdam in the 1990s by former Hastings resident Warwick Spinks, who was part of a sadistic British paedophile ring in Amsterdam during this period that included another ex-soldier as a leading member – a Welshman named John Gay, whose nickname was “Army John”.

Gay was the joint owner of a child pornography company in Amsterdam, named ‘TAG Films’, that specialised in showcasing the violent sexual abuse of boys. Gay abducted Welsh boys and drove them by minivan to an isolated farmhouse in France, and then to brothels in Amsterdam, where he forced them to participate in pornographic films. Scotland Yard detectives discovered that the child pornography ring to which Gay belonged had discussed making a video in a barn that belonged to a German man, who owned one of the brothels in Amsterdam; an informant separately told these detectives that he had watched a snuff film that Warwick Spinks showed him – shot in a barn – which featured a twelve-year-old boy being beaten, attacked with needles, castrated, and cut with a knife.

Another informant later told police detectives in Britain that he had met with John Gay and other members of the ring in Amsterdam, and that in 1989 he had seen a snuff film there – this one shot in a flat – that featured a boy being beaten, raped, castrated, and then cut with a knife. A third man who was associated with the Amsterdam ring reported to British police that he had seen five films that this ring had produced, each one featuring a different boy being tortured to death. Warwick Spinks told an undercover police officer in Amsterdam: “I knew some people who were involved in making snuff movies… I know somebody who was in a snuff movie and somebody got snuffed in front of him and he never knew it was a snuff movie. They had tied him up and done terrible things to him and killed him… I felt sorry for this boy, it was a German boy […] About 13, 15”. Spinks continued: “I know I’m a fat old queen, but I get away with it. I get away with murder”. Spinks and Gay (“Army John”) were convicted in 1995 and 2000, respectively, of subjecting boys to violent sexual abuse in Britain; Gay committed his offences in Bristol and Cardiff, and Spinks committed his offences in Hastings.

The international investigation into Warwick Spinks led to the unearthing of a tape that came to be known by British/Dutch police as the ‘Bjorn Tape’, copies of which were found in the residences of almost every paedophile in Amsterdam during the 1990s. The Bjorn Tape was produced in the Dutch city of Hengelo in 1990 by an Englishman named John Peters, who had previously served in the British Army; journalist Nick Davies notes that the tape was given this title “after the nickname given by police to the [Dutch] boy who is its central character and victim”. Davies describes how in the opening of this tape, the former British soldier John Peters is shown in a flat “carrying something across his arms and, as he walks slowly towards the camera it becomes clear that it is a small boy, probably seven or eight years old, dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt”. Davies continues: “The boy is utterly limp, his lower legs trail downwards over the side of the man’s right arm, his head lolls gently backwards over the crook of the other arm. But it is the boy’s head which catches the camera’s eye and stops the heart. It is hooded”. 

Detective Constable Terry Bailey of New Scotland Yard is quoted in ITV’s 1997 documentary ‘The Boy Business’, in reference to the Bjorn Tape: “When you see the terror that is on the child’s face, and the fear that is there – to actually drug a child, to actually wake him up and hear him scream … It is so horrific”. Davies similarly notes that the boy was subjected to “relentless sexual assault”. John Peters, the Englishman who produced the Bjorn Tape, served in the British Army until he went AWOL in the early 1970s; the reason being that he was charged with sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old boy in public toilets near his military base in Sutton Coldfield. Davies reported the following in 1998: “Just as [Peters] evaded the police in Sutton Coldfield in the 1970s, so now he has evaded them again in Holland, simply by crossing a border. He is believed to be in Asia, whose population of impoverished and vulnerable children has become a magnet for paedophiles and whose police have no active intelligence link with the British or Dutch”. Dutch newspaper Trouw noted that in the raw files of the Bjorn Tape, Peters reveals his arm to the camera, showing the following tattoo: ‘Blood Group O. Pos’. In a British Army forum discussing the practice of British soldiers getting blood group tattoos, one user commented: “Quite a few guys in my old battalion had them back in the 70’s. Usually high up on the arm”, correlating with the period in which Peters was known to have been in the British Army. The ostensible purpose of this tattooing is so that medics will know what blood transfusion is required if the soldiers are wounded on the battlefield. Moreover, the practice of hooding, which Peters subjected ‘Bjorn’ to in the tape, was an officially authorised practice in the British Army from 1965 until 1972 in relation to treatment of detainees – which included young boys in places such as Aden and Northern Ireland where the British Army was deployed during this period. With regards to the child featured in the Bjorn Tape, Davies reported that he survived the abuse but that he had later “collapsed into mental illness and been given refuge in an orphanage”.

A Very British Phenomenon

The British Army has a history of subjecting boys to sexual torture. A report published by Amnesty International in 1965, written by Dr. Selahaddin Rastgeldi (a Kurdish physician and human rights investigator), documented how in detention centres in Aden, one of the forms of torture that British soldiers were using against Adeni male detainees was “Forcing the detainees to sit on poles directed towards their anus”, and noted that “young school boys have been interrogated and detained in the same way as elder prisoners”. Kurdish news outlet Rudaw cited Rastgeldi’s findings in confirming that these detainees “were paraded naked, then mounted onto poles pushed into their anuses”. In Iraq in 2003, British soldiers beat two teenage Iraqi boys and forced them into stress positions at Camp Breadbasket, and then forced these boys to get naked, adopt sexual poses, and simulate sexual acts with each other on camera, as confirmed by the ICC. In 2009, an Iraqi man reported that when he was sixteen-years-old in 2003, two British soldiers beat him, held him down, and then took it in turns to rape him, at the Shatt-al-Arab Camp. In the memoirs of John Shipp, who joined the British Army as a boy soldier of ten-years-old in 1795, and then published his reminiscences in 1832, an account is given of how boys no older than 13 years of age were stripped naked and flogged bloody as punishment for trying to desert. The practice in the British armed forces of stripping teenage boys and caning their backsides as a form of corporal punishment continued into the 1950s. It is not surprising that this institution has produced paedophiles with a special affinity for subjecting children, particularly boys, to very violent sexual abuse.

What is also noteworthy here is the persistent failure of the criminal justice system to properly deal with these crimes. In particular, in the case of seven-year-old Mark Tildesley, who was abducted from a Wokingham funfair and murdered in 1984, the police officer who was in charge of the investigation – Chief Superintendent Roger Stoodley – stated: “I think there was substantial evidence against Sidney Cooke for the murder of Mark Tildesley and the Crown Prosecution Service said it wasn’t in the public interest (to proceed). I found that a staggering decision… Whether they had lost interest in the case or whether there was directions from above I don’t know”.

The CPS refused to prosecute Cooke despite the fact that Cooke was working at the funfair from where Mark was abducted; witnesses saw Mark with a man who strongly resembled Cooke; a tiger key ring identical to the one that Mark was carrying on the day of his abduction was found in a car that belonged to Cooke; and Dirty Dozen member Leslie Bailey confessed that he, Cooke, and others in the gang tortured Mark to death. Stoodley further noted: “Young boys were being carried out of flats on the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney, without anybody apparently noticing or phoning the police or in any way caring about what had occurred. It’s a very worrying situation”. Another police detective who investigated Cooke’s gang, Dave Easy, provided the following poignant and unsettling reflection: “Out of all the inquiries I’ve ever been on […] it’s the one that still comes back to me time and time again, and I find that in a quiet moment in a day, I’ll be thinking about something to do with these boys and the charges that were never brought”.

Most of the boys whom the Dirty Dozen are suspected of murdering simply disappeared, without any bodies ever being recovered; an accomplice of Sidney Cooke told a police informant that one of the boys whom the gang murdered was buried under Brighton Pier. Cotton candy, ice cream, carefree beachgoers, bright lights, happy couples on the sand – and a dark secret stowed away beneath the surface; the lonely corpse of a lost child, nameless now, out of sight and out of mind. 

The bodies of the boys who were tortured to death on snuff films in the late 1980s and 90s – which were described by multiple different witnesses, with many overlapping details – were likewise never found; children who were lost to the night. Britain is a country where, beyond an illusory exterior, something is terribly wrong. A former playmate of eight-year-old Vishal Mehrotra, who disappeared in 1981 on the day of the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana, recalled: “The nation was playing at princes and princesses… And yet the dark side of that fairytale is something very folk tale-ish: the abduction and murder of a child”. On a personal note, I wish that I could turn back time, and stop these children from going through what they did – that I could tell fourteen-year-old Jason Swift not to go in the flat. But all any of us can do is reflect, remember, and try to stop this darkness from persisting – first by confronting it and bringing light to it, however difficult that may be.