Find the beach rapist
Police release e-fit after 15-year-old girl is attacked in sea amid scores of bathers
A GIRL aged 15 who was raped in the sea at a packed beach has spoken of her ordeal for the first time.
The victim was dragged into deep water by her attacker after a ball she had been playing with landed close to him.
She said despite numerous other bathers she escaped only when one of his friends approached them.
After she ran to her friends on the beach, the man followed her and asked how he could contact her.
Police yesterday renewed their appeal for witnesses and released an e-fit of the suspect.
The attack happened close to the west of Bournemouth Pier in Dorset on July 18, on what was the hottest day of the year.
Police also revealed the attacker told his victim he was called Dabby, aged 17 and from Birmingham.
The victim said in a statement she was approached by the man at about 4pm. ‘He started talking to me and touching my arm,’ she said. ‘At the same time another man was making my friend uncomfortable so she left the sea. I was alone now and he started to push me out into deep water and I couldn’t feel my feet on the sea floor ... No one could see what was happening and it was then that he raped me.’
In her statement, read out on BBC 1’s Crimewatch Live yesterday, she added: ‘I was in tears. I told my friend what had happened and I was really hurting ... Then the guy came up to me again and was asking how to contact me.
‘Eventually my friend made him go away and that was the last I saw of him.’ The suspect is described by police as possibly of Pakistani descent, between 5ft and 5ft 7in tall and of thin but muscular build. He had an earring in his left ear and his left eyebrow was part-shaved.
Detective Inspector Wayne Seymour, of Dorset Police, said: ‘We do have forensic evidence that means we will be able to eliminate anyone who was not involved.’
What’s worse, pensioners don’t pay national insurance, increasing the burden on the young even more. And with the economy struggling to recover from Covid, a new tax on jobs and enterprise comes at exactly the wrong time.
By far the biggest flaw however, is that this scheme will punish striving families without solving the problem. This levy will not be ring-fenced for social care, and in the first three years most of it is to go towards reducing the backlog of healthcare treatments caused by the pandemic.
At the end of that time, the likelihood is it will simply disappear into the black hole of NHS spending and the social care crisis will flare again. The Mail believes the permanent answer is a genuine insurance scheme, along the lines of pension autoenrolment. Employer and employee would pay a small monthly amount into a care fund, on which contributors could draw if they needed support in later life.
True, there would be a short-term funding gap to be bridged.
Temporarily breaking the state pension triple lock would go some way towards that, as would asking working pensioners to continue paying national insurance.
The rest should be found from savings in other areas of public spending, not least the grossly inefficient NHS.
It’s been easy to forget after a year in which they borrowed £303billion, but the Conservatives are supposedly the party of financial prudence and low taxes.
Difficult as this care conundrum is, Mr Johnson can and must solve it without abandoning those core Tory principles.