Hope House^H^H^H^H^H Baintree

[Moosehands]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/03/njersey103.xml

A set of shackles was also found in the room beneath Haut de la Garenne, which have been removed by police for forensic examination. Both the shackles and the bath corroborate descriptions of a "deep, dark place" given to police by alleged victims who say rape and torture happened on a daily basis.

On a vertical wooden beam rising up from the bath, the words "IV BEEN BAD 4 YEARS & YEARS" has been written in black marker pen.

I know a few posters here are from the general Great Britain area (forgive my stereotypically American grasp of geography), and this story seems to have broken within the past 3-4 days so I was wondering if anyone else had heard of it.  The whole thing is one of the most awful stories I've ever read; the kind of thing that should never occur anywhere outside the bounds of fiction.  Dark pits, bricked up rooms filled with shackles and canes, childlike scrawls on the walls, and blood-sniffing dogs marking spots all over the grounds.  :(

I'm also struck by the odd resemblence to Hot Fuzz, minus the child sex angle and notwithstanding my Silent Hill 4 titular reference.  An extremely isolated community with total control vested in a handful of inter-related rich people with an overzealous interest in maintaining the status quo and a basement full of corpses.

Personally, I'm hoping the island's whole legal and political system gets torn down those in charge turned out (the ones who can't be directly connected to the events and subsequently jailed).

[NowhereMan]

I don't know, it's the Channel Isles, it's a weird place. The story is pretty horrible and apparently the latest cases being investigated happened within the last couple of years. I doubt however you're going to see a huge amount of change to the institutions on the island, a lot of people there value keeping things runing steadily over mass reform from what I've been reading in the papers (and yes, it's featured heavily in the British papers for the last few days).

[Moosehands]

I'm probably overly optimistic to think any change will happen.  It's just an immediate visceral reaction of Something Must Be Done.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/29/njersey429.xml&page=1

This 3-page article seems to cover some of the most egregious problems.  Things like convicted sex offenders being made into policemen after the fact and the Speaker of the House of Commons being the brother of the attorney general.  I realize that islanders themselves probably don't want change or even to acknowledge the events (in one story some random person in a pub is quoted as saying "oh any bodies found must have come from when the Germans were here").  I guess it's just amazing to me that the Crown wouldn't step in here and say "You people fail at governing yourselves, so your right to do so, as granted by us, is now revoked."

Of course I'm also woefully ignorant of English governmental and legal systems in general and the Channel Isles system in particular.  These articles and their attempts to explain the way the laws work are pretty much my first exposure to the relationship.

[K9]

...

[Moosehands]

The thread title is my attempt to make two jokes at once, one of them being a reference to old text editors.

[Engels]

at first I was like, 'torture house found in jersey'? Big deal. Oh, wait, ok, not New jersey.