Wednesday marked twenty years since the fateful day that a fourteen-year-old girl in the seaside English resort town of Blackpool went missing; Charlene Downes was never seen again, and authorities believe she was murdered. As the ghastly story of what happened to her unfolded, it became appallingly clear that she was only one of thousands of British girls who had suffered a least some of the terrible ordeal she went through before she was killed. Yet even now that two decades have passed, Britain still hasn’t fully faced what happened to Charlene and the other victims or taken any serious steps to prevent what happened to them from happening to any young girl ever again.
