Dear readers – Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more… Since yesterday’s newsletter, another forty or so people have stood up to be counted. Take a look at that totaliser again: we’ve now got 878 people on board. If you’re not so hot on your fractions, that means we’re over seven-eighths of the way there. We’re so close to 1,000 we can almost taste it. But we need another 122.
It’s doable, but we still need your help. We only have until Sunday which is terrifyingly soon. So hit that button now and sign up at a price of your choosing, and/or ping the link on to someone else. Any more signups get us closer to unlocking those pledges. Surely we can’t come so close and fall short at this stage.
On with the rest of today’s edition. But first, please note: today’s main story contains descriptions of sexual violence, self harm and coercive control. The name of the victim has been changed to protect her anonymity.
Your Tribune briefing 🗞️
🏫 The University of Sheffield has shot up the rankings in one of the most prestigious league tables of world universities. In the QS World University Rankings 2027, the university ranks as the 82nd best university in the world, 10 places higher than last year and its highest position in 15 years. The ranking also means that, according to QS, the university is the 12th best in the UK, overtaking York, Bristol and University College London. The rankings are especially important in attracting Chinese and other international students, who now make up a quarter of the student body, and see going to a QS Top 100 university as essential for their careers.
🏴 The Guardian visited Southey Green for an interesting piece about how the recent explosion of flag raising is going to meld with World Cup fever. The working-class north east Sheffield community has the most active flag raising group in the city, and its main streets are still festooned with St George’s crosses and Union Jacks. Reporter Steve Rose speaks to people who support the flags and those who find them intimidating. And he also tracks down people from a shadowy organisation called SCARF — Sheffield Communities Against Racism and Fascism — who take them down in the dead of night. Our piece from last year about the flag war of Walkley is here.
📻 The community radio and television station Sheffield Live are to move into a disused city centre pub. The station has bought the former Tap and Barrel pub on Castlegate with help from social investment lender The Key Fund to turn it into a new community radio, tv studio and live arts space. They now hope to raise £150,000 from a community share issue to enable the bar and function room to reopen and to host performances by spring 2027.
🌳 A Sheffield tree which became one of the chief cause célèbres of the street tree scandal has been felled due to disease. The Chelsea Road Elm in Nether Edge, which is thought to be around 130 years old, was identified for felling by Amey a decade ago, but was ultimately saved by a public campaign. Surprisingly for an urban tree, it was later voted as one of the top ten most popular and loved trees in Britain in a competition run by the Woodland Trust. However, as ecologist Ian Rotherham points out on his blog, the tree has likely been a victim of Dutch elm disease and the hot and dry summers of recent years.
Why did Elijah Palmer ask a girl to harm herself?
By Victoria Munro and Mollie Simpson
Before fifteen-year-old Lucia worked up the courage to block and subsequently report Elijah Palmer, a seventeen year old from Sheffield with slightly greasy curly hair and a hint of stubble emerging on his jawline, he managed, in the course of a single day, to convince her to commit a series of increasingly sadistic acts. On 2 May 2025, via private messages in a Discord group chat, he blackmailed her into etching his username slitted into her chest with a razor blade, slap herself in the face on camera while naked, burn a bible with his name on, graffiti the walls of her room proclaiming that he was her “one and only true father” and that she would “submit only to him whenever he needs”.
Despite the physical and emotional scars she sustained from this harrowing day, yesterday, on Thursday 18 June, Lucia was brave enough to sit in the public gallery in courtroom seven of Sheffield Crown Court and watch her abuser be sentenced. The anonymity of sexual abuse victims is protected under Section 1 of the Sexual Offences Amendment Act 1992, and her name has been changed in this story to conceal her identity. While the defendant was seventeen when he committed these offences, which would usually entitle him to anonymity as well, His Honour Judge Hampton noted that as he is now eighteen at the time of sentencing, that there should be no restrictions on reporting his name.
Elijah Palmer was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison, marking the first time in the UK a juvenile has been sentenced for coercing someone to self harm via online chatrooms. A member of 764, a highly secretive online group that seeks out vulnerable children to coerce them into making sexually explicit material and harm themselves, he found Lucia in April 2025 after they were added to the same Discord server and decided she would be his victim. 764 insisted he needed blackmail material to coerce her into harming herself, and so he created an email account in her name and drafted an email to a school on the Wicker issuing a bomb threat, which he would later threaten to deploy if she wasn’t compliant with his demands.
764 started in 2021 with a teenager named Bradley Cadenhead, from a postcode in Texas from which the 764 name is derived, who is now serving an 80 year custodial sentence for possession of child pornography. While the children they target can be anywhere in the world – in Palmer’s case, Lucia is from the south of England – what victims tend to have in common is that they are young, female, with mental health issues and low self esteem. Currently, the National Crime Agency considers groups like 764 to be one of "the most severe and serious online threats" it is dealing with.
Members advise identifying their victims by looking for Discord servers where girls are discussing eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. They suggest starting with a kind, supportive and gentle approach, then starting to pick at a girl’s insecurities. Blackmail material is usually gathered by gently encouraging the girls to perform sexual acts on camera. Every Discord server devoted to 764 has a “lore book”, where members share “content” from their “cut sluts” and receive praise in return. “The more sickening the material, the more acclaim there is to be gained,” said Mr Gordon Stables KC, prosecuting in the case of Elijah Palmer.
Scott Harrison, a detective chief inspector for South Yorkshire Police who leads the force’s internet sexual offences team, says that very little shocks him after 28 years of policing, but this case was particularly unpleasant. “In my personal opinion, offending can't get much worse than this. It's pretty unique in how horrible it is,” he says. While US law enforcement has been forced to contend with 764 groups since 2021, the groups are "relatively new to the UK” and Harrison said it was only in the middle of 2025 when the police force “started to get our head around the threat”. Since then, there have been a number of investigations into similar groups across South Yorkshire.
His Honour Judge Hampton explained to the press that Palmer had come from a troubled background marked by neglect, domestic abuse and abandonment. Mr Francis Edusei KC, defending, said Palmer had been “retreating to his bedroom from the age of sixteen” and that his family hadn’t “really been paying attention to him”. His Honour Judge Hampton noted that Palmer had self harmed in the past as well. “I accept that you are remorseful,” the judge told him.
Detective chief inspector Harrison wasn’t so sure. "We didn't really ask whether he was sorry and he didn't provide much information for us anyway,” he told The Tribune. “He didn't volunteer how he got involved. He didn't really present in any way, he's quite a confident chap and quite intelligent.”
His Honour Judge Hampton noted that there was no way any of these crimes could have taken place “without a significant degree of planning”. When the journalist Marc-André Argentino analysed leaked messages from 764 chats, he found that it took one member an entire year to get in in the first place, as the vetting process is incredibly careful and selective.
While the online chatroom Discord identified and reported hundreds of 764 members to US law enforcement in 2021, teens have always found ways of evading the platform’s safeguarding and moderation policies, and many splinter groups still exist today. In 2024, when a Washington Post reporter asked Discord about 764, a spokeswoman admitted their moderation system mostly relied on users reporting violations of the community guidelines themselves. “I am satisfied these terrible offences would not have occurred without Discord enabling contact between the two of them,” said His Honour Judge Hampton in his sentencing remarks yesterday. “Discord is either unable or unwilling to protect its users from such abuse or illicit imagery… members of the public should be made aware that Discord is a dangerous space.”
In a psychiatric assessment that took place shortly after his arrest, Palmer said there was a thrill in being part of 764. “Truthfully, some part of me enjoyed that someone bled for me,” he admitted. He pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, which ranged from encouraging or assisting serious self-harm, causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent and possessing pornographic images of children, including a 28-minute video of a girl aged between one and three being penetrated and then tortured with a flame.
During the sentencing, Lucia sat and watched from the public gallery, hiding her face in her hood at times. She declined to read out her victim impact statement, instead asking someone to read it on her behalf. How this experience felt for her was delivered in the flat, procedural voice of the solicitor representing her. “I don’t like talking about what’s happened because each time I have to revisit it in my mind,” she wrote in her statement. “I have lasting reminders of what Palmer has done to me, including permanent scars on my body.” She added that it was only through months of counselling that she felt able to put what happened into words. “I am only just starting to process and deal with it. I feel more wary of the world around me.”
For Harrison, Lucia’s interactions with Palmer have reminded him how “most parents are unaware of what their children are doing online”. He stresses that while law enforcement will try its best to keep pace with what’s happening on social media, it’s important that parents feel confident to be “a little more overt in checking what [their kids are] up to.” And in terms of Lucia, “I don't think she will ever recover fully from her interactions with him. She's a very vulnerable individual in any case and he used her vulnerabilities to exploit her."
Things to do 📆
Friday
🪩 This year’s Migration Matters Festival begins on Friday, marking the start of nine days of celebration of the diversity of Sheffield. Sadly the opening party at Yellow Arch is sold out, but there are loads of events you can still take part in over the opening weekend including, on Saturday, an Afro-Brazilian and carnival dance workshop, on Sunday, a dub session with Aba Shanti-I, and, all week, an immersive sound walk of the restaurants of London Road.
Saturday
🏳️🌈 Kelham Pride returns for a third year on Saturday, starting with a big parade from Kelham Island Museum at 12.30 before a street party featuring music and entertainment on the main stage at Burton Road, a food market at Peddler Warehouse, and an after party courtesy of Queers for Beers. As well as the main stage and Peddler, lots of other local venues will be involved including Yellow Arch, Alder, Grafters and Neepsend Social.
Sunday
🏁 On Sunday, Krazy Races arrives in Sheffield for the first time. The soapbox derby event will take place in Sheffield city centre, with the karts starting in Barker’s Pool before heading down Fargate to the finish line outside M&S. The event, which runs from 10.45am to 5pm, is taking place in partnership with the charity Roundabout, with all team entry and sponsor money going to support their work helping young people experiencing homelessness.
Thanks for reading! Now please hit that button and get us over the line before time runs out.
