“My daughter is being gang raped and sold to countless men.” These were the words, spoken by a heartbroken mother, that first alerted me to the organised rape and pimping gangs – now commonly referred to as “grooming gangs” – targeting young girls in the north of England.
It was the late 1990s and, knowing that I was a campaigner against child sexual exploitation, some of the mothers of these girls had reached out to me. They were desperate for help.
I wasn’t the first person they’d approached. They had tried the authorities – the police and child protection services – but instead of help, they’d found only judgement, about their parenting and their daughters. One police officer described a victim as a “troublesome slag”. The gang that had abused her was later convicted of horrific child rapes.
I marvelled at the strength of these mothers even as I saw, up close, the pain in their eyes. I couldn’t help but get emotional when one told me about how her 13-year-old daughter had come home crying, with blood all over her legs, high on cannabis and alcohol. She had been anally gang raped.
Social workers had told some of the families that their daughters were “choosing” this “lifestyle” and there was nothing they could do about it. To these adults who were tasked with protecting these children, child rape and prostitution was a “lifestyle choice”.
I felt horrified and blindly furious. “We didn’t know,” the mothers kept telling me. “We did nothing wrong!”
They came from a broad range of backgrounds, mainly working class. Some of them had happy, stable family setups, and others were more chaotic, where their daughters had been taken into local authority care homes. Some of the girls had already been victims of sexual abuse – by boys in their neighbourhood or male family members. Some of them were being bullied at school. Some were autistic. But all of them shared something in common – neither the police nor child protection professionals had stepped in to help them.
The most vulnerable were those in care homes. Workers at these homes would turn a blind eye to the men in flash cars waiting outside for them. When the girls would disappear for days on end, the police would barely look for them.
It was obvious, once I spoke to the mothers and some of the girls who had managed to escape the gangs, that this was not an unknown phenomenon – health workers, neighbours and teachers were aware of what was happening. It wasn’t a secret that girls had begun to replace heroin as the preferred merchandise for criminals looking to make a fast buck.
I had previously investigated widespread sexual abuse by clergy and online child abuse rings. Now I wanted to investigate what these mothers were telling me. One evening, I was sat outside a care home in Blackpool, in the north of England, hoping to ask a member of staff what they were doing to protect the girls in their care, when I noticed what looked like a brand-new car pulling up around the corner. It was driven by a man in his 40s. There were two younger men sitting on the back seat. One of the younger men got out of the car, went to the door of the care home and rang the doorbell. He spoke briefly to the member of staff who answered. Five minutes later, a girl who couldn’t have been older than 14 ran out and clambered into the back of the car. They drove off.
I was all too familiar with the machinations of child sexual abuse and exploitation, but there were some key differences between the cases I’d investigated previously and the way these gangs operated. These gangs made their victims believe that they were their saviours. Younger men would be used to draw the victims in. Initially, they’d provide friendship, fast food and fun. Because most of the victims were white and most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani descent, the girls would be told that it was best they didn’t tell their parents, as they were “bound to be racist”. Once the girls were sucked in, they would be passed on to other men, who would sell them from flats.
Early reports from parents and victims confirmed that some of the older men in the network were taxi drivers. It soon became clear how the girls were targeted: Taxi drivers would pick them up – often from care homes. I saw taxis pull up outside these homes and girls get in as staff watched from the windows.
The taxi drivers would get a fee for each girl delivered to the gang members – mainly men in their 20s and 30s – although that fee often involved being permitted to rape the victim free of charge.
Some of these gangs were highly organised – young runners would be tasked with making initial contact with the victims; landlords would rent out their flats for the girls to be raped in; others were more opportunistic. All of them benefitted from the culture of impunity that continues to surround the sexual abuse of women and girls – a culture where conviction rates are so low as to render rape virtually decriminalised.
Most media reports approach complex stories like this as being about race or class or sex – never all three at once. But the truth is that these children were abused because they were girls. They were denied any pretence of protection from the authorities because they were poor. They were targeted because of their race and then ignored by authorities that simultaneously feared being accused of racism while adopting racist assumptions about the sorts of white girls who would “sleep with” brown men. This is about race and class and sex. And misogyny runs through all three.
These girls were either blamed or not believed. In fact, sometimes they would be prosecuted for being drunk and disorderly while the men who supplied the alcohol – the same men who raped them – were not.
These girls were not merely “duped” as the word “grooming” suggests, although they were certainly tricked into believing that they had a boyfriend in one of the younger procurers; they were raped, sold, abused, in some cases tortured.
Now, almost three decades after I first spoke to those mothers, nothing has changed. There is still an appalling complacency about organised sexual exploitation, which results in few convictions – regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrators. The police still are not doing enough. We are still choosing to blame the victims.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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