When 13-year-old Christine first saw the “boy” who had moved from the group chat she was in into her private messages, she was shocked. He still wanted to be with her. Lonely at school, after a move precipitated by the end of her mother’s relationship with Christine’s father, she took the apparent affection offered.
The rest of the women contributing to Britain’s Forgotten Girls – a harrowing hour-long documentary about the sexual and criminal exploitation of young girls over the last 20 years by drug gangs acting with virtual impunity – have similar stories to tell. The approach by the gangs happens at 12, 13, 14. Then the game is switched.
Rape or sexual assault occurs (“I was so scared, so scared,” says Annie, who was 14 when “all aspect of choice just got taken away from me” by the three older boys who had befriended her) and, through threatened and actual violence – perhaps supplemented by blackmail or by the lack of anywhere else for the child to turn – continues for years thereafter. The details are few and horrifying. A number of them mention having to go to school as if nothing had happened the night after an inaugural gang-rape.
Your mind can hardly take it in. Sometimes he stayed and watched. They all talk of reporting some of their assaults to the police and being met with indifference or silence.
Violet was groomed by members of the local drugs gang when she was 13. She came home one morning “in a dissociative state, really” after being raped and her parents reported it immediately to the police. Swabs found multiple people’s DNA inside her.
When she called the police for an update they told her, she says, “they had bigger fish to fry”. An anonymous female police officer from another force talks of a culture in which the girls were endlessly blamed for “putting themselves in risky situations” and otherwise causing their own downfall. The BBC says it has been told that parental neglect is a common misclassification by social workers of sexual assault involving young girls.
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