A grooming gang survivor has revealed that she was abused by hundreds of Pakistani heritage men for years, but despite reporting her abusers to the police, none have ever been arrested.
Sarah — a fake name given to protect her identity — said that she was systematically raped and abused as a child in the early 2000s after running away from care homes in Derby.
She was eventually awarded compensation by the local government after authorities acknowledged the abuse and the repeated failures of social services to protect her from being raped. But she says despite the recognition of the acts perpetrated against her as a child and the confirmation that social services had failed to protect her, the police have yet to act on the information she gave them.
Speaking to regional newspaper the Birmingham Mail, Sarah said: “I gave Derby police my Birmingham offenders’ names – but no one has ever been charged.
She said: I was groomed and abused between 1999 and 2003. And I was really horrendously groomed in Birmingham. It wasn’t just me, lots of girls, and lots of girls I know, were taken from Derby to be abused in Birmingham.
I gave all the information I had to Derby police in 2012. No one was charged but I was very traumatised and very mentally unwell then so I don’t really know what happened.
There were literally hundreds over time. They’d ply you with drink and weed, you were so drunk you didn’t always know what was happening.
I know of lots of Derby girls who were groomed in Birmingham, I don’t know why we don’t see high profile grooming cases in court in Birmingham like we have seen elsewhere in the country.
West Midlands Police, for their part, acknowledge the report had been made to them, but said they had been unable to prosecute the case as “officers were unable to gather enough evidence”.
In a stunning example of alleged police incompetence, Sarah claimed that West Midlands Police officers stopped a car with her and another girl as passengers alongside their Pakistani abusers, took the details of the two children, but then let the men drive away with the underage girls.
“Birmingham police stopped the car and took mine and my friend’s names and the men’s names. I was really scared as I didn’t know what was going to happen but the police just let us drive off,” she said.
“When we later got back to my care home the staff told me the police had rung and said we’d been stopped with really dangerous men. I thought, ‘Well if they were that dangerous why did you leave us with them?'”
Sarah said that her mother was a drug addict and a prostitute and that her mother’s dealers and “clients” were among the first to abuse her as a child. Care home records seen by the local news outlet confirmed that she was indeed abused by the men.
Two councils were forced to pay out over £150,000 in damages to Sarah for the sexual abuse she experienced while living at the homes, and the failure to remove her from her drug-addled mother’s care earlier.
“What I found the most awful thing of all was that I was really badly blamed and I was scapegoated… they (social services) actually wrote down that I was the main player in my own abuse aged 14 about the grooming gangs.
“I was drowning in a sea of abuse, treading water while frantically screaming for help and people thought I was waving. And they were waving at me instead of trying to save me. How many more historical child grooming victims are there in society right now who have not yet been heard or helped?”
Other grooming gang victims across the country have also said that for years during and after the abuse, authorities had failed to believe them, instead insisting they were to blame because they had made bad choices, had lied about being raped, or were even accused of voluntarily prostituting themselves at young ages.
Sarah said that ultimately, she does not believe any of her abusers will face justice.
Derbyshire Police confirmed that they had received an allegation from Sarah. However, they said that “officers were unable to gather enough evidence to secure a prosecution”.
“We welcome any new information which would allow us to carry out further investigations in this case and would urge anyone with information to come forward and speak to us,” the force said.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.