The “GROMING GANG” scandal in the UK revolves around sweat, layer and anguish Women’s rights

“My daughter is raped and sold to countless men.” These were the words that a sad mother talked about, which first alerted me to the organized rape and the purposeful gangs – referred to now as “gangs of gangs” – targeting young girls in northern England.

This was in the late 1990s, knowing that I was active against children’s sexual exploitation, some of these girls have continued. They were desperate to help.

I was not the first person to approach. They have tried the authorities – police and child protection services – but instead of helping, they only found a ruling, about paternity, motherhood and daughters. A police officer described the victim as a “annoying slag”. The gang, which she later abused, was condemned by the horrific rape of children.

I was amazed at the strength of these mothers even when I saw, closely, the pain in their eyes. I could only be emotional when someone told me how her 13 -year -old daughter returned to the house crying, with blood throughout her legs, high on hashish and alcohol. She was raped by a gang.

Social workers told some families that their daughters “choose” this “lifestyle” and there is nothing they can do about it. For those adults who were assigned to protect these children, the rape of children and prostitution was a “selection of lifestyle”.

I felt terrifying and angry blindly. “We did not know,” mothers kept telling me. “We did nothing wrong!”

They came from a wide range of backgrounds, especially the working class. Some of them had happy and stable family settings, and others were more chaotic, as their daughters were transferred to the role of local authority care. Some girls were already victims of sexual assault – by boys in their neighborhood or male family members. Some of them were being intimidated at school. It was some autism. But all of them shared something common – the police or professionals did not enter the child to help them.

The most vulnerable are those in care homes. Workers in these homes will turn away from men in flash cars waiting abroad. When girls disappear for several days in a row, the police were barely looking for them.

It was clear, as soon as I spoke to mothers and some girls who managed to escape gangs, that this was not an unknown phenomenon – health workers, neighbors and teachers were aware of what was happening. It was not a secret that girls had started replacing heroin as the favorite goods of criminals looking to make a fast -back.

I have already searched sexual assault by clerics and child abuse episodes online. Now I wanted to investigate what these mothers tell me. One night, I sat outside a care house in Blackpool, in northern England, in the hope of asking one of the employees what they were doing to protect girls in their care, when I seemed to have noticed it as if it were a completely new car. He was driven by a man in his forties. There were two younger men sitting on the back seat. One of the younger men went out of the car, went to the door of the care house and rang the door bell. Speak shortly to the employee member who answered. Five minutes later, a girl has not been over 14 years old and climbed at the back of the car. Go.

I was all familiar with the intrigues of sexual assault and exploitation, but there were some main differences between the cases you previously investigated and the way these gangs operated. These gangs made their victims believe that they were their savior. Younger men will be used to attract victims. Initially, they will provide friendship, fast food and fun. Since most of the victims were eggs and most of the perpetrators of Pakistani origin, girls will be told that it is better to tell their parents, because they “must be racists.” Once girls are absorbed, they will be transferred to other men, selling them from apartments.

Early reports from parents and victims confirmed that some older men in the network were taxi drivers. Soon it became clear how the girls were targeted: the taxi driver will pick it up – often from the care homes. I saw taxis pulling out of these homes and girls enter with employees from the windows.

Taxi drivers will receive fees for every girl who is delivered to the gang members – especially men in the twenties and thirties of life – although these fees often include allowing the victim to rape for free.

Some of these gangs were very organized – young contestants will be assigned to the initial contact with the victims; The angel was rented their apartments until the girls were raped; Others were more opportunistic. All of them have benefited from a culture of impunity that still surrounds sexual assault on women and girls – a culture in which the condemnation rates are very low to make rape experimental.

Most media reports approach complex stories like this about sweat, layer or sex – the three are never at the same time. But the fact is that these children were abused because they were girls. They were rejected from any pretext to protect from the authorities because they were poor. They were targeted because of their race and then the authorities who were at the same time ignored by being accused of racism while adopting racist assumptions about the types of white girls who “sleep with” brown men. This is about race, class and sex. He sees women’s hatred through the three.

These girls were either blame or not. In fact, sometimes they are prosecuted for being drunk and unorganized while men who provided alcohol – the same men who raped them – were not so.

Not only these girls were “hidden” as the word “grooming” indicates, although they were definitely deceived by the belief that they had a friend in one of the youngest young children; They were raped, sold and abused, in some cases they were tortured.

Now, nearly three decades after the first time spoke to these mothers, nothing has changed. There is still a horrific satisfaction about organized sexual exploitation, which leads to a little condemnation – regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrators. The police are still not doing enough. We still choose to blame the victims.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.