Victim whose 2008 complaint to police eventually led to conviction of nine men tells how grooming began
The girl whose complaint to police in 2008 led to the conviction on Tuesday of nine men for running a child sex ring said the grooming began when a friend introduced her to men who promised her "free alcohol and cigarettes, food and taxis and things".
She thought it was "great" at first because there were no sexual strings attached.
"I just thought: 'I can get all this stuff for free.' And then I ended up living pretty much with this girl because I thought how good it was and I could do what I want. That's when the relationship turned bad with my mum and dad because of the way I was acting."
She said the first time she was attacked, "you don't expect anything like that to happen. I just thought I was having a good time with this getting drunk and stuff. I was young and I didn't think they'd want me."
The men did not talk to the girls much. "We'd be upstairs [above a takeaway] and they'd be downstairs … and they'd come up now and then and have a chat to us for five minutes. It made me feel like I was pretty. I never thought they'd do what they did to me because you don't think that, do you? That that will happen."
She said of one man: "He asked me to come upstairs and I didn't really think anything of it. Then he was basically saying about all the things he's bought for me and he wants something back for it. Then I was saying no, like, I was kind of saying it in a giggly way. I felt like if I'd said it nastily to him he could have hurt me. I tried to say no in a nice way but he just weren't having it."
She said her friend had changed her. "At that time I was scared of her and I was scared of them as well. At first I felt really bad and dirty and ashamed, but after a while it had been going on for so long and so many different men that it just became … I didn't feel anything. It weren't like me any more."
The girl said it just became something she had to do "and I couldn't get out of it. Like once you're in it, you're trapped. It just became like a daily life." She said this could mean having sex with up to five different men in a day, sometimes every day, but at least four or five times a week.
"They'd arrange a time and they'd come and pick me and her up and we'd go to the place, a flat or a house, and there would be different men waiting. There were quite a few men who would be there and there's other men who would pick us up and take us to different places for the other men waiting. But there was a lot of men that I'd only seen once or twice."
She said that on one occasion she had got drunk and angry and smashed the counter in the takeaway, and the men rang the police and she was arrested. She said she was scared to tell her parents "because I didn't know what the consequences would be from the men. Because I knew what they were capable of, because they'd threatened me."
During the 2008 interview, she told police what had happened, gave them her underwear and described the places where it had happened. When the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute, she said the abuse just carried on.
"I was back in the same position and she [the other girl] was introducing other men to me again. It just started again with different men and more men this time. And that's when it started becoming like up to five men a day."
She said: "I felt let down. But I know that they believed me … then in 2008 it weren't really heard of … Asian men with white girls. Nobody like … it was just unheard of. You think of Muslim men as religious and family-minded and just nice people. You just don't think they'd do things like that."
The girl said social services intervened because different men were picking her up and dropping her off from school, and she was arriving dirty and smelling of alcohol.
"Then I got pregnant and social services said to me that if I don't leave that house [the house she was sharing with the other girl] they'll remove my baby at birth and I were frightened to go because I didn't know what they'd do … the men."
When she moved back in with her parents, she was getting phone calls and taxi drivers were parked outside the house, watching it.
"I'd be getting phone calls off the girl and the men and that went on for months. I would not go out of the house on my own for nine months or something without my mum or dad because I was frightened what could happen." She said she eventually moved out of the area.
"I just hope now people realise it does happen and how it happens and how they do something about it … and justice will be done."
She added: "There are so many different men and you're being forced to sleep with these other men for them to gain money for selling you out. They frighten you and you're scared of them and obviously that's how they make you do it. The girls are too frightened to get out of it in the first place – to tell somebody."
The girl she was staying with and her sister thought they were in a relationship with the perpetrators, but "it's not a relationship. They're just brainwashing you so you think that they love you so you'll do what they say.
"I think what they did to me was evil. They ripped away all my dignity and my last bit of self-esteem and by the end of it I had no emotion whatsoever because I was used to being used and abused daily.."
She said she regarded the defendants' testimony describing the victims as prostitutes running a business empire as "ridiculous".
"How could I make it up? It was too big to lie about. How can 13, 14, 15-year-olds run a business empire of prostitutes? It's just stupid."
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