One victim, who had been groomed
from the age of 12 and was raped for the first time when she was 13, told BBC
Radio 4's Today programme her harrowing story.
She says she was raped "once
a week, every week" until she was 15, that police "lost"
clothing she had given to them as evidence and that she had feared for her
family's safety.
"Emma" [not her real
name], now aged 24, says she was 12 when she was first approached by a group of
young men in an arcade in Rotherham. The boys, who she says were of
"school age", began talking to her and struck up a friendship with
her.
'Soft
drugs'
What she did not realise at the
time was that she was being groomed for sexual abuse, she says.
The grooming went on for about a
year, during which time she began going to Rotherham town centre where she was
introduced to "grown men".
"They started introducing
alcohol and soft drugs to me and then, when I was 13, I was sexually exploited
by them," she says.
"Up until this point they had
never tried to touch me, they had not made me ever feel uncomfortable or ever
feel unsafe or that they could harm me.
"I trusted them, they were my
friends as I saw it, until one night my main perpetrator raped me, quite
brutally as well, in front of a number of people.
"From then on I would get raped
once a week, every week."
'Different
men'
She says her abusers began to force
her to have sex with "whoever wanted to come and have sex with me".
Speaking to BBC Panorama, she tells
of one incident when she was taken to a flat, locked inside a bedroom and
repeatedly raped by different men.
"I just had to sit and wait
until they sent man after man in and whatever they wanted, I had to give
them," she says.
"I can remember begging one of
the perpetrators who I knew quite well not to send anybody else into that room
and to just let me go home and them just laughing at me, telling me to get up
and basically just get on with it."
Charges
dropped
She says she reported her abuse to
the police "three months after my sexual exploitation started".
Emma says she saved the clothes she
had been wearing during the attacks and handed the items to police as evidence.
"They lost the clothing, so there was no evidence," she says.
After that, Emma says she was told it
was "my word against his" and that the case "probably wouldn't
result in a conviction, or even get to court".
At the same time, she says, her
family were being threatened and intimidated.
"The men were parking outside my
house, they were threatening my family, they were ringing my house phone - and
they were quite dangerous men as well," she adds.
"The police said they couldn't
offer any protection, so because of that I decided to drop the charges."
Mum
rape threat
She says: "I was 13 at that
point and my sexual exploitation went on until I was 15."
Her mum was the first person she told
about what was happening but even then her family were unable to stop the
abuse.
"My parents went to the relevant
services, they went to the people who should have been there to help and
protect [me], because as a family we couldn't stop these people," she
says.
Emma says her parents even locked her
up - "as many other parents" of victims had done - but threats from
the men left her fearing for her family's safety.
"I had no choice really, because
they used to threaten to get my mum and rape my mum," she says.
"So in my mind, as a 13 or
14-year-old, it was 'Well if I didn't go out and see them they are going to get
my mum and are going to rape her'.
Parents
'saved me'
"They gang raped me, so what
stops them from doing that to my mum?
"They used to follow my mum
because they used to know when she went shopping, what time she had been
shopping, where she had gone."
Emma adds: "I look back at it
now - I was a child, these were adult men who were very, very dangerous, very
nasty, they knew everything about me because in the grooming process I had told
them everything.
"So they knew all about my
family, they knew where we lived, they knew everything.
"I knew nothing about them apart
from their nicknames."
In the end she says her parents
decided the only way to stop the abuse was to move her "out of the
country".
"That was the decision that
saved my life," she says.
Abusers
'still free'
Emma says she was away from the UK
until she was 17, and when she returned she got "fantastic" help from
a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
"When I started talking to them,
what I did find is that I wasn't the only child who had sat in their offices
with this complaint against these men," she says.
But she says her attackers remain at
large.
"I still see them, they still
walk about the streets," she says.
"My way of dealing with that is
just completely blanking out that they're there, but it just maddens me and
sickens me that they've destroyed so many lives."
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