"It was the thrill of being with a bad boy." Christine was 13 when she began exchanging messages online with someone she believed was a teenage boy. On their first meeting, she discovered he was a grown man 10 years older than herself. He also told her he was involved with gangs and drugs.
"I always knew, OK, he's probably hurt someone, but in terms of hurting me, I didn't think it would get to that point," she says.
The nihilism and selfishness of a hardened career streetwalker, in a 13 year old.Thanks, diversity!
Over the next few years, he would use Christine to courier drugs, subject her to extreme sexual exploitation, and assault her so violently she feared she might die. Christine is one of four women who have chosen to waive their anonymity and speak publicly to the BBC documentary, Britain's Forgotten Girls, about how they were targeted by criminals when they were children.
And willingly became criminals in their turn.
The thrill of feeling wanted was also what led Annie, from south-east London, into the clutches of a gang. At first, she says she "felt quite in awe, quite excited to have the attention" of three older boys who wanted to befriend her, even though she knew they were involved in drugs.
All believe the authorities failed to protect them and did not take their allegations seriously.And naturally, so does 'The Guardian', fully invested in portray these women as helpless victims of men’s misdoings.
The BBC says it has been told that parental neglect is a common misclassification by social workers of sexual assault involving young girls. It’s not clear whether this is because it makes for a smaller workload or because they are untrained in seeing what’s really going on – but perhaps, given that either seems like a huge dereliction of duty, it doesn’t matter.
So invested that they are even prepared to disapprove of social workers!
What we might call the first officially missed opportunity to help what was estimated to be at least16500 children at risk was the reaction to the national inquiry led by the then deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz. Those 2013 findings were largely lost in a welter of recriminations and accusations that the report (which found drug gang abuse cut across all demographics) underplayed the role of ethnicity. It was as if the preceding scandal about grooming gangs had used up the media and public’s allowance of sympathy and at the same time set up a popular narrative from which they didn’t want to deviate.
No, it’s not an equivalent, no matter how much you might want to claim that.
So we have another film documenting another set of wilful, persistent and profound failures of the system to carry out the protective duties it supposedly exists precisely to perform, another film testifying to the perception of girls and women as second-class citizens, as sirens who bring it on themselves, and another frightening look into the moral, social and cultural abyss that shows no signs of closing.
That abyss is one that’s prevalent in the black community and if you ignore the elephant in the room, you’ll never resolve it.
