Grooming gangs/child sexual exploitation - was it going on in your area in the 80s/90s/00s? Did you realise?

[WhichBitchIsWhich]

Prompted by another thread about the Telford sex abuse scandal, I'm wondering how widespread this really was (and maybe still is but today's teenagers aren't likely to be on MN to answer).

I grew up in a small Midlands town and was at secondary school between 1993 and 1997.

It was definitely going on there at the time, though I've only realised the scale and true extent of it in retrospect.

Girls (working class white girls, to be specific) from our school would regularly meet adult men who they called their boyfriends outside the gates at lunchtime and "go for a drive" in their cars, coming back with a McDonald's a while later. They were often collected at the end of the day by the same men. Some of us recognised this as abuse (or at least as not okay). I remember discussing it with friends a few times as a teenager and we certainly knew these men were not "boyfriends" as the girls involved said. It certainly wasn't a secret, the staff knew about it and watched it happen but said or did nothing (I assume, as it carried on year after year).

Most upsetting to me was a deaf girl with learning disabilities who was in my form group, who lived in a local authority children's home in the next town over. She was pregnant at 15 and I still remember someone asking her in class who the father was and her replying "just some fucking [racist four letter word beginning with p and ending with i]" (apologies for even hunting at the word but it's what she said). She didn't come back to school after she reached about 6 months pregnant and I heard from another girl who had lived in the same "care" home that she didn't get to keep her baby.

I realise now as an adult what was almost certainly happening to her

I'm in London and was at school till early 80s. Obviously no Internet back then, which was better (as kids couldn't be groomed online) and worse (as less information).

I don't remember any gangs as such but looking back there was definitely inappropriate relationships eg a 12 year old with an 18 year old boyfriend. We were in awe....now it makes me want to vomit.

A girl in the year above me was having a relationship with the geography teacher when she was 14. It certainly lasted for a few years as I saw them together when I was 16, so she'd have been 17.

Not quite child abuse, as they were all over 16, but when I was in 6th form many girls had boyfriends in late 20s.

I wasn't an adult at the time, I was at High School from 83 to 88 but even so can't say I saw anything like this. However, there were very different attitudes at the time, look at the whole 'wild child' thing, Sam Fox in the Sun etc. Bil apparently went and sat in his work van outside schools looking for new girlfriends. He met this someone this way when she was 14 and he was early 20s, he went on to have a child with her a few years later and they were together for about 10 years. It was seen as a bit naughty but not police worthy.

They got away with it because there wasn't really any difference between them and white men who had been doing it since forever. The police wouldn't have been interested because it was just 'what teenage girls did' (in misogynistic language, naturally).

Can't speak for anyone else but I did.

I reported them.

The police didn't give a shit.
My bosses didn't give a shit.

When the one man tried to come to the home to try to talk to me I told him to stay away and that I knew exactly what he was.

He didn't give a shit.

I of course also tried my very best to talk with the young women in the home but they were convinced they were 'loved' and couldn't see their vulnerability or that these men were predatory.

Legally I had no right to lock them in their rooms which would have been the only way to keep them safe.

They were 16 and 17 year old care leavers. There are limits to your powers.

CSE is still a massive problem along side runners for county lines.

There has been a big shift in how it's delt with over the last 15 years.

Staff in childrens home / foster care are better trained.
Police take it more seriously with specialist units - serving Cawns, educating hotel staff what to look out for, being part of MASH teams for sharing information, collating information etc.

In Social services strategy meetings are held more, missing episodes scrutinised, specific role for CSE and missing young people, return home interviews carried out every time a young person is missing, mapping meetings where information is shared so links between a groups of young people can be detected.

As a whole we have got better at protecting the young people using interventions but it's far from perfect.

I lived abroad as a teenager but went to a British school and I can hardly think of a British girl I went to school with who wasn't abused or raped. It was a variety of men to be honest, some British, some European, some American. There was nothing stand out about the men, it was always just men.

Meanwhile in the UK a friend a few years older than me who would now be late 40s was being abused by a much older takeaway owner who arranged a back street abortion when she became pregnant. She was never able to have her own kids because of the damage caused.

I think that way of thinking was standard tbh.

Everyone I knew, including me had much older boyfriends and that was considered perfectly normal. I had boyfriends in their mid twenties when I was 15/16 and my parents were actually pretty switched on and protective. It was just normal at the time - eighties, early nineties. I have a 15 year old and the thought of her having an adult boyfriend is completely incomprehensible to me it just wouldn't happen.

I didn’t notice anything at school but I do wonder if it’s because I went to a school with predominantly Asian children without may vulnerable white children or perhaps it was happening and I was oblivious.

A few years ago a friends DD was groomed and it is such a heartbreaking situation. My school friends DD (about 13 when it started) absolutely believed she had a better life with her abusers so taken into care about 100 miles from home to get a fresh start - she often ran away and went back to the abusers. Then she was moved even further away from home into a secure mental health unit. The DD is resentful towards her mum and their relationship has completely broken down. The DD is 18 or will be very soon and her intention has always been to go back to those who groomed and abused her. The groomers are very good at picking vulnerable children.

I was a teenager in Telford in the mid 80s. Yes it was going on. My best friend (white) was recruited as a 'boyfriend' for a muslim man by her friend. Her friend's muslim 'boyfriend' had told her to find a 'boyfriend' for his mate.

My friend was a virgin and vulnerable due to issues at home. She only ever met her 'boyfriend' at a flat where he had sex with her. He refused to be seen in public with her. She came to school upset one day as he told her after they had sex that he would never do this to a muslim girl as he would respect her too much.

As far as I know, there was not the awful torture and abuse of the poor girls in the news, but it was still pretty disgusting. She was 14, as was her friend.

I am glad people are mentioning "white men" I was groomed by a white guy in our very white working class area. Btw, I am ethnic origin so how do you think I feel when all people comment on just "Asian men".. its an absolute shambles.
Yes there were Asian grooming gangs that I came upon but the media also needs to look at the all-white community areas where it was also happening!!! We were the only ethnic family in that town. So not only did I experience the grooming and sexual abuse but also racism.
The racist tosh that comes out of this is laughable..they need to hear my story. And there were definitely black guys grooming my friends too in high school when we moved to another town (predominantly black and carribean community)

There was a difference. People in authorities were more scared of being called racist than they were about girls being abused and raped and tortured. This is well documented in reports into this.

We have to be able to identify and name different types of abusers to be able to develop strategies to tackle the abuse. There were clear cultural beliefs about non-muslim girls and clear reinforcing community ties that gave these men, in their minds, the moral permission to do what they did and the social network to do it. From the analysis I read a few years ago, the problems have been in areas predominated by communities who originate from rural pakistan. This is an issue of rural pakistani misogynistic and racist attitudes, unsurprisingly still being held onto after the move to the UK.

If we ignore the cultural elements, we cannot develop initiatives to tackle it. And we let girls be abused and raped to protect 'community relations' and avoid being called racist. As we have. And as we are.

Teenager in Leeds in 00s and it was definitely a thing. Around the age of 14 my friends and I used to lie about our ages to smoke in shisa bars (the trendy thing to do then). We would always get chatted to by groups of older Asian men. Luckily none of us were really in the 'vulnerable' category and just used to find it really creepy; I do remember crying in the toilets at one place though and making my friend leave with me as one guy in particular wouldn't leave me alone.

Also, not the same kind of group behaviour, but many girls still having much older 'boy'friends and teachers all turning a blind eye to it. One of my sister's friends went on to marry the school bus driver! I think (hope?) attitudes towards that have changed a lot in the last 15 years or so though.

So many posts on this thread are absolutely heartbreaking to read.

I was at secondary school in London, 1998-2003. I don't recall any grooming that looked like 'gangs', but there was a small cluster of white working class girls who used to escape at lunchtimes to one of their family homes. The gossip was that her dad was abusing (not the word we used to conceptualise it then) the other girls. One lunchtime 2-3 teachers went literally running out of the gates and up the road to her house - she was in school, but allegedly two other girls were locked in the house with him, possibly against their will? We never knew and I suspect we never will, but i realise now that most likely the gossip was exactly the truth (whereas for a few years between leaving at 16 and becoming a proper grownup, i guess I assumed that it was just our lurid teen imaginations).

I remember the same teacher (my HoY) who went flying out of the school that day routinely slapping down anyone's nonsense about their glamorous older boyfriends, actually. Very much "sir, did you know so-and-so has an 20yo boyfriend?" - "really? And she's 14, so what does he want with her? Any self respecting 20yo should be going out with someone his own age". It was always in his unconversational 'I'm not getting drawn into your silly games, shut up and do your work instead of trying to distract the class for the fun of it' voice, but thinking about him now (and especially reading some of the teachers' reactions reported on this thread) I'm quite pleased to remember his little nuggets of challenge to that crap.

I was trafficked for CSE images (‘child porn’) by my family, south England. I never told anyone because I knew I shouldn’t, but when one girl spoke to me about her abuse I shut her down, distanced myself from her and told all my friends she was a liar with issues. We were in primary school. I feel so so awful but I was angry with her for talking about it- I knew I wasn’t meant to and was afraid she’d get us both in trouble.

When me and my friends were 12/13 we were groomed by 30ish yr old white men. We were given lots of drugs, booze, food and taken away to stay in dodgy B&Bs. We thought we were really cool at the time but actually it took away our childhood. Police knew, social workers knew and we were assumed to be at fault for it because grooming wasn't really understood at the point. I remember social workers having visits with me and then taking me there after. Now I'm a social worker and I would not be thinking it's ok to drop a 13yr old off to well known smack and crack addicts who basically sold us to get more drugs.

Three Girls on BBC is a drama about this type of abuse. It's really good but absolutely awful to watch.

The misogynist, police were paid their cut. Fuck all to do with "worried about being called racist". I can't believe that anyone is taken in by that lie.

I lived in rural NE Scotland and had no clue this was happening anywhere until it was on the news from Rotherham or Rochdale.

@D0lphine i started teaching in 2003, and it was very different. We didn’t really have any safeguarding training, for one thing.

A lot of the girls didn’t come across as vulnerable (I now understand that this made them more so, not less.) They came across as streetwise, savvy, older than their years. Thick makeup and hooped earrings and hard faces. They didn’t seem frightened, cowed, withdrawn. They openly spoke about their sex lives and their plans for when they left school.

I was 22. I was scared of some of them, tbh. No one saw them as children. They didn’t see themselves as children.

And the rich and famous then/before then too (Savile et al).

The police force in this country are a fucking disgrace

South East London. Age 15 in 1996. best friend's boyfriend was 35 year old friend of the family. got my friend into prostitution, tried to get me into it, asked me to go to fetish club. pretty sure he drugged us one night. Slept with other friend, tried to molest me.

Got grabbed twice off the street but we fought them off, random men in alley ways.

group of men lived two doors down, grooming us, buying us CDs, kittens, touching us while we were there. don't recall any intercourse. Think I'd remember but baffled as to what their end game was.

Basically yeah, it's always been around and always will be.

You're talking about me @educationnow I was a hard faced hoop wearing gobby KID. I didn't deserve what happened to me because I was a bit rough.

At the age of about 11 or 12 I was told by my friend to watch a man at Church who wasn't particularly "nice". She was liked but she was very quiet and often was by herself. I now shudder to think about what she might have experienced, hopefully I've got the wrong end of the stick but I'm not sure I have. It didn't dawn on me until years later.

I grew up in the Rochdale borough; as far as I’m aware it didn’t happen to girls at our school but there were a couple of pupil-teacher scandals after I left. One girl had a kid with the PE teacher who still teaches there.
Anecdotally heard that it was pretty rife in other areas of the borough where the demographic was higher Pakistani immigrant men. Even though it was “safer” for me to get a taxi to my orchestra rehearsal up there on a Friday night my mum (who couldn’t drive) would insist I got two buses, after I’d been repeatedly chatted up and pestered in cabs there or back. That started when I was twelve.

Max - I know. I was trying to answer another poster. What I know now and what the general views were then are very different.