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 