Caveat to say I’m going to tell this as factually as I can and please know this comes from a place of wanting to do the right thing.
Live in a town in the South East. We went into town this afternoon and it’s a fairly well known phenomenon that a large group of kids come in to town on Sundays to ‘mooch’. They’re all young, and you can tell the boys are, but the girls tend to ‘dress’ much older, to the extent that on first glance you’d think they were around 16 and it’s only when you look closer you realise they’re 13, 14 at a push. Local Facebook stuff pins them as kids from traveller families - I don’t particularly know or care about this or whether it’s true or prejudiced, just mentioning as I think it’s relevant.
There was a band of about 40 of them wandering around the shopping centre being a bit loud and obnoxious - annoying but fine. But then I spotted one of the girls arm in arm with a man. She was pale Caucasian, blonde, same age as the other girls (she clearly knew them from the way they were interacting). The guy she was on the arm of was south East Asian (my brain said Chinese but I don’t want to make assumptions about another person’s race). He was much, much older. Balding, if that puts it into some context. He had a massive grin on his face and she had a bit of a ‘hard’ face on - the ‘don’t mess with me’ sort of look. They were arm in arm at first with him leading her and he spoke to the other girls in the group so he must have known them as well. They went into a shop and my brain did a bit of a ‘oh must be family to be walking arm in arm/oh wait they’re clearly not closely related due to ethnicities/she’s a bit old for handholding even if it’s stepdad/ok what’s going on here’ thing. My gut feel was something was up but they then switched to holding hands rather than being arm in arm before going into a shop with the rest of the girls and by the time my brain had worked through it they were gone.
About half an hour later DH had nipped off to get his hair cut and I was wandering around with our preschoolers in the pram when I passed them again. This time it was just the two of them, none of the other girls and he was arm in arm with her again. It’s hard to explain but her face looked unhappy and the way he was leading her didn’t look great, he was almost pulling her along - not quite as dramatically as that suggests but he was definitely ‘leading’ if that makes sense and as I say she didn’t look happy.
My gut is telling me I think there’s a grooming set up here, it felt weird that it was just in plain sight. I didn’t feel I could speak to her or call anything out - the second time I saw them I was solo with two small children and from what I’ve seen in the past speaking to these kids doesn’t get a great reaction - and I also felt it was a bit futile, what the hell would she say with him there anyway?
I wish there had been a police officer around for me to flag it to but, hey, that went out with the ark right…
I feel bad for not doing anything and I wish I had. Is there anything I can do now? I’ve thought about calling NSPCC for advice but looked online and they’re only open 10-4 Mon to Fri. Could call the shopping centre security, but again what can they do? They don’t have much sway with these kids, from what I’ve seen in the past.
The reason I mentioned the local comments about them being travellers is initially I thought about the local schools and whether I could call them if it would help corroborate any concerns, but most of the local traveller community homeschool, and that worries me more about the lack of safeguarding.
I know I sound like a busy body and I don’t want to be one, but my gut feel was that this was off. It’s not something I’ve seen in my town before and don’t want to be ‘concerned of <town>’ but it’s really in my head and don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help at this point. I hope someone else said something but you can’t just hope someone else did can you?
Probably a pointless post at this stage and more me trying to process what I saw but if anyone has any suggestions about routes to go down please let me know. I’m really worried for this girl. I know they’re all outwardly hard as nails streetwise types (I’ve seen them out and about!) but there isn’t a single teenage girl who doesn’t deserve protection from what I’m fairly sure I saw.
Again, please know that the descriptions I gave are purely factual. I’m not trying to make assumptions about anyone. There were just a few too many red flags in this scenario and my gut is telling me it wasn’t right.