Yet another abuse of girls scandal in Telford going on for 40 years!

[rowdywoman1]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-worst-ever-child-grooming-12165527

Up to 1,000 girls repeatedly abused for up to 40 years in Telford. What on earth have the police and other organisations been doing?

I'm Iin London and have witnessed some very dodgy stuff when I was young,

Not from gangs like this though - although I'm sure they are / were operating,

We need as a society to change our attitudes around girls.

It does start to feel like wherever you look, it's there.

And it's always been there but the girls were judged / blamed for being "tarts" or whatever.

I know from my own upbringing that girls are supposed to "look after themselves" when it comes to this stuff - and with good reason.

We need to change this right now. Children need to be protected, sexual abuse of anyone is not OK, and they need to start joining the fucking dots around girls being abused and challening behaviours. Rather than saying well look at her she's off the rails is anyone surprised she's a tart, saying this child is being sexually abused is it any wonder she's acting out.

Thinking of these girls as difficiult / "off the rails" and painting them as knowing actors, and never ever looking at the men hovering on the edge of the picture, it's got to stop.

I mean when I was young me and my friends understood that whatever happened it was up to us to deal with it, that parents were distant and none of us would have dreamt of reporting anything to police etc.

We understood that as teenage girls we would be deemed responsible for anything that happened to us (short of murder!) and so we proceeded on that basis,

Nothing super-disastrous happened AFAIK but certainly things which were pretty dodgy were just dismissed as the way things just were.

What are parents roles in all this? There seems to be a clear link between suspectibility to grooming and low self esteem and low levels of supervision. Obviously the police and government via social policy have a duty to target abusers but how can we help parents from vulnerable families?

And what's the latest with the inquiry

The combination of sexism and classism entrenched in our institutions is so bloody toxic.

You do start to wonder what the hell is happening

Re parents:
It's the dilemma that all parents face - children / teenagers believing that they know best, being influenced by those around them and inevitably online influences and then threatening to their parents that they will self harm if they don't get their own way. Look at our discussions on here about adults / groups who don't understand adolescent mental health / suicide threats and deliberately use them to promote their own agenda
We know that many children will use every trick they can to get what they want - and for those more vulnerable it will include extreme measures. We need to enable parents to feel confident, be able to establish boundaries and to seek help. We need to resource CAMHS to share skills - not piecemeal but intensively, and we need to make sure that the police, schools, social care etc actively protect children from those trying to groom them. We need to see an acting out teenager pushing the boundaries to dangerous levels as a vulnerable child and in need of intervention.
And we must ensure that this very recent insidious trend of undermining parental authority stops immediately!

Try looking up how many towns and cities this on Street grooming has been going on in and how many cases the police have taken to court and you will see how the media are still afraid of covering this.
Finding a definitive list is like looking for rocking horse shit.
The last time I looked I ended up on a right wing blog because nobody else showed to show it.

This is still going on apparently; I have family in Telford and everyone knows which Asian taxi firm to avoid due to suspicions that they are involved in this....

The where are the parents thing is difficult

In one of the recent cities, parents had been to the police, been to SS, been trying really hard to find support and help. They had named the men to police and still nothing was done. The police viewed the girls as troublemakers etc and that was that

Not all the girls were from difficult circs although most were - children can be vulnerable for all sorts of reasons and also these men are clever and well practiced, I'm sure some of the children they got has nothing really bad going on but were just out looking for something exciting to do etc. I took a lot of risks as a teen as did my friends I can easily see how these men scoop up girls who are looking for all sorts of different things.

yes of course parents need to look out for their children BUT

not all parents are capable
some kids are a bit loopy even with lovely families
after a certain age if they are determined there's not a lot you can do - on MN the answer with uncontrollable / very difficult kids is often to just kick them out which I always find very very harsh

and fundamentally

there are men here who are going actively out of their way to groom control and rape girls. they are determined, well practiced and clever. THEY are the ones who are at fault here before anyone else. We need to change the police, SS etc before even looking elsewhere. If we leave it to the parents then it will NOT stop. How are parents supposed to fight against criminal gangs with no support from the police?

OH DH says he heard on talk radio earlier that the BBC said they aren't reporting it yet as it's only in the mirror and they haven't verified it

I was a bit but it's not just us asking. He pointed out that talk radio is hardly a feminist outlet!

I think it’s happening in a lot more places & in a lot more communities than most of us know.

Dd who is autistic was involved in an incident which led to the authorities picking up on the fact that he is very vulnerable & susceptible to grooming.

The social worker told me of a major grooming ring centred around the travelling community actually taking place not only in my town but 10-15 mins walk away from our house.

They pick their victims carefully, children in the edge maybe in trouble at school or minor offences or with mental health problems. Those who will crumple in court or not be believed. They use their own children to ensnare others. The operation took 2 years & out of 10 charged only 2 were convicted & only one jailed. My husband realised he actually went to school with one of them.

Sorry my post auto corrected. It is Ds who is vulnerable & not Dd.

i The combination of sexism and classism entrenched in our institutions is so bloody toxic.

The combination of these two things has been deadly in relation to grooming and child abuse in both communities and public institutions.

SnibbleAgain
I agree - it needs to be the police and local authorities who change. We know from many of the other investigations that parents (especially mothers) begged social services to intervene and they often refused.

But parents and families are the first line of defence so as well as changing the systems, we must also help families (of course family support being one of the austerity casualties!)

Also -

Recent report highlighted that many victims were adults who had fallen prey through being vulnerable in some way. This is where it gets difficult as with children in this situation it's cut and dried (although actually - looking at responses from police - it isn't). This pushes the numbers of victims through the roof - with adult women though (over 18 I suppose) it gets more complicated with "consent" - coercion, victims had learning disabilities, if women are addicts or have had a difficult childhood, previous sexual abuse, care leavers, the list just goes on.

YES parents need to be educated in this and children do but with the best will in the world all it will do is push these abusers past and onto someone else who is more vulnerable...

I think we're all in violent agreement here.

It's mind boggling but I look back and remember a couple of men in the pubs round my town who all the girl knew to keep clear of, and a young woman with mental health issues who looking back was clearly being exploited.

I mean it should be cut and dried when it's children but the response from police etc seems to have not been that which is appalling.

The reasons seems to be oh well these are difficult girls, you know, they were up to all sorts. Not good enough. And why aren't you even looking at the men in the corners of this picture?

I was a foster carer who 12 years ago was asked to look after a 13 yr old girl who’d been working as a prostitute in Sheffield. There were 3/4 girls looking at being placed in my area Gloucestershire I said I wd if she was in education i didn’t get the placement but another carer did who was happy to let her stay in bed all day doing whatever. At 15 years and 4 months social services returned them all to Sheffield with the keys to their own flat social services were complicit in this rmtheyvdidnt want those girls in education it was easier to not have them there because if a child isn’t in education they can be signed over to adult services at 15 years 4 months

OMFG that is so so young.

Why are we as a society so bad at protecting children from sexual abuse, when we are so quick to condemn it when it happens overseas?

And this is the police, SS we are talking about, people who are supposed to care about vulnerable young people being exploited by criminal gangs.

The difficulty we have is that when women and girls are abused we don't tend to react in ways that cause trouble for society in the same way as boys can... We tend to self-harm, we're not generally as violent etc. Maybe there is a sense that giving these girls to the men keeps them distracted from other sorts of crime?

It's awful.

OK I'm not going to react in the way I'd like to.
Playibg devil's advocate let's say there is a group of girls, 11 to 15, say, who are seemingly "working" as prostitutes. These girls are likely to have other issues such as drink, drugs, self harm, and also extremely difficult background with (I suspect) no one in their corner.
The two questions are:

• what do we do for them immediately, and how (and how do we make sure we identify them all)
• what do we do to stop this happening to anyone else

Dispassionately, and playing slightly into the hands of the group who want to blame the girls themselves, that is still what it comes down to, foe me. As well as a separate issue about punishing the men

I think we need to move the focus OFF the girls and onto the men

If we were better at getting men like this nicked and off the streets, then the neglected / previously abused / excitement seeking / whatever girls wouldn't be in danger in the same way.

We need to get rid of the predators much better and much more quickly, as there will always be people who will make good prey.

In the meantime - I suppose educate in schools, and on telly, make sure that it's not reported as being a certain "type" of girl as while many were vulnerable, not all were (apart from being young and naive), make sure that girls and women know that any and all reports to the police / SS will be taken seriously and treated professionally etc etc

Making sure that girls leaving care are very carefully supported would help.
Giving girls somewhere to go so they aren't hanging around the streets would help (this has always been the case with both boys and girls)
etc etc

Bottom line is though that as long as there are predators there are going to be victims, we need to get the predators swept from the streets. Make them think twice before doing this crap. Look at whether there are issues in different areas of the country, different backgrounds etc. Try and cut off at the root.

Yes I completely agree, but blaming then men doesn't seem to be happening or working (strange, that).

What bothers me is this was in your face from men from a group of countries.

Men of UK extraction operate differently - more on their own and more subtely, in their own families, with girls who have been down the pub etc - and I suspect the police are still dismissing cases where the perpetrator doesn't "look the part". The racism that may have once protected these men is now proteccting other men, potentially. I have no proof of this except my life experience. Well, and reading the news obv.