Scarlett was 14 – groomed and trafficked in Manchester to be raped by dozens of men

[removed]

I’ve been saying this for years, the reason so many girls were ignored is not because anyone wanted to be seen as racist, it’s because they didn’t see the girls as victims.

How many times in that story do these girls talk about how they would run away back to these men, how they would willingly go to random peoples houses, how they would take the offer of free gifts and drugs knowing what was expected in return, how they would keep putting *themselves* in these situations.

To the police and the people supposed to care, they were just unruly teenage girls who knew exactly what they were doing. The girls knew if they went to these parties there would be drugs, alcohol and sex taking place and yet they kept going and so nobody was interested in helping.

I remember the girls from school who were like this, they thought it was cool to have an older boyfriend, we thought they were just a bunch of slags.

I’m not blaming the girls here, we know they were groomed, we know many victims struggle to break free from the cycle of abuse, but nobody seems to talk about how we all saw these girls as nothing but unruly slags and that’s why we didn’t do more.

[removed]

I grew up in the 80s’/90s’, several girls I knew were preyed on in the same way. I literally didn’t know the men could be prosecuted for this sort of thing. The adults around me were aware of it happening (I discovered after something terrible occured), it was seen as a sad thing, but ultimately the girls, or at least their parents, own faults.

In cases that did reach the police they didn’t seem interested in pursuing them. I would guess they were seen as hard cases, often without witnesses or evidence. The girls are induced to lie to protect their abusers.

I saw someone was recently imprisoned for the same offenses in the same area, a decade after I lived there but that’s some progress I think. People seem far less willing to let it slide by these days.

What to do about it now is a more difficult question than one might think. There’s many out there who deserve prison time, but for example I know one individual who started a relationship with someone eight years older when they were in their early teens, it was unquestionably grooming, but now they’re married with kids, how do you prosecute something like that?

It’s anecdotal but society seemed far more forgiving of grooming. Think of films like “Rita, Bob & Sue too” a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about grooming on a Bradford Council estate.

Think of the number of famous musicians/celebrities known to have relationships with underage girls than multiply this at all levels of society.

I was reading about the wrongful conviction of Stefan Kiszko, the actual killer Ronald Castree had previous convictions of abducting & indecently assualting a nine & a seven year old on separate occasions, the punishments – a £25 & £50 fine.

Personally I think there’s a massive number of people, many thousands, who are guilty of these sorts of crimes & have gone unpunished for decades. Bringing these people to justice would be very expensive, time consuming & would dig up all sorts of muck thats been hidden for a long time which is why the authorities are hesitant – like other recent crimes they are hoping this huge mess will fade with time.