Prey: Giving a voice to the survivors of grooming gangs

0:02Sarah O’Connell:Sky News, the full story first.

0:09Sarah O’Connell:Coming up, a new Sky documentary tells the story of the grooming gangs that continue to plague our communities through the voices of the survivors themselves. Just to warn you, we will be discussing grooming, harm and child sexual exploitation in this episode. Thumbtack presents Tile Trouble. Every single time I use my sink, I make eye contact with the uneven grout on my kitchen backsplash. The crooked corners eye me and I'm haunted by more tiling questions than I thought possible. What kind of pro can fix a backsplash? Can I replace one cracked tile or should I replace them all? What? What if I just use Thumbtack?

0:45Sarah O’Connell:I can hire top-rated pros, read reviews, and compare prices with a tap. All on the app. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

1:50Sarah O’Connell:of a New Sky documentary, Prey, inside today's grooming gangs, which is presented by the victims themselves. Throughout this episode, you'll be hearing directly from some of them. First, Scarlett. She was groomed and trafficked around Manchester to be raped by dozens of men from the age of 14. And there's Danielle. She ended up in the care system after she was raped when she was 11 years old. Her vulnerability was then exploited by predators. Liz and Sarah join me in the studio. Let's start with Scarlett. Tell me about her, Sarah. When did you first encounter her?

2:26Liz Lane:Well, her father reached out because he wasn't getting any help from social services. He'd been reporting it repeatedly to the police. And so he reached out in despair, really, trying to get someone to give him some help. So we went up and we met her. We didn't fully realise at the time when we first met her that she was just still at the tail end. of what was happening to her. So she was about 17 then. And we just established a relationship with her and stuck with it from there.

2:56Sarah O’Connell:What actually happened to Scarlett, Liz? Well, she was groomed when she was 14. Basically, an incident happened where she was attacked by this local gang of teenagers. And she kind of fell in with this group because she thought she'd be better off being friends with them than on the outside and it might offer her some protection. and then one of the guys in that gang raped her and she said that was a big turning point, like her attitude just changed because she says the police didn't fully investigate it, nothing happened with the investigation and she just felt really vulnerable and then she became friends with this older girl and it was this girl actually who was five years older than her that initially groomed her and it was over a period of kind of months where she was hanging out with her.

3:40This young woman was having sex with men and then eventually she made it clear to Scarlett that she was expected to do the same.

3:48Sarah O’Connell:So how does this work, the grooming? Presumably starts quite low level, does it? Or can they just literally take them straight off the street?

3:55Liz Lane:Well, it's befriending, isn't it? That's how I understand grooming as. They're befriended by these men. And when I say befriend, you know, the men will flatter them and buy them things sometimes, but not always. quite common across all of our girls is they'll pick them up in nice cars a teenage girl a 13 14 year old teenage girl feels quite happy sat in the front seat of a bmw and being picked up at the school gates and things like that it's a very slow process i think that you know slowly slowly they gain more and more trust and more and more faith and then they start taking them out to different parties and suddenly there'll be a shift in the air almost and the abuse will begin.

4:42Having said that with Danielle it was literally picking her off the street and it was very fast because she was so vulnerable she said she'd be wandering the streets at night she'd run away and she'd literally got nowhere to stay she's young like 12 13 14 frightened and so it was seen as like the better option to go with a random guy and then really bad things would happen so in some circumstances it can be as quick and easy for the men as that.

5:08Sarah O’Connell:Just in terms of Scarlett's own upbringing herself, she lays bare the idea that there is one type, that there is one socioeconomic class from which the survivors, the victims are drawn from. Just explain her own background a little. She grew up with two parents. They split up when she was quite little, but she said she had a middle class upbringing. She got whatever she wanted. Her dad even bought her a horse when she was in her early teens and she went to private school so she's not your stereotypical grooming victim but she had this incident that made her vulnerable and all young teenage girls will have a vulnerability in some way and these people preyed on that.

5:47Sarah O’Connell:Look besides the assumption the victims are from a certain socio-economic background there's also a stereotype about the groomers themselves. In Scarlett's case it was another young woman someone she considered a friend who actually drew her into the abuse. So how common is that?

6:00Liz Lane:Well I don't think it's as uncommon as you might think. We also spoke to another young woman who was groomed by a girl. I think sometimes the gangs use girls to groom other girls because it's easier to you know win the trust of someone if you're also a young woman. I don't think it's that rare. It's just not spoken about. Nobody kind of talks about it and I think one of the worst things about that element of grooming is the sense of betrayal that the young woman feels when someone she's absolutely considered a friend she's not looked at this girl as someone who might make sexual advances or use them in some way so I think it's it's a very bitter pill to swallow when you look back and realize you know I was actually being groomed for abuse by this young woman she was like my sister she was like my best friend like it's like I found a person with all in one like she protects me She was like my mum, like she looked after me.

6:56I remember the first time that something ever happened. Two guys come in with like condoms, vodka, like calipax, cocaine. But then this time she went in the bathroom and had sex with the guy and she left me alone with this guy and it was just really awkward. Where all the other times, like if guys went near me, she'd kind of be like, leave her alone, leave her alone, like, and make it out like that she was protecting me and this time she'd left me. and I remember her being in the bathroom for about 40 minutes and she'd come out of the bathroom and she just said, she started laughing, you know, like off her head on drugs and she went, you're still sat next to him, you still haven't gone near each other and then she went in the bathroom again and obviously that made it clear what she wanted me to do then.

7:41I don't even remember the night really, I just remember waking up in the middle of the night to him next to me.

7:47Sarah O’Connell:And Liz, look, we've mentioned another young woman called Danielle. She comes from a rather different background, a different upbringing to Scarlett. I mean, tell us how she came into contact with the gangs. She came from quite a big family, lived in Peckham. She said it was not the easiest life, but her mum tried to give her what she could. And then when she was 11, she was raped by somebody in the community and then put into care as a result of that. And so she talks about how she went, you know, hundreds of miles away up to Lancaster in care, talks about being put on the train and she didn't want to leave.

8:20and then within a few weeks she hated the children's home she was in and she was sectioned aged 11 and then from that it was kind of a downward spiral where she'd be moved around to dozens of children's homes and she'd constantly run away and then end up in really dangerous situations. They would have sex with us and tell us that they loved us and that they would marry us and things like this and make us think that they were our friends when really they weren't. They were much older and they have no interest in girls like us.

8:48Sarah O’Connell:And it is in those dangerous situations that the grooming took place And a point that both Danielle and Scarlett are at pains to make Is that you cannot generalise about the ethnicity of the groomers

9:02Liz Lane:The girls in our film, most of them say that it was predominantly Asian men They don't specify other than Asian men But not all the girls had that Two of the girls we spoke to, they had white groomers almost exclusively and all of the girls, all of them, have said that men of every race rate them and groom them. So this idea of it being only and exclusively Pakistani or Asian grooming gangs, none of them would say that.

9:32Sarah O’Connell:None of them. Liz, just talk a little bit about how the grooming takes place. A lot of it's happening online now. So like the initial contact might be through Snapchat or something like that. The girls' details are being passed on amongst men, how they'll just have dozens of random requests all the time. The thing with Snapchat is there's the disappearing message feature. So it means that if somebody contacts you, sends a message, sends a threat, as soon as you've viewed it, it disappears and it's not even held on Snapchat servers or anything like that. So for a police investigation, which usually would take place many months after, it's unlikely a girl in that situation at that time is going to report it.

10:14It's gone. so the evidence is gone and then on top of that if they wanted to you know get evidence themselves and screenshot it the groomer who was sending the message would get a notification so it's dangerous for them to even try and capture it in the moment so it seems that it's very much a platform that these men use to target them

10:32Sarah O’Connell:The use of drugs to coerce or control these young women I mean I think that is an understood feature of grooming but there's also this realisation now that these rape gangs and drug gangs are one and the same thing they even involve the girls in the drug trade? I think this goes hand in hand with like the ethnicity of the groomers and the men. Actually the thing that they've got in common is they're pretty much always organised criminals and these girls are just another commodity to them. So they use them you know selling them for sex or to be raped but also using them to carry drugs or cut up drugs.

11:04They're just useful, they're hanging around, they've got them, they're less suspicious maybe certainly than themselves you know less likely to be stopped but also maybe than other boys that they might have running county lines so in pretty much every case the girls said they've been made to at least hold drugs some of them get much more involved like scarlet because one of the other things about

11:24Liz Lane:the drugs connection is the premises that they operate from these gangs they're what we would call trap houses or bandos and they're raping girls in the same properties that they're bagging up drugs they're one in the same place so it should be obvious it would be obvious to us if a young girl was caught with those kind of drugs what was happening to her so many of the

11:47Sarah O’Connell:of the girls who talk about parties about you know going along and it's a laugh and they're being looked after and they're being showered by praise and they're receiving the gifts and all the rest of it and then it turns pretty horrible at the time they the girls see it as normal and you know we feel like this is something we could do a whole documentary on the psychology of it and the fact that at the time you know scarlet says she hated it when her dad said you're being groomed because when you're in it you can't see it and even though you know bad stuff's happening to you you still kind of feel like you're choosing to be with these people but they've got such a level of control over you you know through threats and serious violence but also these girls do at times see them as fun people to hang out with at the same time it's really complicated and i think unless you've been in it which we haven't it's really hard to get your head around to me it almost feels as if they've been brainwashed by these men

12:43Liz Lane:and the nearest criminal offense i think to this crime is coercive control which is only ever heard of it used in sort of the frame of domestic abuse a husband and a wife and you know people repeatedly say about this why does she go back to him why does she keep returning to him he's beating her up he's doing and yet these girls ostensibly seem to go back to their groomers but it's not through choice it's because they're controlled by these men and they really are

13:13Sarah O’Connell:controlled by them it feels like manchester has a big old problem when it comes to these sorts of gangs?

13:19Liz Lane:I think it's a UK issue. I think it happens everywhere, in every city, in every town. I think it's possible Manchester gets a bigger focus because that's where we know the story originated from. Rochdale is part of Greater Manchester. I have no proof or evidence or stats on this, but neither does anybody else. I don't think Manchester's got a bigger problem than Liverpool or Sheffield or London. You know, Danielle's from London and you definitely don't look at grooming gangs around London, but Danielle was held in a house in Croydon by a gang and repeatedly raped and they wouldn't let her out of that house for over a week.

13:57Liz Lane:So it happens everywhere, as do rapes. I mean, the underpinning thing about this whole story is women don't get their rapists convicted. It's not just grooming gangs that don't get caught. You know, like rapists don't get convicted in general.

14:13Sarah O’Connell:Towards the end of the documentary, we see Scarlett sitting down with dad Marlon and he talks to her about the pride that he has in her for having gotten through this. Your personality changed rapid really really quick. Yeah it was like overnight wasn't it? It was literally overnight and even though you weren't the easiest kid when you were younger but you had character and you kind of winged it with your humour and then that disappeared really quick and then you became really verbally aggressive but then that changed to physical within a couple of weeks and that which you never ever done before which I knew then something drastic's happening here it gives you anxiety as well like depression everything everything I've suffered with anxiety and depression through this definitely but what I want to say even though you didn't go to university and I'm really sad that you've missed that opportunity where you are now I am so proud of you on a different level sorry because you've come so far as a parent there was only one question going through my mind at that point and it's how on earth did you let that happen and I'm not blaming him I understand that things can progress but how how does it happen how do you lose your teenage daughter at the age of 14?

15:42Liz Lane:I think it's really easy to lose your teenage daughter at the age of 14 and I think any parent can lose their teenage daughter or son for that matter to criminal exploitation at that age I think the groomers are incredibly clever and they have a deep understanding of the psychology of a teenage child, sometimes more so than the parent themselves. And definitely, I would say more so than the police. I think it's a very slow process where they slowly reel that child in. And by the time they've reeled them in, how do you stop your daughter going out? I mean, Scarlett herself talks about how her father would physically restrain her to stop her leaving the house.

16:27Liz Lane:you can't put your child in a cage in the house all the time it's not an easy thing for a parent to do especially if you don't have the help and support of social services and the police and you're going and this is a common theme i you'd agree wouldn't you yeah where parents go to external agencies for help and they don't get any yeah it is a path that scarlet that danielle the

16:52Sarah O’Connell:rest are going to be on for quite some time i mean how does that trauma from the years past how does Does that manifest itself in their day to day?

17:00Liz Lane:They can be very emotionally up and down. I think that they have a big problem and an understandable problem in trusting anyone. You know, whoever that might be, friends, journalists, police officers. You know, I find that trust is a big, big problem for them. A lot of them have lost out on their education because they were being groomed and they weren't attending school. so they find themselves in a position where, as Scarlett says in the film, her friends have gone to university, she's not in that place anymore. I think the word trauma, you know, we all say, oh, I'm so traumatised. These girls are genuinely and deeply traumatised and it shows itself in almost every facet.

17:41Liz Lane:Like, I get phone calls from one of the girls in the film who's, if there's a car following her, she'll ring me up at, like, 11 o 'clock at night and go, there's a car following me. It probably isn't following her, but because she's seen the same car behind her for longer than five minutes, she panics. And I think that's the same for all of them.

18:00Sarah O’Connell:But what are your takeaways? What are your conclusions? Your overriding thoughts now that the documentary's been put to bed and it's out there?

18:08Liz Lane:That women and girls' lives are cheap, I think. I think that this has been happening for 20, 30 years and the authorities don't seem able to deal with it. We're just at the beginning of a national inquiry. Why are we just at the beginning of a national inquiry? I think that the police have got quite a lot to answer for. But having said that, I think there are nothing like enough resources to investigate these cases. If you think how long it's taken us just to investigate three or four, you know, there cannot be enough resources available. I think there's no training available. and I think we both think that the girls are incredibly brave to sit down and talk to us or anyone in the way that they have done.

18:58Liz Lane:I mean, we have so much respect. Yeah, I mean, I think they've all given up on the thought of themselves getting any justice pretty much. I mean, I think they've pretty much passed that point but they all wanted to do it because they want to protect kids going forward or, you know, raise awareness, let people know the signs. and I say my other takeaway is just how complex this is and so not trying to defend the police or social services in any way but it is difficult when the girls are in the grips of this to kind of get through to them and help them and I think there is by far not enough understanding amongst police officers and social workers about how to actually deal with these girls and treat them like human beings but also persevere with them and don't give up.

19:41Sarah O’Connell:Marlon reached out to you for help with his daughter. if someone's listening to this and they have concerns about their child what can they do, where should they go?

19:47Liz Lane:I would advise anyone to go to the police and to go to social services in all these agencies there are good people and there are bad people but from what we've seen they don't get a lot of help but that must be the first port of call so go to the police, go to social services and if you're not getting any help or assistance and try your MP and people like that if you want to talk to the media come to us because we will try to help as well as do a story on it, we do actually try to help these girls.