Original subtitles

They used to tell me, no one's going to believe me.

They're going to say, like, I wanted it, it's my fault.

I just thought, oh, why bother?

Like, who's actually going to listen?

I was 13.

I was maybe about 12.

13. I would have been around 14 at the time.

I have listened to children telling me the most harrowing things I've ever

heard in my whole professional career.

They talked about being used to transport drugs across the country.

They talked about being passed around groups of young men for sexual assaults.

I was made to sleep with different men, and the situations you end up in is

horrible.

The girls were treated like criminals.

It was like the behaviour was their own doing.

For some people, particularly people in senior positions, they found it very

difficult to accept the real scale.

of what was going on. We were really struck by what felt like a conspiracy of

silence. We're talking about thousands of girls.

And I know more girls are being recruited and groomed into this.

I had to go to school like nothing had happened.

I was so scared to tell anyone.

This was actually the day that I went on the first date.

I think it makes me feel a bit sick because I'm actually like a child,

to be honest.

I was 13, he was 23.

I grew up in London.

My parents got divorced, and because my parents had an abusive relationship, my

dad wasn't really there.

We moved to Coventry.

Coventry is very different to London.

Coventry is very small.

Looking back, I think the move threw me off a lot.

In school, everybody already had their friendship groups because of how late

I'd moved in.

So within school, I didn't really feel like I had friends.

There was a group chat and he popped up to me outside of the chat and he was

just talking to me.

We'd be texting through the night.

Then he said that he wanted to meet in person.

So we met, we went to Nando's.

I remember him walking through the doors. And when he walked through the

doors, I was like, oh my gosh, like, that's a grown man.

I can't tell you what was going on through my head. I think I was just

thinking, like, you've already gone this far. Like, you're here now.

Like, what are you going to do, leave?

As the conversation was going on, I told him I'm 13.

And he was like, that doesn't change anything. Like, I still want to be with

you. And then that's when we started, like, quote unquote, going out.

He was involved in gangs, he was involved in drugs.

But it was the thrill of being with a bad boy.

I always knew, okay, he's probably hurt someone.

But in terms of hurting me, I didn't think it would get to that point.

Where we are in the rural areas, this beautiful countryside, and I don't think

anyone will ever associate the fact that there are drug gangs operating

in these areas, but there is, and children are being harmed.

May is someone who I've been working with for nearly six years now.

She had been a victim of sexual exploitation.

and it started when she was 13.

And it was just through befriending a group of boys that are well

known to have connections to drugs.

I'd recently just moved to the new secondary school.

They knew I didn't have any friends and they just started to speak to me saying,

oh, you should come out with us sometimes.

We'll be your friends.

And then it sort of progressed to, oh, I think you're so lovely. I would

literally treat you so well if you was just my girlfriend.

And I was like over the moon. I was like, I've just gone from having no

friends. Now I've got a whole group of friends and a boyfriend.

This is what every teenage girl wants.

And then it was OK for the first few weeks.

By the time it got bad, I didn't really see a way out.

One night near Christmas, the three main boys, including my boyfriend at the

time, said to me that I needed to drink with them.

And then, within about five minutes, the room started spinning.

Really, really badly.

They were pushing me around, videoing me, laughing at me because I was losing

control of my body.

But I could see still.

And then everything went black.

And then I woke up and it was probably about three and a half hours later at

this point. As I went to get out of the bed, I pulled the duvet back and...

I had been completely stripped of all my clothes. I was completely naked.

I was just confused.

And then I ran out the house and threw up a lot.

Woke up the next morning.

And then I remember going to the toilet and everything was

bruised. Everything was bleeding.

And I had to go to school like nothing had happened.

I didn't want to accept that I'd been sexually abused by more than one person.

Six years later, I'm still being troubled by the same individuals.

and I'm still not being heard now by the police.

This gang, they're hooking these young children in. You're talking as young as

nine, ten.

And I know more girls are being recruited, owner, groomed into this.

They look so intimidating and scary, but having a young girl there is going to

help them get them in a lot quicker, which is why they do it.

I was once May.

I was completely lost. I was traumatised.

I went through all that. But no one understood.

I was just looked at as a troubled teenager.

And this is kind of what made me want to set up a charity.

It was around kind of 2018.

There was a number of referrals coming in, so it was quite clear there was

something going on because there was a pattern of behaviours. Something wasn't

right.

It wasn't just sexual exploitation, it was criminal exploitation as well. So

there were other things girls were asked to do as well, holding on to drugs, the

selling of drugs.

You know, I wanted to raise this and highlight it.

And you just felt there was this barrier of acceptance that this was

actually happening.

We were really struck by what felt like a conspiracy of silence.

We're talking about thousands of girls that are experiencing incredibly violent

situations, and yet often when we were in circles talking about the experiences

of children who were criminally exploited, girls were not coming up.

Quite similar to the late 1990s, early 2000s, when the efforts were not made at

the time to intervene in grooming gangs across the country, and it was...

completely overlooked.

Most of the perpetrators were men of Pakistani origin.

Three earlier reports which had clearly stated the scale of the abuse were

either ignored or suppressed.

For groomer gangs, the primary purpose is often the sexual exploitation of

those girls.

But the primary purpose of a drug gang is to make money off of selling drugs

and other criminal activity.

So they exist as a semi-formal group that...

brings in girls to help them make money. And they're also often sexually

exploited as part of a gang.

The abuse and exploitation of girls in drug gangs is a widespread UK-wide

issue. So this isn't about a particular city or area, particular demographic

groups. As long as we've had drug gangs in this country, we have had girls being

abused and coerced within them.

What's even more shocking is that this has been going on for years.

Around 2002 it started.

I would have been around 14 at the time.

Do I just give a bit of like about who I am?

Yes, yes. So my name is Annie and I am mixed race, half white British,

half Caribbean.

When I was born, I was adopted to my now parents.

They adopted a number of children.

They were very loving, very caring.

So I grew up in Eltham. It was quite quiet. It was quite like a well-to-do

sort of area for families.

There's lots of schools around there.

I'd say I generally felt quite safe there up until a point.

When I was 14, I was introduced to three boys who were part

of a gang in the local area.

The boys were from the Ferrier estate.

It was a very well-known, notorious estate.

The gang that operated controlled it, really.

They sold drugs and engaged in various criminal activities.

At the time, I felt quite in awe, quite excited to, I suppose, have the

attention.

The night everything began, we were driving around for a lot of the evening,

just having a laugh, and my friend who I was with at that time said that she

needed to go home.

I was meant to be staying at her house for the evening. So my parents thought

that I was at her house.

And then one of the boys said to me that I could go back to his house.

And so I trusted him. I trusted him.

But we didn't go to his house.

We ended up going to another friend's house.

He was an older boy around 19, 20.

We went in and I remember going through to like his bedroom and sitting,

being given like alcohol and drinking and pineapple and maybe vodka or

something like that.

And then I just felt like it just started to feel really uncomfortable.

He was just like trying to get close to me and...

just became like really dark in that I felt like they were just telling me what

to do and I was so scared, so scared.

All aspect of choice just got taken away.

So, you know, it happened.

And I remember thinking, I didn't want to explain to my parents that I'm not

staying at my friend's house.

And then, you know, I ended up being raped by three older boys.

How do I explain that?

I couldn't just put any of it into words.

And I was still expected to go into school every day and show up at school

every day.

Definitely...

Proud of her strength, I suppose.

She shouldn't have had to be so strong in the first place.

There we are.

Yeah.

My work on street violence started in around 2006.

I lived in London. I'd grown up in London.

and I lived in areas where young people had lost their lives.

So when I started this work, young women just weren't really being discussed or

considered. And their experiences of exploitation or other forms of violence

went under the radar for years.

However, with me now is Carleen Thurman. We've been experiencing these things for

so many years, things that people aren't talking about, things like gang rape of

girls, things like kidnap of sisters and mothers, those kinds of things. Why

isn't anyone coming out and saying that that's what's happening? Over the years,

we spoke to hundreds of women and girls across the country who've had different

encounters with violence. They talked about being used to transport drugs.

across the country. They talked about being passed around groups of young men

they were associated to.

All sorts of severe violence over prolonged periods of

time.

But there were some, particularly white male criminologists at the time, who

said that this is just either fabricated or not as severe as Carleen is making

out because...

If this was going on, we would have identified it already.

On my 14th birthday, he just said, like, if you want

me to treat you grown, like, this is what grown people do.

So he asked me to...

sleep with his friends to help him out.

And I did it.

I felt, like, disgusting.

But he made it out like it was something he really needed.

Like, if you care about someone, you're going to help them.

So I felt like, oh, like, you might be feeling like this, but you've helped

him.

He asked you to do that other times?

After that, I've lost count of how many times.

Like, it became an expectation.

Some were his friends, some were his age, some looked older.

I don't know who they were.

There were other girls there. It wasn't just me.

They were like drug addicts that live in these flats.

And they used to bring us here.

They'd use the houses for drugs.

And in that, they used to sleep with us. And a lot of the time when I came back,

I wasn't sober.

I don't think I ever was, actually.

I remember when I would misbehave.

He'd give people no rules.

The no rules was like whatever they wanted to do, they could.

Sometimes he'd stay in there and watch.

What we're talking about is incredibly hyper-masculine, violent, ruthless

environments in which violence is part and parcel of the culture of that gang.

And so the treatment of girls as objects...

That is uniform and routine across gangs. The treatment of girls as things

that could be passed around from one boy to another for sex, that could be pimped

out. Gang rape is common.

When the three of them raped me, they took photos.

The next few weeks went by and started getting phone calls from the initial

gang.

They said that I'd expose you, you know, if you're not open to basically more sex

with more people.

I didn't want anyone to see the pictures and I felt ashamed.

I just felt like an awful person.

The pictures were shared by these boys initially with different gangs kind of

coming to me every day.

and groups of boys gathering outside of my school.

I remember leaving school and being marched, like, down the local high

street and wherever they could really, like, pull me into, whether it was an

alleyway and an estate,

they would just, excuse me, just rape me again and again.

Were social services ever involved?

Social services weren't involved so from records and my

understanding there was never no sufficient safeguarding put in place

to protect me.

Despite there being denial by academics in 2010-2011, I was briefing the then

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

I attended roundtables chaired by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May.

So there were multiple people that were interested in 2010-2011.

And so I felt like we were on the verge of quite significant policy change.

But there was only so much I can do.

as a then 26 year old we need leaders to take hold of this and develop a national

position on it when carlian told me about this i think she was just

very very pleased to have somebody in a position of authority taking what she

was saying seriously so in a sense we formed a good partnership on that i

decided to set up a national inquiry to identify the scale and extent

of this truly terrible problem now an investigation into the plight of

thousands of children who are sexually exploited by gangs in england is being

launched today until now experts have thought that up to 10 000 young people

have been abused but the office of the children's commissioner says it believes

its inquiry will show the real number is actually much higher than that we

traveled all over the country so we went to cities we went to towns we went to

local authorities which were largely rural in nature and also to metropolitan

boroughs. We were really able to extract a tremendous amount of information.

It crosses all cultures, all ethnic groups, all parts of our

society in terms of levels of poverty or affluence.

Too often girls who are black or from ethnic minorities They appeared to be

considered to be less worthy than some of the other victims.

In one local authority that we visited, the police produced, together with

social services, a huge dossier of girls who were being sexually exploited.

Every single girl in those files was white.

And I asked the police and social services at the end of that about girls

from minority ethnic groups.

And they said to me, and this is a quote, we're not looking for them.

When the report came out in 2012, there was a mixed response.

For some people, including people in senior positions, they found it very

difficult to accept the real scale of what was going on.

16,500 children showed signs of being at risk.

and it insists abusers come from many backgrounds.

A senior government source described the report's language as hysterical.

Data was hard to collect at the time and is still hard to collect now because we

don't have very clear recording mechanisms for things like exploitation.

There was definitely resistance in government. You don't want to hear that

thousands of children are at risk of being sexually exploited across England

with various different forms of exploitation that you don't have a

policy to really support.

And it landed at a time where people were still very, very focused on the

Times reporting, on northern towns, on South Asian men.

All nine of the men who were convicted yesterday of grooming young girls for

sex, sexually assaulting or raping them, were Asian.

Those cases featured, of course they did feature in the inquiry, they're a form

of exploitation, but they featured alongside others.

Senior government ministers believe that the report deliberately plays down the

role. of Asian abusers. You're very clear that it doesn't do so, that this

is a fair reflection of what you've seen, because they are pretty critical

of this part of your report. It is deeply troubling to me that they are

finding it so difficult to accept the evidence that we have, which is that

people from every single ethnic group are, I'm afraid, carrying out forms of

sexual violence of this particular type.

against children.

I think at the time there was a lot in the news, there was a lot in headlines

around white girls and Asian men.

My perpetrators weren't Asian men.

These were men of different ethnicities.

These were men of different ages.

Essentially, they were drug gangs.

The tide really had turned against accepting

quite how brave and serious this was.

I decided to take part in this documentary because for too long,

The reality of so many of the victims of sexual exploitation in the context of

gangs have had their reality denied.

And all the victims need to be identified.

My dreams as a kid...

I always wanted to speak.

Like, I don't even care who hears it. As long as somebody hears it and as long as

I get to share my message with the world, that is the most important thing.

How would you describe yourself to someone who's never met you?

OK, that's a good one.

I would probably describe myself as loud, opinionated,

kind, caring.

funny, glamorous, talented.

I'm not modest.

I definitely wouldn't say modest.

And strong.

I think I'm strong.

I grew up around South London.

I always had a safe house.

I was very lucky and privileged in many ways.

I was very loved as a child.

That was when my mum and stepdad got married.

Looked pretty adorable there, to be honest.

In my early teens, my mum really struggled to manage me, and then the

teachers struggled to manage me.

I think I always kind of felt...

I don't know, a bit scary.

I want to find that cute picture because I want to just show the difference

between dressing up when you weren't dressing up to impress anybody,

but you were just dressing up for fun. Oh.

I love this photo because I used to love dressing up. I always used to.

turn into whoever I wanted, but there wasn't any risk associated with that.

Things probably started to change when I got a little bit of freedom.

I think I was just looking for connection and I remember creating my

Facebook account and I was taking loads of pictures of myself.

I remember like the adrenaline of posting something and like the dopamine

hits that would come in when like it would get loads of comments or likes and

you know I'd put a bit of makeup on and all of a sudden I've got like 100 likes

and loads of people telling me how beautiful I look and that was just kind

of like a quick way to get that like instant rush.

There was a lot of older guys. I was like 13.

I met him on Blackberry Messenger.

He told me that he was basically on the other side of London.

I'd met up with a friend and I said, come on, let's go.

I remember we took a really long train journey and it actually wasn't

him that picked us up. It was like one of his friends.

Doubt started to set in of like what's going on kind of thing But I kind of

felt more safe because I had a friend with me if it's like bad or if it's

scary like you're with me We're together, you know, we'll be fine.

And do you remember anything else from that night?

I remember being in this really like disgusting building With

my friend

And then all of a sudden she said she needed to leave.

And she left and the door kind of shut.

And all of a sudden I was just surrounded by men.

And I just didn't know what to even do.

And I think I just kind of bit down and just like, I just wanted to go home at

that point.

But I just kind of knew and kind of felt as though the quicker this happened, the

quicker I could go home.

But yeah, looking back, I was definitely scared.

A few days later, I remember I got a message from him.

He said that he wanted to apologise for what had happened.

And I believed him.

This night, I was getting ready for school. The next day, I was doing my

nighttime routine and putting my pajamas on.

I remember going downstairs and getting in this car.

And I turned around, and there were different men, older men, scarier

-looking men.

And it happened all over again.

When I got back to my mum's this time, I'd been reported missing, and I just

remember knocking on the door, and my mum and stepdad were sat at the bottom

of the stairs, looking, like, super distressed.

I just remember being in, like, such a kind of almost, like, dissociative state

where I was so distressed.

And I just vividly remember, like, going into the kitchen and, like... opening

the drawer and, like, just taking a knife out and just feeling, like, so

crazy within that moment. It was like a cry for help. Like, it was like me

saying, I'm not OK, I'm not OK, because I didn't know how to verbalise that. I

didn't know how to explain what happened. I didn't know.

And then police came round and I got taken to hospital.

It was like a sexual assault unit.

They took my pyjamas. They were pyjamas that my mum bought for me.

The swabs, when they came back, I can't remember how many DNA matches they

found, but I know they did find, like, multiple.

And that's, like, a hideous thing to know, to be honest. Like, just to know

that, like, yeah, you've got, like, multiple

people's DNA inside you, on you.

You don't even know any of these people's names. Like, wow.

Like, pretty shitty.

All the abuse broke my family.

It had such a ripple effect on everybody.

And I distinctly remember...

The social workers accusing and blaming my parents for everything that went

wrong. They even said they neglected me, which was shocking because that was so

far from the truth.

And at 13, I went into care.

And then to go from living in a middle-class kind of home where I had,

like, a good education, I had, you know...

lots of love and care to then going into institutions and the care system the

contrast was like it was crazy I'd gone from like one situation where I was

unsafe to being in another situation where I was equally as unsafe

I had social care involvement for a long time and over the years they came to

know that I was in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend who was

older than me.

But nothing's changed.

Like the abuse became... I don't even know if ten times worse is the word.

Things got physically abusive.

If it was bad, I did go to hospital. I did go A&E.

I had fractured ribs.

I had a lot of injuries.

I think it was just a cry for help.

But it was like, no one's actually going to help you.

I was actually scared that...

I genuinely may not see another day.

What we'll often hear from girls is it takes a very long time to recognise

themselves as a victim of these crimes.

It takes a huge amount of strength.

to come forward to services and say, I'm being abused.

We heard some really shocking examples of girls who were coming to the

attention of services and were being rebuffed. They were being turned away.

They're turning up at hospitals in mental health crisis after they've been

raped multiple times.

And these services are not asking the right questions.

The problem is we have teachers, social workers, police, health workers, not

looking out for the warning signs.

London drugs gangs are being blamed for a record number of allegations of

slavery, with police and charities increasingly concerned by so-called

county lines.

Kids as young as 12 are exploited by the gangs to move and sell the drugs, often

in rural areas.

The image of the child exploited by those gangs was more often than not a

boy or a young man.

The response at the time from government and from the police is to focus on boys

and young men. And the experiences of girls and young women who were exploited

by county lines is hidden from view at this point. And the result was many

thousands of girls that were abused when we should have acted sooner to protect

them.

Any good memories you have of when you were a kid?

There's not many, but a good memory from when I was a child was when

my grandma used to have us all around for Boxing Day and

everybody would just be there, the whole family. And before, there was a lot of

family fallouts and dramas and stuff. It was just, it was really, really good.

At the age of 12, I was taken into care.

When I was in the care system, I was running away and I used to hang around

in Piccadilly Gardens.

This is Piccadilly Gardens.

Between the ages of 12 and 16, I was sexually assaulted numerous times by a

criminal drugs gang built up.

by older men.

I was then in Manchester Town Centre a lot, selling drugs.

This is where you meet people. This is where I met my exploiter. This is where

I met a lot of people that was, you know, using me for either sex, drugs.

I was sexually and criminally exploited, both.

I was made to sleep with different men.

After a while, it just became normal to me.

I don't know, for me it was... These people were around me and even though

they were males, it made me feel like I was wanted and I was part of a family

and people actually cared about me. But in reality, it was all just a mask.

After a while of me being involved with this drug gang, I was sent to

places like Isle of Man, Newcastle, Wales, London, even down to Scarborough,

to run drugs.

I was maybe about 14 and I used to meet a lot of different people.

The person would meet me there or I would be picked up by somebody in a car.

and taken to an address.

I was made to give these drugs to people but sometimes people would get very

aggressive and the situations you end up in is horrible.

I ended up sitting in abandoned buildings, bandos and drug dens and

literally sit there for hours mixing crack cocaine with different substances.

It got to the point where I was forcefully pinned down and stuff, and

sexually assaulted.

The man in question would have been about 42.

I was 14.

We travelled a lot to different cities.

Sometimes I was taking drugs to people.

He used to teach me how to cut drugs, how to weigh and I remember in my bag I

had like a Minnie Mouse pencil case sort of thing and I had like mini scales that

I'd carry around with me.

When he let me into this part of his world it was like a privilege like i

felt like i've earned this side of him i saw it as like he's investing in

me he's not doing this of anyone else he's actually seeing like you're special

like he's teaching you it was very much like a norm

until there was an incident

it was my

15th birthday

I had a birthday party with my friends.

After the party, we ended up at Britannia Hotel.

And there was just different people sleeping with different people.

Everyone was just in different rooms.

And some were on different floors.

And the men were older.

I feel like there was, I want to say, six girls.

I don't know how many men, to be honest.

The next day, one of the girls had spoken to her mum about it, I think, and

her mum had contacted the school.

School had contacted social services, I think, and then from then, the police

got involved, and then they remained involved.

I started working for the police in 2009.

I can't say which police force it was but it was a force in the south.

I was in the response team for six years and then after that I then joined the

child exploitation team.

I joined the force because I wanted to make a difference but I felt like I was

being shut down the entire time.

Officers join the police for lots of different reasons.

Some of them join because they want to be really proactive, they want to fly

out on blue lights and things like that. And so they don't necessarily want to do

all the safeguarding side of stuff because it's all about, let's stop the

drugs, let's do this, let's do that.

There was a point that I genuinely wanted help from the police, but I feel

like they didn't care too much about the fact that I was being sexually abused or

sexually exploited.

I remember my youth worker, she was helping me follow through with the

police.

I sat for hours and hours in interviews and gave them information about what

happened. But it was like the moment I told them about the drugs and the

houses, everything shifted.

I think they wanted to catch him for the drugs and everything else.

Little old me coming and saying, this is the abuse I'm going through wasn't

enough.

And I guess the information that mattered the most to them was

information that I was bound to secrecy, that I would never give this

information. What information did the police want?

Their addresses.

That was the information they wanted.

The culture in the unit was awful.

The sergeant involved was very misogynistic.

The more nuanced and difficult the case was, the more that he would try and

ignore those or he'd like move down the risk rating until he could sort of move

them off there and they wouldn't be under investigation.

The language used to describe the girls would be very much focused on that child

taking risk, around that child having risky behaviours, around that child

taking themselves to places that put them in danger.

I just feel like a lot of people failed me.

The responsibility was very much placed on Christine putting herself in bad

situation with men and I didn't have respect for myself.

I don't know how you can sit and say a child who's, let's call it for what it

is, being raped day in, day out, doesn't have respect for themselves.

Sometime after reporting the rapes, I called the police to get an update on

the case.

They were telling me that they were, like, they'd been arrested for other

things and that the other things were more important.

Drugs, things like that.

And... You'll hear back when there's any information, but right now these men

have got bigger fish to fry.

Bigger fish to fry.

Nice.

I remember that so vividly.

I just remember coming off the phone and just, like, just feeling completely

sick.

Like, that language just... You wouldn't really associate that with, like...

a serious sexual assault case on a minor, like...

Nearly years later, I remember just a letter coming through the door

saying, like, we've made the decision that due to basically us not thinking

that your mental health is good enough for cross-examination, we've decided to

close your case.

And I remember being so anti it. I was like, they can keep their money. I don't

want their money.

I mean, what an insult.

Those that abused me, nothing happened to them.

They were never brought to justice.

Eventually the pictures were put online.

My school were notified and then they notified the police.

But we didn't get any support.

I just became that girl who, you know, was thought about as promiscuous.

Like, I was making decisions and I was choosing to do this.

I have a letter here that was written by the police.

So it states here that the particular reasons in this case that have prevented

me referring it to the CPS are as follows.

On the evidence available, there is not a realistic prospect of a conviction in

this case.

Therefore, I have closed the investigation.

I felt the fact that they did nothing really made me feel like it wasn't

abuse.

Made me carry a lot of shame.

Made me feel like it was my fault.

I blamed myself.

This one particular night, I went missing because I had to go and do a job

for the people that was making me sell drugs. And I was sent to an address.

I was led upstairs and when I was upstairs, I was sexually assaulted,

I was tied up.

So when I had a chance, I just ran.

I ended up at the closest train station.

I just clicked the button and somebody answered and I said, please help me, I'm

running. They said, you stay there, we can see you on the camera, the police

are on the way.

It felt like forever. When they got here, it was like before I even... told

them anything when they when they found me it was like an eye roll because one

of the police officers knew who i was and it was like free taxi home then

luckily a female officer came i didn't know this officer she didn't know me i

had you know cuts and bruises and my eye was black and my wrists were

were red and swollen and i was pleading and pleading to these officers that came

like Please look at me. Like, believe me. Listen to me. I need help.

I told them everything.

Everything that had happened.

They took my underwear that I was wearing.

They found his DNA.

They never found out what happened to people that had done this to me.

At the time, that made me feel worthless.

Like, how can...

I go through all this and you don't want to help me. What's wrong with me? Why

me?

My whole teenage years, growing up, I knew I'd either be dead

or in prison by the age of 20.

I was in Victoria train station in Manchester, just about to go and meet

the person who I used to run for. They called it running.

when you run drugs.

And as I was on my way, undercover police jumped out of a car and gripped

me up. And unfortunately, I was found with seven wraps of crack cocaine on me

and four wraps of heroin.

I was told in court that I'm going to get put away for my own safety as well

of what I've done.

But it confused me because I was like, why am I being punished if I'm not safe?

I was basically institutionalised. I was basically locked away six, seven hours

out of the day.

You can't police your way out of sexual exploitation.

I'm much more interested in building safety around children and young people

and for children and young people.

The police come in once exploitation has happened.

That can't be the basis upon which we build a safe society because then we're

building a society that responds to crime rather than a society that

provides safety.

In January, the government asked Baroness Louise Casey, an experienced

Whitehall troubleshooter, to investigate the nature, scale and profile of group

-based child sexual abuse offending.

Finally, Baroness Casey describes ways in which patterns of grooming gang child

sexual exploitation are changing.

including evidence of rape and sexual exploitation taking place in street

gangs and drug gangs that combine criminal and sexual exploitation.

I do not believe that this kind of exploitation has been sufficiently

investigated.

This is actually a really big problem in the rural areas.

You know, so many children are being exploited.

One of our key services is that prevention.

It's those subtle signs.

acting on you know when their behavior is slightly changing those early signs

that that's the time to act before they get trapped because when they get

trapped that's where it takes years to overcome the ongoing trauma that they're

suffering i've struggled a lot and i was in mental

health hospital um numerous times i was ready to kill myself three years ago

i was ready to end it all But then I found something that I

wouldn't change for the world. I found a job that actually gives me the

motivation to just do anything in life.

I started working as a co-researcher on a project looking into child care

exploitation and the care system.

Our experience has been vital in helping us understand how we solve these things

and how we make things, change policy, change practice.

Because without that knowledge, I think we miss so much about how we can help

sort things out and help fix things.

I realised like, oh my God, I'm actually going to have a voice and I'm going to

be able to actually tell these people, like, I've been through it and you're

not alone.

And that was the best.

best news I could possibly get.

Even though a lot of the people in these services didn't get it right and did

fail me, there were some people that got it so right and I will never, ever

forget them. You know, they changed my life.

I'm sober, which I never ever thought would happen. I never saw like a life

without drugs and alcohol.

I thought that that was going to be with me till the very end.

Today, I would say I'm safe.

I have a lot of clarity in my life.

I choose what I want to do.

And I'm in a beautiful relationship with my lovely partner who is extremely

supportive.

And I think, like, the most important thing to mention is, like, I'm gay.

And I didn't even get a chance to, like, explore my own sexuality because that

was taken away from me as a child.

I look in the mirror and I think, I'm really proud of you.

Because it's not been easy, you know?

You were surrounded by so many people but you were still very, very isolated

and very, very alone.

It just really frustrates me to be honest, especially that this is still

really much happening to a lot of young people.

When I think about the lack of support and intervention.

I just feel like she had no chance, no chance to start healing.

It was something that she had to do as an adult.

But I also feel

by healing, by speaking,

I've enabled her to finally be at rest.

I just want to make a difference.

I want to help others. I want to give people the second chance that I wish I

had so much sooner.

Today's my book launch, so we're literally just setting up.

We're just waiting for guests to come in.

I'm really excited.

First book launch.

Yeah.

I am an author, I am a youth leader at my local church.

I've learnt to turn my pain into purpose and it's not been an easy journey.

I'm grateful that you're all even here to witness even this day because I know

many of you saw the days prior but it's...

Yeah, I'm just humbled.

I'm lost for words. I knew I was going to be overwhelmed, but I didn't think I

would feel like this.

If you've been a victim of sexual abuse or violence, details of help and support

are available on the BBC Action Line website, or you can call for free at any

time to hear recorded information on 0800 077 077.