When 13-year-old Christine first saw the “boy” who had moved from the group chat she was in into her private messages, she was shocked. “Oh my gosh,” she remembers thinking. “That’s a grown man.” When she told him how old she was, he – 23 – said it didn’t change anything. He still wanted to be with her. Lonely at school, after a move precipitated by the end of her mother’s relationship with Christine’s father, she took the apparent affection offered.
The rest of the women contributing to Britain’s Forgotten Girls – a harrowing hour-long documentary about the sexual and criminal exploitation of young girls over the last 20 years by drug gangs acting with virtual impunity – have similar stories to tell. The approach by the gangs happens at 12, 13, 14. Grooming follows. Then the game is switched. Rape or sexual assault occurs (“I was so scared, so scared,” says Annie, who was 14 when “all aspect of choice just got taken away from me” by the three older boys who had befriended her) and, through threatened and actual violence – perhaps supplemented by blackmail or by the lack of anywhere else for the child to turn – continues for years thereafter. The details are few and horrifying. A number of them mention having to go to school as if nothing had happened the night after an inaugural gang-rape. Your mind can hardly take it in.
