‘Chantelle … was misusing cannabis and alcohol and … placing herself at risk of sexual exploitation” is a staggering sentence to find in a council’s case summary about a child in its foster care system. Here’s another one, from an assessment record by children’s services on the subject of 14-year-old Erin (not her real name). “Erin … is being exploited into prostitution. She hangs around with a number of men who take her money. She is a very promiscuous girl.”
I could go on. Groomed: A National Scandal is full of them. Film-maker Anna Hall has decades’ worth of material to choose from. Her 2004 film Edge of the City was the first television exposé of what we now call grooming gangs, born of research she had begun after a chance meeting five years before with a senior director at Barnardo’s children’s charity who told her that they had noticed a new pattern of child abuse. Groups of men were targeting vulnerable children – almost always white girls, usually in the care system – befriending them, giving them drink and drugs, becoming their “boyfriends”, then having sex with them and offering them round to other men.
