Last night saw the conclusion of ‘Three Girls’, the BBC drama telling how the victims of the Rochdale sex grooming case found justice only after years of being ignored by the police, and dismissed by the CPS.
Now, ‘Lily’, one of the victims of the scandal, has spoken about how she was groomed and what happened after she reported the abuse.
Appearing in the studio anonymously, the young woman, now 22, told ‘Good Morning Britain’ that she was 15 when when she was abused by older men in Rochdale, after the death of her parents meant she ended up living in foster care and walking the streets.
She said: “They build the trust first and like the first kind of time I got taken into a taxi nothing happened. They just took me home and give me some like fags and that to me was kind of like they are looking after me, they are trying to keep me safe. They took me off the street and brought me home.”
Asked by presenter Ben Shephard whether that was the first time she had felt like there was an adult looking after her, ‘Lily’ said: “Yeah, yeah I did, you know, that was the first time I kind of felt accepted, wanted, safe.”
Speaking about what happened after she reported the abuse, Lily said: “I just felt like I was ignored like because I’d been told that this thing that had happened to me was really, really horrific but when I actually tried to report it nothing happened.
“So that kind of made me go back to thinking, well there’s nothing wrong with what’s going on because if there was something wrong, and it was really bad, then the police would have done something.”
The drama followed how, despite the concerns of some isolated police officers and sexual health workers, the girls’ accounts were dismissed until another investigation was instigated years later.
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