The following is a report from a London based daily called the Evening Standard:
Girls who associate with gangs are victims of sexual violence on a massive scale.
These are the chilling words of Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England Sue Berelowitz before a report published tomorrow after a two-year investigation into the sexual exploitation of children in gangs. “We are talking about rape, including gang rape, of girls as young as 11 but mostly in their mid-teens, rape that is part of the warp and weft of daily gang life,” she added.
“These girls don’t tell, they don’t complain, they don’t report to the police. It’s just what happens. If a girl is linked to a gang member and he is waiting for her outside the school gate and says, ‘Come with me’, you go. Saying ‘No’ is not an option. As one boy gang member put it, ‘Boys are predators, girls are prey’.
“Once a girl has had sex with a gang member, forced or otherwise, as far as the other boys are concerned, she has no right to refuse sex under any circumstances ever again. Girls are used, abused and discarded like a piece of meat.”
The seminal report “It’s wrong but you get used to it” was commissioned from Bedfordshire University. It is the most in-depth investigation into girls and gangs undertaken in this country. They interviewed 180 young people across England, split evenly between male and female gang members, to build the big picture.
Although the scale of the problem has not been quantified, Ms Berelowitz estimates that about 2,500 girls are at risk in London alone. “Gang-based peer-on-peer exploitation is hugely under-reported, but we know that in London there are around 3,500 gang nominals of which 2,500 are not in prison, so if every one of those has a girlfriend, we are talking about 2,500 girls at risk of rape.”
Colin James, whose group Gangs Unite runs a Girls in Gangs programme in Waltham Forest, believes the problem is more widespread. “A popular gang member could have up to 10 girls on the go. Some have five ‘baby-mothers’ by the time they hit 21, so we are talking about thousands of violated girls in London. For a girl associated with a gang, sex is their initiation. Then things get more dangerous because rape is a weapon of choice for some gangs — they rape the girlfriends, sisters and mothers of rival gang members to get back at them.”
Ms Berelowitz said the Standard’s Frontline London campaign has shown “real commitment to a really important issue that people need to wake up to”. Tomorrow she is expected to announce eight headline recommendations addressed to government, the police and Safeguarding Children’s Boards. They are expected to include a proposal that the police map every girl connected to gang members because each one is at risk of rape. They are also expected to call for proper relationship and sex education in schools, and for police and gang interventions to also focus on females and not just males.
Ms Berelowitz added: “From the Government down, people need to realise that sexual exploitation of girls in gangs is a very, very, very serious problem. It’s like lifting a stone and these terrible ugly worms are crawling out that nobody wants to acknowledge. So the first thing we have to do is raise awareness and put effective practice in place for the authorities to act on. It’s a huge piece of work, a game-changer.”
The Office of the Children’s Commissioner is publishing two other reports, “Sex without consent, I suppose that is rape”, and “If only someone had listened”, Inquiry into Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups, Final Report.
Muslim Conversations 