Oldham victim speaks out after national inquiry announced

This week, the Home Secretary took to the House of Commons despatch boxes and apologised to survivors of child grooming, saying scores of vulnerable victims had been ‘disgracefully let down by the authorities who were meant to keep them safe’. 

The apology came amidst the announcement of a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, alongside a series of other measures, including a new nationwide operation into historic cases. 

Yvette Cooper told MPs about a ‘damning’ report by Baroness Louise Casey, which identified ‘continued failures’. 

The news sparked a flurry of headlines, public debate and political mud-slinging.

Once again, the most important voices – those of victims – risk being drowned out. 

One brave woman has spoken about her horrific experiences at the hands of child groomers and sex traffickers. 

The Oldham-based survivor has had her say on why it’s important there’s a national inquiry – so long as survivors are put first.

This is her story:  

I was 14-years-old when much older men, in their 40s and over, started having sex with me. 

My home life was difficult and I struggled with my mental health from a young age.

At 13, I stopped going to school and started hanging around in places where I shouldn’t have been, getting drunk. 

Later, in my social work files, they’d write off that time that I had ‘sought out criminals’ and ‘put myself in vulnerable situations’.

As if I wasn’t a teenager, a child, anything. I was just an absolute mess.  

One night, after I’d already been targeted by individuals for some time, I was thrown out of my home and didn’t have anywhere to stay.

Someone I knew told me there was a place I could go, where I’d be looked after. 

It was a building in central Manchester.

That was the first time I met ‘Alex’ and ‘Ray’ (not their real names). 

Alex and Ray were nice.

They offered me free drinks, until I was so drunk I didn’t really know what was going on anymore.

I remember someone saying that I needed to be ‘tested out’.

And then, suddenly, I was in a bedroom with an older man I didn’t know.

Afterwards, I was told I’d been ‘good enough’.

The rest of the night doesn’t feel real. I was given drugs and more alcohol and then taken to a hotel somewhere in Greater Manchester.

And that’s where it started.

For the next two years, almost every single night – if I was lucky, I would get about a night off each week – I was abused by older men. 

After that first night, Alex and Ray gave me money. I remember feeling so happy with myself.

Because I couldn’t afford a coat and I was absolutely freezing.

And now I had this money, and I could buy myself whatever coat I liked. 

I forgot about the coat. It was only when I read my social work files years later that I remembered. It made it seem like it can’t have been so bad – because I was so happy about the f*****g coat. 

At first, it felt like Alex and Ray looked after me, they could be like family.

It was only when you didn’t do what they wanted that they became aggressive, and sometimes would physically beat me and the other girls. 

Now I know it was manipulation. It was grooming. You can’t see it when it’s happening to you.

Because they’re not always bad to you all the time.

As a young girl with mental health problems, I didn’t see it.

And I look back at it now and think: how did I allow that to happen to me? 

We were never told where we were going.

We were taken to hotels, houses, flats – at first in Greater Manchester, then all over the country.

Sometimes we’d be in the huge homes of rich old men, other times we’d be in scruffy high-rises, full of drug users.

There was a huge variation. 

We’d end up in some very dangerous situations. Things I don’t even like to think about. 

I remember once, they dropped me off somewhere.

I went in and there were five men waiting for me there with a video camera.

And they filmed themselves doing stuff to me. I don’t even know where that footage would be now. 

Another time, they sent me and another few girls to this party.

A club had been rented out to 50 or so men.

We were told they just wanted to ‘see’ us.

But when we arrived, we were forced to strip naked and let all the men do what they wanted to us.

When we tried to resist and call for help, we were threatened. We were stranded there. We had no option. 

I don’t remember a lot of that time.

Part of it is because I think the brain tries to protect itself.

I wasn’t thinking or feeling. I was a zombie. I’ve learned that it’s called dissassociation. That was my state, constantly.

Even when it wasn’t happening and I was just waking up and making a cup of tea, I wasn’t there in my mind. 

But part of it was the drugs.

The people we went to see liked it better when we were drugged up, because it was easier to do things to us. We weren’t even conscious half the time. 

Alex and Ray supplied it, mostly a lot of cocaine and alcohol.

If we didn’t take the drugs, we’d be punished.

And then at some point they turned around and told us we needed to ‘pay them back’ for the drugs they gave us – even though we didn’t want to take them in the first place.

They used to make us work and then would take the money from us. 

Occasionally we were forced to have unprotected sex.

I regularly had to be treated for sexually transmitted diseases at a sexual health clinic.

And then, I started to suspect I was pregnant. 

Alex and Ray told me to get rid of it, but I didn’t listen.

Instead I carried on seeing men until I was seven months pregnant. I was marketed for it.

Some of the men asked to see me because I was visibly pregnant. 

By this point I was going on 18.

It was only because social services got involved with my own baby and by pretending I was in a relationship that I was able to escape the situation with my traffickers. 

Whenever I think of that time, I feel physically sick.

The impact that it has had on my life has been absolutely devastating. 

I’ve had my children removed because I can’t function as a human being.

I’ve been in and out of a psychiatric hospital.

I’ve been put on very heavy duty medication since a young age.

I can’t hold down a relationship, and any relationship I’ve been in has been physically or sexually abusive. 

Even though you can’t remember all of it, it stays with you, in your body. 

It was only years later, in a woman’s refuge, when I fully realised what had happened to me was wrong.

For a long time, I believed what happened to me wasn’t really exploitation.

I blamed myself, because I’d been a teenager. Because I thought it was my fault. 

Only when I started reading the Greater Manchester Combined Authority report in 2021, and heard other girls’ experiences, I started to recognise my own.

I made contact with the ex police officer and campaigner Maggie Oliver and was encouraged to go to the police. 

I wish I could say that was the end of it. I naively thought it was that simple: you tell the police, they investigate, justice happens. 

But after three years, it feels like I’ve been swallowed up by a black hole and had nothing but doors slammed in my face. It has been a struggle to get a hold of my own files, to speak to people crucial to my case.

The investigation is still ongoing.

And there are complaints procedures open against some of the organisations involved.

I never, ever thought coming forward would be this difficult.

And it’s the organisations that are supposed to help me that have at times been the biggest obstacles. 

And that’s why I think it’s so important that there is a national inquiry, and that the local inquiries are given statutory powers. It’s not just about ethnicities and patterns of behaviour – in my case, my traffickers were white, and my abusers came from every possible background you could imagine. 

It’s about making sure the authorities who failed to protect us when we were younger have nowhere to hide.

The truth needs to come before their reputations. 

I hope these new commitments by the government will mean that organisations like GMP will have their hands forced to hand over the documents and statements that might not paint them in a good light, but that will be crucial to getting justice for survivors. 

And I hope a lot of people are very, very scared by this news. 

They should be.

Responding to some of the allegations touched on by the survivor, a GMP spokesperson responded: “We understand the frustration of survivors who support our efforts to prosecute abusers but have not yet received justice.  

“We are open with survivors from the start about the complexity and lengths of investigations, and we work with supporting agencies to try and ensure victims are kept updated throughout. 

“We are determined to ensure survivors can have faith in the GMP of today to bring offenders to justice.

"Bringing child abusers to justice is why our investigation teams work so tirelessly day-in day-out to piece together all the evidence to present the best possible case in court. 

“These are long and complex investigations, but time will be no barrier to GMP’s commitment to seeking justice for survivors.”

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