Assunta Crolla

I feel like many people still don’t quite understand the level of depravity inflicted on those little girls — or just how young they were. Think of your sister, daughter, or granddaughter as a child. Picture them. Think of how young and vulnerable they were. Lucy Lowe was 14. Vicky Round was 12. Becky Watson was 11. Charlene Downes was 11 or 12. Sammy Woodhouse was 14. Victoria Agoglia was 13. Sarah Wilson was 11. And there are countless more. They were children. Many barely out of primary school, so young and in no way responsible for the atrocities committed against them. Think about what gangs of Pakistani-Muslim men put those little girls through. Now imagine it was your sister, daughter or granddaughter. Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs plied them with alcohol and drugs, they raped them in graveyards, they put them into the back of taxis and drove them to be gang-raped by 20+ of their friends, they dismembered them and sold them as kebab meat, they inserted a pump into their anal cavity and had multiple men sodomise them at once, they raped them on filthy mattresses above takeaway shops, they forced panties down their throat to muffle the screams, they threatened to murder them if they told anyone, they brutally beat them, they killed them and torched their houses with their family inside, they picked them up from local authority care homes to be raped, they forced them to take crack cocaine and heroin, they convinced them they loved them so they could abuse them, they killed their unborn children, they targeted the most vulnerable and marginalised, they told them no one would believe them, they forced them to get abortions, they passed them round like a piece of meat, they threatened to kill their families, they gaslit and manipulated them. And that is just a fraction of the abuse inflicted by Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs in Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Oldham and elsewhere. That is just a tiny percentage of the horror that thousands of little girls faced at the hands of their abusers. Now think about the people that were meant to protect them. Who comes to mind? Police, local councils, social services, sexual health clinics, schools, care homes. But they didn’t. Those in positions of power turned a blind eye for decades while little girls were being raped, tortured, and murdered. They branded them “white slags”, “child prostitutes”, and “paki shaggers”. They walked in on victims naked and drugged with 20+ adult men and only arrested the child, they arrested girls for prostitution and handed them back to the same men that were exploiting them, they added the victims to dockets as co-defendants in their own abuse, they downplayed the scale of abuse, they refused to investigate reports, they paid for the taxi rides the girls got raped during, they silenced whistleblowers (like @MaggieOliverUK), they blamed the girls for their own abuse, they tried to block inquiries, and more. Imagine all of this happened to your sister. Or your daughter. Or your granddaughter. Now think again about how young they were, how vulnerable, how innocent. And understand the true horror of child sexual exploitation and the depravity of Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs.