PUBLISHED:
21:54 GMT, 17 May 2013
|
UPDATED:
21:55 GMT, 17 May 2013
Innocence: Victim Rachel aged 11 on holiday before she was drawn into the clutches of the Oxford paedophile gang
On a Tenerife holiday with her parents to celebrate her 11th birthday, the little girl in the pink sun-dress
smiles at the camera. She looks so innocent as her blonde hair blows in
the wind and she happily waves a glass of cola in the air.
When
this picture was taken, Rachel was in her final year at primary school.
Her favourite pastimes were taking the family’s three terriers out for
walks near her home in Oxford and inviting her friends round for tea.
As
her mother, Georgina, says today: ‘Rachel loved school and was the
teacher’s pet. She was excited about going to the big secondary with her
friends. She is the youngest of our big family and we doted on her. We
called her our baby.’
Yet
five months after the holiday picture, Rachel’s childhood was abruptly
ended. Instead of returning home straight after school, she started
staying out in the park with the same group of girls who used to come to
her home for tea.
She
would arrive late for the 7.30pm family supper. And — after a time — she
often did not come home at night and went missing for days on end.
Now
her horrified mother knows the reason for her daughter’s worrying
behaviour. She was being seduced by a predatory gang of paedophiles, who
lured her into a life of sex slavery by giving her gifts of cocaine,
cannabis, cigarettes and vodka.
By
the age of 13, Rachel had more than 700 men’s names on her Facebook
page. Hundreds of others were sending text messages and even naked
photos of themselves to her pink mobile phone.
She
changed her online identity to a Muslim name. And when she did come
home, she often had savage bruises and bites all over her face and body.
‘We
would search the streets for her in our cars,’ says Georgina. ‘We did
everything to try to keep her indoors, locking all the doors and windows
at night.
‘But she would
wait until we had gone to sleep and let herself out. Then she would turn
up the next day in tears and say she was sorry.’
Rachel was the youngest of six girls
who bravely gave evidence at an Old Bailey trial that ended this week as
seven men from Oxford were convicted for brutal sex assaults on them
over eight years.
The men,
five of Pakistani origin and two North African brothers, were convicted
of 23 rapes, 15 charges of rape conspiracy and nine of child
prostitution, as well as other offences including trafficking the girls
for sexual exploitation and having sex with a child.
Scandalously,
police and social workers knew in 2005 that the Oxford girls were being
preyed on by the gang, but did little to stop the nightmare unfolding
before they finally started to investigate in 2010.
As
with similar outrages in Rochdale, Derby, Rotherham and Telford in
Shropshire, where street-grooming gangs have been convicted recently,
there was an elephant in the room: the predators of this particular type
of sex crime are mainly of South Asian heritage while their victims —
some only eight years old — are invariably white.
Convicted: Brothers Akhtar Dogar, left, and Anjum Dogar, right, of the Oxford sex grooming gang
Of course, the vast majority of people
from Muslim communities are decent, hard-working citizens, and people
of all races and creeds are capable of evil. But there is no doubt that a
disproportionate number of Muslim males are involved in sex-grooming
gangs in Britain.
And the
fear of being branded racist or anti-Muslim in politically correct
modern Britain has meant that the authorities have ignored the cries of
parents such as Rachel’s mother.
In her tidy, three-bedroom home with its lovely, well-tended garden, Georgina wonders if she could have done more.
Of
course, she feels guilty over what happened to her daughter: ‘I wish I
had been stricter, but it’s difficult to know how when I was dealing
with something as powerful as a gang.
‘She was completely bewitched by these evil men and thought at first she was very grown up and having a good time.’
One
of the myths perpetuated by police and social services is that the
girls are the wild progeny of feckless parents or sexually precocious
youngsters in the care system.
In fact, many come from decent, loving homes — as does Rachel.
Her
father was a hard-working factory manager and her mother an accounts’
clerk when she was introduced to the gang by her friends.
She
is the only one of her siblings to have got into trouble. All her older
brothers and sisters have careers and families, and are making the most
of their lives.
Nothing prepared Georgina for the manner in which her youngest daughter suddenly turned feral.
Georgina
contacted Oxford social services hundreds of times to ask for help with
her out-of-control daughter and says they did not return her calls.
She stormed down to their offices in Oxford and says she was ignored.
She
phoned the police, who to their credit often went out searching for
Rachel, but officers (and social services) failed to tell Georgina that a
gang of men, predominantly British-born Pakistanis, was operating a
sex-grooming ring in the city and any white girl was at risk from them.
Sick: Brothers Bassam Karrar (left) and Mohammed Karrar (right) were found guilty of child sex offences
Like other predatory grooming rings,
the gang used nicknames to confuse the girls about their real identities
so they could not report them to the police.
Rachel
knew the men who abused her by unintelligible pseudonyms — Jammy, K-Dog
and Jeezy were just a few — and only learned their true names, even
though she had known the men for years, when she saw their pictures in
the newspapers this week.
She had given evidence at the trial from behind a screen so she was shielded from seeing them.
The modus operandi of the Oxford gang and others like it is much the same.
Zeeshan Ahmed, 27, was convicted of a catalogue
of charges involving vulnerable underage girls who were groomed for
sexual exploitation
A girl might be in the town centre on a
Saturday afternoon, talking to friends or waiting for the bus home from
school. She is bored and wants something exciting to happen. When a
group of smiling men pull up in a flashy car with blaring rap music, she
is flattered.
They ask her
to come and ‘chill’ with them, and offer her a bottle of vodka to swig.
They give her cigarettes and — above all — tell her she is pretty.
To
a girl of 11, 12 or 13, it is alluring to have a group of handsome
boyfriends. But after a week or two, it is always pay-back time.
The
once smiling men soon say they want to have sex and if the girl does
not agree willingly, they force themselves on her, sometimes taking
pictures on their mobile phones. Soon, they are offering the girl to
their friends for money.
If
she objects, they threaten to tell her parents what has happened and
send the mobile phone pictures, or to hurt her family. It was the same
pattern with Rachel.
Today,
she is in the care of Oxford social services and living in another part
of the country. It is a unit where she is secure so the gang cannot
contact her — nor she them.
Aged
16, she is not allowed a mobile phone or computer access. She can speak
to her family only when a phone call is made for her by a warden at the
home.
Suffering from
post-traumatic stress because of her five-year ordeal, she is studying
for her GCSEs and is visited by her mother regularly.
Her parents, who were together for 23 years, parted because of the stress over what has happened to their youngest daughter.
Predators: Brothers Kamar Jamil, left, and Assad
Hussain, right, are facing jail after being found guilty of a catalogue
of child sex offences
As Georgina says: ‘The gang took my
little girl and our family’s life, too. One minute I was helping her tie
up her shoelaces and the next she was being raped.
‘I have no idea how many men she has slept with, but I am sure it all began in the summer holidays when she was 11.
‘It
was then she began staying out in the evenings until late with her
friends in the park and that is where she was targeted by the gang.’
Rachel
was soon out of control. When she was not out in the evenings, she
would be in the family’s sitting room using her mother’s laptop and
Facebook to contact the men she had met in the park.
Her
parents would go to bed, unaware of the laptop messaging, and their
daughter would then slip out of the house in the early hours to meet the
gang.
‘We would wake up in the middle of the night and find her gone,’ says Georgina.
‘Sometimes she would be back in the morning, dishevelled and dirty, and I would make her have a bath and drive her to school.’
One night, she and Rachel’s father went round to a house in Oxford where they suspected their daughter was ‘partying’.
They
kicked in the green door and found it resembled a brothel. ‘There were
all these rooms,’ says Georgina. ‘In one of them was a friend of
Rachel’s who used to come to us for tea when she was little. She was
there with an Afghan man.
‘She said that Rachel had been there a minute or two before, but had just left.
‘At
the time, I had no inkling that an organised group of men was involved.
But I was on the phone to social services every day.
‘We
needed help, but didn’t get it. They certainly did not tell me the
truth that a gang was operating in the city and targeting girls
like Rachel.’
Finally, social services did react. At 13, Rachel was taken into care at her mother’s request.
She
was sent to numerous foster families and children’s homes around the
country to get her away from the city. But the gang always found her via
her mobile phone or on Facebook.
She
would abscond, often going missing for days as she returned to their
clutches to be plied with more drink and drugs — to which she was
hopelessly addicted — in return for sex.
Abuse was carried out at the Nanford Guest House in Oxford. Pictured is a room at the guest house
Even though she was in the care
of Oxford social services, the gang would send a taxi to get her from
where she was living and take her to the nearest town or big city to
provide sex for Muslim customers or themselves.
On
one occasion, in December 2011, Rachel was living in care in the East
of England. She was allowed to visit her mother in Oxford on the
condition, said social workers, that she did not go missing and meet the
gang. But it was a forlorn hope.
Once
back in Oxford, she received a text message from one of the gang
calling her ‘sweetie’. He begged her to go down to the town to meet him.
She ran out of the house,
disappearing for two days, first to the Oxford bed-and-breakfast hotel
where DNA tests on her underwear later showed she had slept with at
least five men.
At one stage during the escapade, she woke up with two of the gang members in bed either side of her.
She
told police she was so ‘out of it’ due to the drugs and drink they had
given her that she could not remember how she — or they — had got
there.
While she remains racked with guilt, Georgina mostly blames social services and the police.
‘They
have failed our children and must pay for it. They should have done
something years ago when the parents first alerted the authorities,’ she
says.
‘If action had been
taken, my daughter would never have been abused. She — and all the other
girls from normal homes — have been let down. Things need to change. I
am terrified for my granddaughters.’
That
may seem alarmist, but the grieving mother who has kept Rachel’s room
spick and span in the hope she will return home soon has a point.
Oxford police said this week that 60 other girls may have been abused by 50 men from similar gangs in Oxford.
As
for Rachel, she recently wrote a short article on the appalling events
of her life. It is a tragic epilogue to her harrowing story.
‘I would love to thank my Mum, who has been there through thick and thin,’ she wrote.
‘I
thought hanging around with older men would make life better. I thought
they loved me and cared about me. But they just wanted to rape and hurt
me.
‘I don’t know if I can ever be in a relationship with another person after what has happened to me.’
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Additional reporting: Inderdeep Bains. Rachel and Georgina’s names
have been changed because sex abuse victims cannot be identified.
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