Telford abusers ‘threatened to rape my family’
A GROOMING gang victim wept yesterday as she told how her attackers threatened to rape her family if she failed to submit.
The woman, using the name Holly, was speaking to Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain about the shocking scale of abuse in Telford.
It is feared more than 1,000 young schoolgirls in the Shropshire new town have been drugged, beaten and raped by remorseless male predators.
It has the third highest number of child sexual offences recorded in the UK, just behind Blackpool and Rotherham.
Asian abusers were not tagged by council staff for fear of being labelled racist. Holly blasted police and council officials for failing to stop the gangs and has now demanded a public inquiry into the wide-scale abuse.
Holly said: “The men blackmailed me, saying they were going to rape my family or burn my house down.”
And she detailed her four-year ordeal at the hands of a vile gang who sold her “countless times” for sex.
She said: “I was abused from the ages of 14 to18. My abuse started with boys my own age, who went on to sell my phone number to older men.
“And from there it was just a whirlwind of rape every day basically.
“I was getting the morning after pill, probably twice a week, and nobody questioned anything. I had two abortions and still nothing was said to me. I was in cars stopped by the police and they asked me no questions of why I was there with a much older man. It got to the point where I tried to commit suicide and still nobody asked me any questions.
“I got out of it by leaving Telford and isolating myself from friends, family and everybody that I knew.”
Exploitation
One 16-year-old victim, Lucy Lowe, her mother Eileen and sister Sarah, 17, all died when abuser Azhar Ali Mehmood, 26, set fire to their house.
The taxi driver first targeted Lucy in 1997. She gave birth to his child when she was just 14.
In 2001 at Stafford Crown Court he was jailed for their murders but never arrested for abuse amid claims the murders were to terrify other Telford victims to stay silent.
Telford and Wrekin Council social services were given 715 child sexual exploitation referrals in three years, but acted in just 324 of the cases.
The council said that the figures “do not paint the whole picture” as referrals were just one of a number of appropriate options for action.