Ordeal of Girl A ...

with sexual requests was a regular tactic used.

When she was 15 or 16, a man in his mid to late 30s raped her on a mattress on the floor of Raj Singh Barsran’s house.

Dhaliwal watched over them and told her to ‘stop acting like a kid.’

She didn’t know who the man was. “I don’t know if I was blacking out or not remembering it because I don’t want to. He smelt – he stunk of beer. He was fat. He didn’t say much to me, just spoke to Pretos in his own language.”

She fell pregnant and Dhaliwal threatened to kill her if she didn’t abort the baby.

She also said: “My mum wouldn’t let me have the child because I was a child myself. I thank her now but it was hard.”

By the time she was 16 or 17, she fell pregnant again, believing one of the defendants to be the father, and she said: “Then they branded me as useless. When I found out I was pregnant, I was blessed because they would just leave me.”

Her mum agreed: “It stopped when [she] became pregnant . . . and I think it was because she was no longer any use.”

Girl A also suspected she was too old as she was introduced to a new group of men, who worked for Eagle Taxis, who would want girls younger than her.

Girls A and C were forced to commit crime and even served substantial custodial sentences for it.

While she was in custody, her mum bought her a copy of Girl A: The Truth about the Rochdale Sex Ring by the Victim who Stopped Them. Immediately after reading it, she called her mum and asked: “How did you know?”

She confessed everything and when her mum asked why she had kept the abuse a secret for so long, she said: “They were threatening to kill you and dad. I feel safe now I’m away.”

When Girl A was being sentenced, she tried to give a letter to the presiding judge exposing the sexual abuse behind her offending, but said it ‘got lost.’

While she was in custody, she made the allegations to a police officer, but said she only wanted it to be treated as intelligence as she wasn’t ready to make a statement.

She also wrote to her local MP, Barry Sheerman. He says he had already brought the issue to the attention of the police a few years earlier and even tried to raise it in a Parliamentary debate.

“No-one is listening to me,” she told her mum.

A couple of years later, one of the other victims went to the police and shortly afterwards girls A and C joined her by making their own statements.

She told police she hadn’t made a statement earlier because she didn’t trust them.

And within weeks, the same three men who had groomed Girl A with cigarettes and attention in the bus station a decade earlier pulled up at the bus stop she was waiting at in Berry Brow and called her a ‘white b***h’ and a prostitute.

She hadn’t seen them in years but suddenly, in an odd mirroring of their initial meeting, they were asking her to come and get drunk with them.

She fled to a pub for safety, but she was followed and attacked.

The assault was reported to the police too.

After that, girls A and C continued to give evidence to the police, as well as in multiple trials throughout 2018.

It’s thanks to them, and the other courageous, young women who took to the witness box, that justice has finally been served.

The victims are referred to as girls A-O instead of by their names as they are entitled to lifelong anonymity.