I endured a daily whirlwind of rape, says Telford grooming victim

A VICTIM of a grooming gang in Telford told yesterday how she endured a ‘whirlwind of rape’ on a daily basis, as police, youth workers and medical staff apparently ignored telltale signs of her ordeal.

The woman, calling herself ‘Holly’, suffered four years of abuse as the ring sold her ‘countless times’ for sex.

Holly said she only escaped the cycle of abuse by leaving her home in the Shropshire town – where up to 1,000 children may have been abused over four decades – to live in hiding 40 miles away.

Seven members of the gang were eventually jailed in 2013 after a police investigation.

But detectives said at the time that up to 200 men from across the country had been involved in the ring – with a ‘huge percentage of them’ unidentified.

Yesterday, as Holly described her ordeal in two TV interviews, the former chief prosecutor who led prosecutions of some of the gang members described the Telford ring as the ‘tip of the iceberg’.

Nazir Afzal, who appeared alongside her on TV, said she was ‘probably one of thousands of young girls and young boys who are being abused in street grooming up and down the country’.

According to Home Office figures, Telford, a town of 170,000 people, has the third highest number of child sexual offences recorded in the UK, after Blackpool and Rotherham.

Holly told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: ‘I was abused from the ages of 14 to 18. 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 going into the doctor’s and the youth sexual health clinic to get the morning-after pill, probably twice a week, and nobody even questioned anything.

‘I had two abortions, still nothing was said to me. I was in cars that were 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 about what was going on in my life and why I was reacting the way I was reacting.’

Holly was interviewed by police during the inquiry, known as Operation Chalice, which resulted in the 2013 prison sentences, but in the end decided she could not face her abusers in court.

She told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire she was taken to a ‘rape house which was set up for the purpose of young girls being sold to men’. But the worst thing that ever happened to her during the cycle of abuse was when she was gang raped after turning 16.

She recalled: ‘After that I tried to commit suicide. I genuinely wanted to die because I thought it was the only way out.’

Holly appeared to make a reference to the August 2000 murder of Lucy Lowe, 16-year, who died in a house fire set by her 26-yearold boyfriend, and who has now been linked to the grooming epidemic.

‘The only reason I kept going back [to the men] was because they were threatening me with burning my house down, which was a real threat in Telford because it had happened previously,’ Holly said. ‘They would [also] say to me that they would rape my mum and my sisters.’

In a U-turn yesterday, Labourrun Telford and Wrekin Council called on Home Secretary Amber Rudd to commission a public inquiry into cases of child sexual exploitation in the town.

The council, which said it has ‘nothing to hide’ over its handling of cases of grooming and sexual abuse of children in the town, previously insisted that the issue could be examined as part of the national ongoing Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

West Mercia Police said that tackling child sexual exploitation remained its ‘number one priority’ for officers in Telford, whose approach had been ‘subject to independent scrutiny’ from the Home Office last year.