Parties, Snapchat and sinister foreshore trips - inside grooming gang
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF HOW YOUNG GIRLS WERE LURED INTO ABUSE HELL
IT is one of Hull’s most popular scenic spots.
But when families and couples had left and night fell, Hessle Foreshore became a site for an alleged child grooming gang to prey on their young victims.
After exposing the extent of child sexual exploitation in Hull, we can also report details about key incidents, recalled by the victims in harrowing interviews with Hull Live.
Some of the victims were already vulnerable before the sexual abuse started, due to mental health or medical issues. At least one was in the care system. But another was from a middle-class family, showing no girl was beyond their grasp.
In each case, the process of abuse started often many weeks or months before the girls would be raped and sexually assaulted at the hands of older men.
Like every organised criminal enterprise, the ring’s leaders relied on foot soldiers, people the girls would trust. This could be a flirtatious male around their own age, or a woman able to befriend the girl and lure her in.
A chance encounter, at a party or in school, would often be the start of a chain of escalating events, orchestrated on Snapchat in relentless time-lapsed messages.
Gang members would ply the girls with drink, drugs or fast food, or prey on their insecurities by making them feel “popular” with invitations to social events.
Parties that were meant to be “fun”, would eventually become much more sinister, however. They would suddenly find they were now the only girl in attendance, or so heavily drugged they had lost control of their decisions.
They would find themselves on the “list”, meaning they were available to hundreds of men. Sex was now part of their daily routine.
Men would pick them up from school then use them for their own gratification or ship them to sex parties in unknown locations.
What might have started as a liaison with one man could soon grow into daily gang rape. One girl would have sex with between four and 11 men a night, most nights of the week, while still at school.
While some of the abuse happened outside of Hull, with girls ferried to undisclosed locations many miles away, much of it happened right here in the city – in a flat, in budget city centre hotel rooms or in cars at isolated locations like Hessle Foreshore.
This was never a choice. was, in fact, a slavish “cycle” of coercion many feared they would never break free from.
If they did ever try to say no, then violence would follow. The girls’ bodies displayed the marks of being pinned down and raped in the most horrific of ways.
Other tools in the ring’s armoury of control included threats to harm the girls’ families or to humiliate them in the eyes of loved ones. One was told she would be killed if she ever “snitched”.
Drugs played a key role in the abuse. One of the girls needed to be resuscitated due to the sheer quantity of drugs and alcohol she had been plied with.
While unconscious, she been raped by eight men.
Some of the victims initially thought it was fun to be taking drugs, such as cannabis and cocaine, but some would become addicted and dependent, with drugs used as “payment”’ for sex.
The “parties”, sometimes attended by tens of men at one time, were organised and profitable. Leaders could earn hundreds of pounds a night from attendees.
All but one of the girls who spoke to Hull Live were below the age of consent when the abuse started.
The youngest we spoke to says she was 13 when she was forced to have sex with men several decades her senior.
One of the girls recalls seeing another girl at one of the “parties” wearing a primary school uniform, suggesting victims could be at least as young as 11.
Humberside Police said they arrested more than 30 people as part of Operation Marksman into the suspected sexual exploitation of young women. However, they have been unable to proceed with the majority of cases and have issued a fresh appeal for witnesses and victims to come forward.