9-Year-Old Girl Targeted by ‘Grooming’ Child Rape Gangs

Grooming gangs in the Black Country have been revealed to have targetted a nine-year-old girl.

One of England’s youngest victims of child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs was listed in the latest statistics released by the Sandwell Council, which said that 36 people, aged between nine and 22, were at risk of abuse by the vicious gangs in 2020.

Two-thirds of the victims were listed as being “white British or white other”, compared to nine of mixed race, and one from Pakistani heritage.

A police report from 2012 found that a grooming gang was operating in the Black Country, which is now home to a large Muslim population.

“Clusters of offenders have been found in Walsall and on Birmingham East which also have the highest populations of Pakistani communities in the West Midlands,” the police report said.

In March of this year, an alleged grooming gang victim in Walsall said that the police had ignored her pleas for help, with officers reportedly claiming that the child was “prostituting herself“.

“I was 12 or 13 when I went with my mum to the police to report the first rape. But a female police officer accused me of lying and that just broke me. I went off the rails after that,” the alleged victim said.

The mother of the alleged victim said: “She was always going missing after that, we’d have to pick her up at the police station after she was found by them, sometimes at hotels. The police asked me if I knew what was happening and I said if I did I’d have an idea how to deal with it, I had no idea.

“And they said, ‘Well, we think your daughter is prostituting herself’. I could have dropped to my knees at that point because we were talking about a young girl.”