Evidence was given to a jury at Sheffield Crown Court as the trial of five men and two women alleged to be part of a Rotherham child grooming gang restarted following a break for Christmas.
The mother of Girl B, one of 12 alleged victims who are all now adults, said despite repeated attempts to get the police and social services to act, nothing was done.
She said her daughter had been a ‘happy child’ with ‘no problems’ at primary school, but problems started with her going missing from home shortly after starting secondary school in 1991.
The woman said she used to walk around the streets looking for her daughter when she went missing.
She said that in June 1992 when her daughter was 12 she took an overdose.
“When she came back home, I asked whatever made her do that? I said no problem is big enough she couldn’t have talked to me,” she said.
“That is when she told me she were going out with these Asian men.”
She said the men used to come to her house and knock on the door asking for her daughter.
“I told them to keep away, she was only a child and they were a lot older than her,” she said.
The woman said they would also wait at the end of the street for her and when she attempted to tell the police what was happening, they ‘weren’t interested’.
“I used to beg her not to go. She used to say ‘I have got to go Mam, you don’t know what will happen if I don’t go’.”
The woman said she changed her daughter’s school and put her in children’s homes in a bid to stop the abuse, but it continued.
The girl’s mother wept as she told the jury she had once found an exercise book in her daughter’s bedroom that her child had filled in with details about what was happening to her.
She said: “It told me that she was going with a lot of older Asian men and what sexually they were doing to her. It was very explicit. I just couldn’t believe it. It took a long time for it to sink in because I was that shocked.
“I took it to the police and told them to look at it. They just gave it me back. I took it to social services and said this is what is happening. They never documented it, never did anything, just gave it me back.”
The woman said she later burnt the book.(The Star)
Link: http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/local/rotherham-trial-girl-12-told-mother-she-was-being-abused-by-asian-men-after-taking-overdose-1-7655523
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