A gang of child abusers is allegedly at large in the UK city of Hull. In a Sky News investigation, three young women made serious allegations, naming their attackers and providing documents to back up their stories, while two others have given supporting testimony.
One young woman told Sky News she was “sold into the sex trade” after she was first raped by the horrifying gang aged 13, and spoke of victims being threatened with weapons including a taser and a hammer, but the culprits have yet to be prosecuted.
Many young women bravely spoke to Hull Live about the ordeals they suffered at the hands of abusers they describe as being men of Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds, including Turkish, Kurdish and Bangladeshi.
The current abuse allegations follow a child sex abuse inquiry reportedly refusing to probe Rotherham and Rochdale grooming gangs as it was “scared of being called racist”. Victims and experts slammed the “selective” decision making revealed in the subsequent £143 million inquiry as “cowardly”, the Times reported.
Sammy Woodhouse, a victim of a Rotherham gang, slammed the public inquiry into the harrowing abuse, saying that it had “not placed survivors at the forefront” of the investigation. Ms Woodhouse said: “If you’re going to get to the root of gang-related child sexual exploitation you need to go right to the heart of it.
“They are trying to bury what happened in places like Rotherham and Rochdale because they’re scared of being called racist,” she said last October. Since 2011, gangs have been convicted of grooming and sexual abuse in areas of England including Rochdale, Rotherham, Leicester, Newcastle, Telford, Oxford, Halifax, Peterborough and Dewsbury. Many investigations found that grooming gangs targeting and abusing white teenage girls were largely comprised of men from south Asian backgrounds.
UK reports from last week stated that not a single police officer has been sacked over the widespread failures that let down the victims of the Asian grooming gangs in Rotherham. A report from the Independent Office for Police Conduct, released last week, said urgent action was required to deal with problems that “still exist” in the handling of child sex abuse cases.
Operation Linden probed 47 South Yorkshire Police officers after 44 white girls were abused between 1997 and 2013 by the gangs.
Operation Marksman was wound down without securing the justice the victims were fighting for following a two-year investigation into the alleged abuse in the East Yorkshire city of Hull. Police told victims they had exhausted all lines of inquiry. A former top police chief is now calling on Humberside Police to ‘double down’ on their efforts to convict those responsible for the terrifying abuse.
Now, the women making these new allegations, continuing in their quest for justice, have given their first TV interviews to Sky News, in which they say they believe there was not enough evidence to bring the case to court.
Sky News stated that they had examined evidence provided by one young woman who they refer to as Sarah (not her real name). The evidence includes photographs of texts from a man who threatened to kill her if she did not come to a location immediately to have sex with a number of men.
Sarah told Sky that she was groomed by two men at 13 years old, and after two months one of the men raped her.
She told Sky News:
“He tried to kiss me, and I was like ‘no get off’, and he was like ‘no, it’s time for you to pay now for all the things we’ve given you’.
“Then he got on top of me and raped me, and I was just a powerless 13-year-old girl. Terrified.”
Sarah says the man then brought her to a block of flats.
“He’d obviously decided that I was a good enough candidate to take to the next level,” she said.
“He introduced me to this other guy and exchanged some money with this other guy, which I’ve later found out I was sold into the sex trade.
“That room, that flat, took my childhood from me.”
Sarah says that over the space of three years, she was raped by 150 men.
“I think I was raped by around 150 men over the three-year period, sometimes 10 or 11 men wanted to rape me per day.”
Junior members of gangs are sometimes paid to groom girls in this way, according to experts.
Sarah made a spider graph for police, seen by Sky News, in which she identifies 11 people linked to the gang who would come to the flat – the two groomers, the buyer, and some gang members and regular clients. Sarah even numbers the individuals, providing photos to help identify some of the men involved.
She also gave the police a drawing of herself, illustrating herself at the time, in which she describes herself as a young girl, measuring 4ft 6in in height, wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and pink neon leggings.
She said: “I was blonde. I had no boobs. I was underdeveloped. I looked young – and that’s what they liked – the younger, the better.”
She also says that the gang targeted girls as young as eight or nine years old for the horrific sexual exploitation and abuse, stating:
“There were girls as young as primary school (age). I’ll never forget that girl that I saw sat there, in her primary school uniform, probably eight or nine years old.”
“She was there with her sister, who was a little bit older. I remember her screaming in that bedroom.”
For the police investigation, Sarah also drew pictures of items in the flat used to intimidate and control victims, including a Taser, hammer and handcuffs.
Sarah said she was once handcuffed to the radiator and the abuse was sometimes filmed.
“There’s videos out there of me as a 13, 14, 15-year-old little girl being raped by men,” she said.
“I’ve seen them. They’ve shown me them. One of the videos is captioned English girl gets f***** against her own will… I was just profit to them.”
Now aged 19, Sarah is among several young women who say they are disappointed that the police investigation has stalled.
In terrifying claims, she says that when she was in her early teens, she was threatened with being set on fire or burned alive if she did not keep coming back to the flat to be raped by the men. The text exchange from 2018 has been seen by Sky News, which says it will be showing the evidence to one of the UK’s reading child exploitation experts.
Victims including Sarah say that they were taken mainly to flats and hotels to be sexually abused, but add that the abuse was also inflicted at the beauty spot Hessle Foreshore.
Speaking about one of the threatening texts seen by the news outlet, former chief police officer Jim Gamble said of the man, referred to as ‘Man A’: “Number one is he’s committed a criminal offence because that’s a threat to murder, and the Offences Against the Person Act makes that a crime.
“But what you do see there is the coercive control. You see the fact that the predator is so confident in their ability, their level of competence at controlling these young people, that they don’t even try and hide it or mask it.”
After looking at a thousand pages of evidence Mr Gamble said: “I’d be surprised if they’re not able to pass the evidential threshold… because what you do have is significant levels of corroboration.”
Corroboration refers to the testimony and evidence given by the other young women involved in the case. Despite this, Humberside Police say they did not reach the evidence threshold required to bring the case to court.
Detective Chief Superintendent, Phillip Ward said: “Despite two years of intensive investigation, analysis and examination, we share the disappointment and frustration that we have been unable to identify sufficient evidence to corroborate or support the accounts given to us by the victims. As a result, we have been unable to meet the Crown Prosecution Service’s evidential threshold for us to formally charge anyone in relation to Operation Marksman.”
Humberside police arrested 34 suspects, carrying out digital searches on 150 devices seized, and say that phone records did not provide supporting evidence. They say they couldn’t find the origin of the threatening text provided by Sarah.
“As part of these arrests, we seized over 200 digital devices from suspects, every one of which was forensically examined. This included analysis of messaging services, social media, GPRS, cell site and contact data, making every effort to identify contact between the suspects or link them to the victims and/or addresses of interest to the investigation. Over 10,000 text messages were reviewed as part of this analysis,” police said.
Detective Chief Inspector Rebecca Dickinson told Sky News: “(With) a text message in relation to a threat, we’ve got to go back and prove where that threat’s come from and that provenance of that threat to get us that evidence that’s unequivocal that we can put before a lawyer and take us forward to court.
“We haven’t got the evidence that takes us to the Full Code Test to get us over that line.”
Two other women have come forward regarding the allegations against Man A, including one woman who told Sky News that he also raped her.
The woman, who is referred to as Anna (not her real name) in the investigation, knew Sarah because they lived in the same village outside of Hull. Anna had got in touch with Sarah after seeing her phone number on Man A’s phone.
In a series of texts, the girls confide in each other that they were groomed and raped by the man. Anna then sent Sarah a long list of abusers associated with the gang over text, some of whom Sarah recognised.
Sarah told Sky News: “Anna reported it to the police, and they turned up on my doorstep. She knew what he was like, she knew what he’d done to her.”
Sky News said that evidence of the grooming and abuse provided by Anna included diaries, texts, school records and pictures of bruising which she claims were inflicted by the abusers.
Some of the evidence details Anna’s fear of ignoring the men and how a teacher saw messages on the girl’s phone that said “I’ll actually kill you” and “Don’t ignore me”.
She told Sky News how she was bitten, beaten and burned during a violent rape at the hands of the group. Anna’s mother became so worried after her teenage daughter repeatedly went missing with the men that she put a tracker in her bag and sent the information to police.
Anna, aged 16 when the abuse started, told Sky News: “The main thing that was in my head was if I don’t do this something worse is going to happen. So, I’ll have to go.”
“I felt I was protecting my family by going back. And it’s just the whole cycle you’re in, it’s hard to get out of.
“When you’re so far into it, you’re just normalised to it. When no-one’s offering you help, you kind of think ‘well it can’t be that bad if no one’s bothered’.”
In their report, Sky News said the case highlights the notoriously low rate of rape cases ending up in courts, stating: “Delving into this case does not just expose how one group of women failed to get charges, it perhaps explains why fewer than 2% of reported rape cases end up in court.”
As the shocking new details of the abuse emerged, Hull MP Diana Johnson has spoken out, urging police and prosecutors to do “everything possible” to secure convictions in cases of grooming and sexual exploitation of women and girls.