‘Raped so many times’: Doco exposes horror grooming gangs
A young girl was lured into a harrowing underworld that saw her raped by more than 60 men – and tragically, she’s not alone.
WARNING: This article discusses rape, abuse and grooming
Scarlett West was barely a teenager when she was groomed and trafficked to be raped by more than 60 men.
Her horrifying ordeal began when, at just 14, Scarlett was attacked by a group in a park.
In order to make them stop, she agreed to become a member, but despite her desperate survival act, Scarlett was still raped by the gang’s leader.
What ensued was a four-year nightmare that features in the new Sky News documentary, Prey: Inside today’s grooming gangs, which delves into a harrowing issue wreaking havoc across the UK.
“They were kicking me and stuff,” Scarlett, now 20, said.
“And then one of the lads grabbed me up off the floor and he took me over to this railing of the fence here and I thought he’d come to help me.
“And he pulled up my top and put a knife to me. And then lads from behind set me on fire and my hood, the fur on my hood.”
After, she was introduced to a girl named “Leila” who had also been raped, and the pair grew close.
The two started hanging out. They’d get ready together, do their makeup and would share clothes. Leila would also pay for everything.
“She was like my mum, she looked after me,” Scarlett said, before explaining that after a few months, “things started to change”.
Leila started taking Scarlett to hotels where they would drink and take drugs. While Scarlett was asleep, Leila would have sex with men who arrived.
But one night, two men arrived armed with vodka, condoms, cannabis and cocaine.
“I don’t even remember the night, really, I just remember waking up in the middle of the night to him next to me, Leila in one bed with the other guy, condoms that are open on the floor and stuff, and I just, like, I think I was still on drugs as well, so my head was just going, I just couldn’t comprehend, like what had even gone on,” Scarlett told documentary makers.
As the men left, she saw them give Leila “a load of cash”, a moment she said she realised “was the point for me where I was just too far in it”.
“I’d not realised what had been going on for all these months, and now, she was kind of like prostituting me out pretty much,” Scarlett said.
Things continued like this for years, with the teen often waking up covered in bruises – the only evidence of what had gone on the night before.
“I remember one time, like, scrubbing myself that much in the bath because I just felt like pure filth because of what had happened to me,” she recalled.
“It was like a nail brush, and I was scrubbing myself with it, and there was all like red scratches from where I’d been scrubbing myself.”
Her dad would often report her missing, but she said police didn’t do much, and she’d often end up back with her abusers within hours.
Fearing she “would end up dead”, Scarlett eventually managed to break free from her four-year hell, but none of her abusers have ever been brought to justice.
During the time she was being trafficked, she managed to keep evidence of her ordeal on an iPad, that despite a broken screen is still accessible.
It contains pictures and videos of that time period, shared by Scarlett with Sky News, and many of which feature in the 48-minute YouTube investigation
She’s not the only young woman who has shared graphic details of being groomed by a gang in the documentary. Another is a 15-year-old girl who is still trapped in exploitation.
Reports of young British girls being groomed by gangs of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, first began to emerge in 2002, when the then-Labour MP Ann Cryer warned that it was happening in her West Yorkshire constituency of Keighley.
In 2010, a group of five men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12 to 16 in Rotherham in South Yorkshire.
The UK Times then launched a long investigation, exposing not only the shocking extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, but also a wider pattern of horrendous abuse of young girls by organised networks of predominantly British-Pakistani men.
However, many of the women featured in Prey have argued the men who paid to rape them weren’t Asian.
“The question I get asked all the time is, ‘how comes you’re not racist’,” said Leona, who was first trafficked at a party her abuser took her to when she was 13.
“Because it was a few, it wasn’t all. It wasn’t all Asian men, it wasn’t all Black men, it wasn’t all white men.
“It’s a sh*t show, I think it’s because they know it will get more people fired up over people of different colours, different races and different religions doing bad things, rather than admit it is also people from this country.”
It’s a sentiment shared by another survivor, Toni Louise, who met her 19-year-old groomer when she was 12.
“I was sold to more white, Scottish men than I was to Asian and Black men,” she said on the documentary.
A public outcry to the issue of grooming gangs has seen British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, order a national inquiry after refusing initial requests to do so.
But Scarlett is not convinced it will lead to significant change.
“They’re not the ones that are being raped, they’re not the ones who are being groomed … they don’t know how it feels, so they just … throw you away and you’ve got to deal with it on your own.”
Scarlett’s dad, Marlon, previously opened up about the trauma she went through at the hands of the grooming gangs.
He said Scarlett, who went to a private prep school and had a horse called Jasper, started staying out late at night, describing how his daughter’s behaviour changed “pretty rapidly”.
“It wrecked her childhood, and it’s destroyed me thinking about what she went through,” he told The Sun in February.
“It’s only now, with maturity, she looks back and realises what was actually going on.
“She’s been raped that many times, it became normal for her.”
A year before she was trafficked to Rochdale from her home in Manchester, northern England, an associate of the gangs threatened to kill her dad.
They sent Scarlett a chilling video featuring a gun and ammunition.
Weeks earlier, a balaclava-clad man was captured on CCTV delivering a menacing letter to Marlon’s house, calling Scarlett a s**g.
Marlon, a psychiatric nurse, claims police and social work did little to protect his daughter.
He claims they branded him a menace because he repeatedly reported her missing.
Greater Manchester Police confirmed to The Sun an “extensive” probe has now been launched into Scarlett and her father’s allegations.
But it’s left the young woman living in fear.
“She has her own place but will often call me at three or four am after having nightmares about what happened to her,” Marlon said.
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Originally published as ‘Raped so many times’: Doco exposes horror grooming gangs
