The police said sexual abuse of Lexi by teenage boys was ‘experimenting’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
When she was about 18 months old, Lexi’s father took her from her mother and they moved into a block of flats.
The father of another family sexually abused Lexi when she was a small child. As a young teenager, she suffered further sexual abuse from teenage neighbours. The police dismissed her as an unreliable witness.
Lexi describes her father as a cruel man who did not show care or love for his young daughter. He became friendly with another family who lived in the block of flats. The father of that family, Aled, began to abuse Lexi when she was very young – she thinks before she was school age.
He would take her into a storage area – she remembers him lifting her over barriers to get in and feeling there was no escape. Once or twice a week he would take her there, undress her and force her to give him oral sex. She vividly remembers not being able to breathe.
She also recalls seeing people approaching the door nearby through the frosted glass and praying they would come to her rescue. She would cry herself to sleep at night.
When she was a little older she became friends with another girl and discovered she was also being abused by Aled. The girls would try and stay together so Aled couldn’t take one of them to be abused.
The abuse continued for several years and ended when Lexi started to develop physically. She feels sure Aled’s wife knew about the abuse and kept her own children away from him.
When Lexi was a young teenager, she and her father moved to a different area and became friends with another family. She would sometimes babysit for their son, who was a few years younger than her.
This family struck up a friendship with another couple and their children, and the four parents would go out at the weekend. Lexi would be left to look after the children, who were all boys. One of them was only a year or two younger than Lexi and he began to encourage the others to molest Lexi.
While one boy sat on her legs, the others held her arms and tried to strip her and touch her. This happened most weekends. She says she would always try and push the boys away and lock herself in the bathroom.
One day, just after her birthday, the oldest boy raped her in the kitchen while the others watched. Shortly afterwards she was alone with the two youngest boys. When they started to grab her she told them about the earlier abuse she’d suffered. She hoped it would make them stop.
One boy rang his mother and told her what Lexi had said. The mother called Lexi’s father. He was furious but did nothing to comfort Lexi or talk to her about it.
Social services were involved but the boys did not admit what they had been doing. Lexi told the police about the abuse she had suffered when she was young but she says, the whole experience was horrifying. The female detective seemed unsympathetic and uninterested. Lexi says she was confrontational and clearly didn’t believe her.
The police interviewed Aled but he denied the allegations. Lexi’s friend refused to confirm she had been abused by him as well. The police told Lexi it wasn’t worth pursuing and that it was her word against his.
The boys tried to cover up their own behaviour by saying Lexi was abusing them. She was forced to return to the police station where she was interviewed by the same police woman. The officer said they were all just young people ‘experimenting sexually’. At this point Lexi decided she would never report anything to the police again.
She says that social services were more supportive and sympathetic. Her doctor was also very helpful and put her in touch with counselling services. She says this helped her realise she’d done nothing wrong and had been the victim.
Lexi would like to see better training for police dealing with reports of child sexual abuse, so they provide sympathy, understanding and support. She would also like to see more awareness that children can abuse other children, and that younger boys can abuse older girls.