Winney didn’t understand at first that she was being groomed by predatory men
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Winney’s troubled home life made her vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse.
She is now aiming to give other vulnerable girls a better start in life.
Winney says she had a ‘normal’ childhood until her parents split up when she was eight years old.
She and her mother and two siblings lived for a while in temporary accommodation with her mother’s new partner, who later became Winney’s stepfather.
After a time, they all moved into a house on an estate.
The children were badly neglected and their stepfather physically and emotionally abused them. He imposed arbitrary rules, such as forbidding them to go downstairs and watch television, or eat meals at weekends.
Winney’s stepfather began sexually abusing her, and so did a relative of his when he came round to babysit. Social services were involved with the family and she discovered later that her name had been placed on the child protection register as she had been displaying sexualised behaviour.
From the age of 11, Winney would often run out of the house and she was sexually abused by many of the teenage boys on the estate where she lived. At school, she was badly bullied.
Winney was placed in care and moved around different foster homes and residential care homes.
Along with some of the friends she had made in care and on the streets, Winney was sexually exploited by a group of Asian men in the area. The girls were taken to different restaurants and nightclubs, given food, drugs and alcohol, and then sexually abused and raped by different men.
One of the men who organised the exploitation owned a restaurant. Winney says that at the time, she and the other girls ‘thought we were having the time of our lives; clubbing, drinking, taking drugs … you thought they were all your friends’.
Winney says that staff at the children’s homes the girls lived in knew they were going out at night. They were brought home by police officers but no effective action was taken to protect them.
Some of the men also physically assaulted Winney. By the time she was 13 she was taking heroin and cocaine, and during her teenage years she was infected with several sexually transmitted diseases.
When she reached the age of 16, social services moved Winney from the children’s home into bed and breakfast accommodation. She says this was in ‘an awful area’.
Winney was exploited by two men who she describes as ‘extremely intimidating and frightening’. They made her smuggle weapons to a different area of the country. At one stage, she was made to stay in an unsanitary house with no utilities. The men were keeping drugs here.
Winney has tried to report some of the abuse she experienced to the police several times. She finds it very difficult to recollect specific details the police need in order to prosecute. She feels very angry that she has responded several times to their requests to give statements for various investigations, none of which have been proceeded with.
She also feels that social services failed to protect her and the other young girls by not helping them.
Winney has mental health problems and has been diagnosed with chronic PTSD. She feels she is a strong person but at times finds it difficult to cope.
‘I find it hard to make friendships or close relationships … people think I’m a bit cuckoo or a compulsive liar. It’s hard; how do you explain to somebody, “Well I never had a childhood”?’
Winney thinks that children need to be educated from a very young age that people close to them can harm them – not just strangers – and that grooming can happen everywhere, including online. She would like to see more resources invested in tackling child sexual exploitation.
To try and make something positive from the trauma of her past, Winney has publicly supported campaigns against child sexual exploitation. She has enrolled in college. She wants to run a business and employ vulnerable young girls and ‘give them a chance in life’.
‘If the failings that happened to me can make it better for the next generation then my life hasn’t been in vain’ she says.