Gangs are sexually abusing and raping thousands of young girls every year, it emerged last night.
Up to 6,000 may be victims at any one time, according to the expert in charge of a major inquiry.
Sue Berelowitz, the deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, said victims are often ‘kidnapped, held at gunpoint and threatened with gang rape’.
She is leading a major, two-year investigation into the problem of street gangs and their attacks on young women.
She said that girls associated with male gang members ‘would all either be at extremely high risk or actually being sexually exploited in some shape or form’.
‘From the conversations we’ve had with individual girls, some of the stories are quite heart-rending, really, in terms of girls being kidnapped, held at gunpoint, threatened with being what the public would understand as gang raped,’ she told Channel 4 News.
Last year a University of Bedfordshire report into the sexual exploitation of children found three-quarters of child protection boards in England were not recording information on child sexual exploitation – making it hard to measure the true scale of the abuse.
The academics found children were often groomed or put under pressure by older girls who were also victims of peer pressure.One former gang member, Isha Nembhard, said many girls do not even recognise themselves as victims of abuse.
She added: ‘They’d rather be called a slag than say that somebody’s assaulting them or sexually abusing them in that sort of way.’
Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector Petrina Cribb said: ‘We’re talking about sexual exploitation, manipulation, coercion into sexual acts, which they may feel they’ve got no option but to go along with.’
It was also claimed that young girls are advertising themselves to gang members on social networking sites.
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