Jane was 12 when she moved to Oldham. She made friends with a girl older than her who introduced her to a man in his late forties.
“He started coming round, buying me phones, telling me not tell my parents,” she said, “then he started introducing me to his friends.”
Now more than a decade later, Jane struggles to recall in detail the number of men involved – but says for six years she was abused by a British-Pakistani grooming gang.
“There was one specific incident when I was plied with alcohol, plied with drugs, and I could not move. There were a group of men coming in and out of the room, I think there must have been four or five, basically raping me.”
Jane told her mum, the police, the council and her social worker about what was going on.
“At one point, when the police had turned up, there was an illegal immigrant with me and they came and arrested me for prostitution,” she said.
Jane left Oldham several years later.
“After a certain amount of time you lose respect for yourself and it becomes a normality,” Jane said, fighting back tears.
“When you are a child, you don’t really understand, but when you get older and you look back, I felt like it was me against the world.”
As far as Jane knows, none of the men who abused her have been jailed.
