Woman groomed and r.a.p.e.d at 13 says she ‘just wanted someone to be nice to me’

A woman who was groomed and r.a.p.e.d at just 13 has told of her harrowing ordeal. The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was one of scores of vulnerable children abused by the gang 15 years ago.

Up to 97 men picked up the youngsters “in plain sight” and took them to homes across Rusholme, Manchester.

But, the Manchester Evening News reports, barely any of the men were charged as a police operation called Augusta was abandoned.

The victim, who has come forward to help others and wants to be referred to as Kelly, said: “One of the girls knew everyone she came across in Rusholme and had met up with a man who she called her boyfriend.

“This was the first Asian-Pakistani man I had ever met. I looked at him and thought to myself that he was so much older than the girl he called his girlfriend.

“I felt that I had made friends. I wanted to impress them, I wanted to seem streetwise.”

But Kelly, now in her 30s, conceded she wasn’t at all streetwise and the gang saw through this quickly.

She often spent time with them above a flat above a restaurant.

“They were giving us food and drink,” the woman said.

“There were so many people – men – there, but they were all really friendly to me.

“They seemed nice. I wasn’t afraid and, after all, I had my new friends with me.”

So the apparent kindness of these new men, as well as her new friends, felt like a safety blanket.

“I just wanted someone to be nice to me,” she recalled.

“I hated myself. All I could feel was pain – I hated myself so much and these girls took some of this pain away.

“I started going out with them more, and every night I started absconding from the children’s home.”

And that was how it all began,” she added.

“One night, I went out with the two girls. They said we were going to a house party. We went to a house in Rusholme. When we got there, I was given vodka – this was one of the first times I had drunk alcohol.

“Everyone, including the girls, were giving me more and more. My head was spinning and I was dizzy. I felt so sick.

“I remember being in one of the bedrooms upstairs and one of the men who was my friend came in. I wasn’t scared – he was my friend.

“Then he was hurting me. He got on top of me. I told him no: please stop. I was still a virgin. He didn’t listen – this friendly man was so horrid, with evil in his eyes. He did what he wanted that night.”

From that point on, she says, ‘he was always there when I walked out of the children’s home’.

Kelly remembered the private homes she had lived in previously as being ‘happy’. But, for reasons she never understood, Manchester City Council then started moving her around.

It was from there that she says things went ‘downward’. The more Kelly went out in Rusholme, the more she was punished for her behaviour by staff.

But nothing was ever done about the men themselves. Instead, she remembers, staff would take her out and buy her things and then take them from her room if she ran away.

“While in this children’s home I stopped going to school,” she added. “I learned that the only way to get attention from the staff and social workers was to misbehave.”

That was despite the fact they could see exactly what was happening.

“I would see his car, or he would be waiting on the corner,” she remembered the man who had first raped her.

“I told the staff at the children’s home he was a bad man, but no one would listen – they told me that I was just fabricating and it was a part of my behavioural problems.

“By this point, we were picked up at the children’s home door by the man and were taken to lots of different house parties with so many older Pakistani men.

“They weren’t friendly no more. They were horrid, they did what they wanted: plied me with alcohol. At this point in my life I believed that maybe this was what I was put on this earth to do.

“I was here for men to just do what they wanted.”

She was no more than 14.

The men were ‘blatant’, she said. They would drive right up to the door, beeping their horns. She said this was happening ‘every night’.

This would have been around the time that Victoria Agoglia, a teenager also in the care of Manchester social services, died after being forcibly injected with heroin, aged 15.