‘I Was Abused Repeatedly As A Child But Police Never Took It Seriously’

‘I Was Abused Repeatedly As A Child But Police Never Took It Seriously’

A lady has narrated how, she was abused repeatedly as a child with the police not taking the matter seriously.

The incident which happened when she was just five,  had left her with terrifying memories.

Samantha Smith of Shropshire, Telford in the UK has therefore taken her time to document and public the matter, hoping to get justice.

“In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am sitting on a man’s lap, frozen in fear as I feel his hand creeping up my leg towards my underwear”, she recalls, in the writeup published in Mailonline

“I am five years old, with no frame of reference about what is normal and what is not. All I know is that I don’t like what he is doing, and I want him to stop. But I cannot find a way to tell him.

‘I Was Abused Repeatedly As A Child But Police Never Took It Seriously’

“Around me, in this suburban home in the Shropshire town of Telford, are all the usual signs of a convivial summer gathering: grown-ups chatting over drinks and a discarded football lying on the grass where I had been playing minutes before, twirling around in my skirt, thrilled by the way it rose and fell like a ballerina’s.

“This man is an adult, someone I should trust, but what he was doing felt wrong in a way I could not put into words.

“What I didn’t know then was that this was the start of a pattern of sexual exploitation not just by this man but many others. For years, between the ages of five and 14, I was abused by successive men who left a devastating legacy. As my life fell apart, I found myself homeless by the age of 16, and there were many nights when I would lie there — racked by visceral self-loathing — wishing I would simply disappear.

How could I not hate myself?

‘I Was Abused Repeatedly As A Child But Police Never Took It Seriously’

“Of course, I had tried to seek help. I eventually reported my abuse and was interviewed by a police child sexual exploitation team. But they did absolutely nothing to bring my abusers to justice.

“In fact, I was made to feel unworthy of help or support, as though the abuse I experienced was my fault. My social workers even spelled it out. ‘Your behaviour and actions have led you to where you are today,’ they told me. Isolated as I was, I had no idea that I was not alone, but one of more than a thousand children in Telford who had been sexually exploited over decades while the police and youth workers, whose job it is to protect us, not only failed to act but all too often blamed us as the architects of our own trauma.

“That’s not just my opinion, but the conclusive judgment of a devastating independent report issued last month following an extensive three-year inquiry into sexual exploitation and abuse in my home town stretching back to the 1970s.

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She added that hundreds of victims of child sexual abuse and grooming in Telford whose suffering was brushed under the carpet as part of a deeply engrained cover-up culture.

‘I Was Abused Repeatedly As A Child But Police Never Took It Seriously’

“Even now, it is hard to confront the scale of abuse that took place in the leafy Shropshire town I once called home. While incidents of child sexual abuse number 7.9 per 10,000 nationwide, in Telford that figure jumps to 16.4. And behind those numbers are real children, many young girls like the one I was 15 years ago: a small child whose shoulder-length brown hair, blunt fringe and tanned skin made my family joke that I looked like the cartoon adventurer Dora The Explorer.

We had moved to Shropshire when I was young. But things became very difficult when my father died soon after I turned five.

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Nonetheless I was a confident child, and an eager to please perfectionist. Did my first abuser — who I have chosen not to identify — see this as a targetable weakness?