Teenager speaks out about being victim of sexual exploitation

AT 17 YEARS of age, the thoughtful, chatty and cheerful student is at college and is getting her life well on track.

Yet she is also having to grapple with events in her past that no one – least of all someone so young – should have to deal with.

Two years ago, when she was 15, she was raped while asleep by a man at a house after meeting him that evening with a friend. “I did not really understand it,” she recalls now. “I thought, ‘Did that happen, am I just making this up’? I knew it was happening; did that mean that I was consenting to it?

“When people talk about rape and stuff they make it out to be this really violent act,” she said, “but in reality it was not like that.”

Feeling confused and upset, the teenager told her teacher at school what had happened, and he alerted social services and police.

“I hate him,” she says now of her attacker. “I really hate him,” adding she would “welcome” the chance to face him in court.

The police investigation is ongoing.

Consent was never an issue in her case – at 15, she was underage.

But experts warn that sometimes victims’ distorted concepts of healthy relationships and consent mean, like her, they do not always immediately recognise when they are being exploited.

Long before the incident at the house, the teenager had been flagged up by authorities as someone potentially at risk of exploitation.

Similar to many in that category, she had fallen into a chaotic life, hanging around with the wrong crowd and abusing drink and drugs after feeling isolated at school.

“I started hanging around with people that maybe wanted to see me get into trouble,” she recalled. “And that’s how we sort of became friends, because they would sort of egg each other on.

“We would do things like go shop-dropping [getting adults to buy alcohol for them]. It was quite exciting just because it was naughty.

“It started off like maybe just hanging out in the toilets at school, then it started getting extreme like not going into school.

“Then I was introduced to this big group of people, much older people. We would hang out at the park. “And that was when they started staying out really late and maybe not going home at all.

“It was fun at first, I felt accepted. They were quite aggressive. But it was attractive.

“They would talk about fighting or would go to the shop and get alcohol, and we would think they were so cool. It just sort of escalated from there.”

Experts warn that young people can be pushed into sexually exploitative situations by peer pressure, for example, facing huge expectation to lose their virginity in sometimes quite degrading ways. This, they warn, has a very damaging effect on self-esteem and leads to further vulnerability to sexual exploitation by others.

Helen O’Brien, who works with the teenager and is the co-ordinator of the Wise Project, said: “It is almost very subtle, and so subtle that people miss it a lot and they say it can be normal teenage behaviour, but it can be very exploitative.

“It can feel very much like young people are recruited into often slightly older [peer] groups for sexual purposes and are only part of that group if you keep behaving in a way that is expected of them.

“And it takes a lot from a young person who is developing their negotiation and assertiveness skills to turn around and say, ‘I don’t want to do that’.”

The 17-year-old told The Argus she recalled feeling “not really pressured, but sort of more like influenced. If your friends are doing it and then you can all talk about it. They would be like, ‘you should do stuff with him’.

“My friends would be getting on and then he would be to me like, ‘My friend Paul is single...’ “Sometimes I was quite afraid of being like ganged-up on if I didn’t want to do something.

“But then they will turn on you anyway, so whatever you do you just cannot really win.

“So you have just got to detach yourself from them, which is so difficult.”

When social services first said they wanted to meet with the teenager because she was considered at risk, she did not want to know.

She recalled: “They would not talk to you, they would talk at you. They would say, ‘what you are doing is really bad, you need to stop’, but not asking you why. And giving you lots of sheets of paper.

“I would just disengage and not turn up to meetings and stuff.

“It was very much like me against the world – that is what it felt like, anyway.”

But she changed her mind, she recalls, after being told she was on a list of the top most vulnerable youngsters in Brighton.

“That was the turning point,” she said. “I never really thought about it like that. I just thought I was having fun. But it was not really fun.”

Since then, she has been meeting regularly with Ms O’Brien at Wise, which offers help and guidance to young people being sexually exploited, or who are at risk of being exploited.

Their conversations include stressing that being sexually exploited was not her fault, while also emphasising personal responsibility.

“I was quite depressed for a while,” she said. “But I am good now. I think it just made me aware that these people are treating people as an object.”

Complex issue

CHILD sexual exploitation can take many forms including, but not limited to:

• Seemingly ‘consensual’ relationships where sex is exchanged for attention, affection, accommodation or gifts, including drugs and alcohol;
• Organised networks of perpetrators who may use younger men, women, boys or girls to build initial relationships and introduce other young people to the network;
• Peer pressure to have sex or sexual bullying by peers, including cyber bullying.

Signs that children are being exploited can include:

• Going missing for periods of time or regularly coming home late; n Regularly missing school or not taking part in education;
• Coming home with unexplained gifts or new possessions (often new mobile phones or SIM cards;
• Socialising with groups of older people, anti-social groups and other vulnerable young people.