healthmedicinet

The government is facing intense pressure to prevent more young girls from being lured into criminal gangs, as a shocking report exposes how they are subjected to brutal sexual exploitation and used to hide weapons and carry drugs for male gang members.

The study uncovers an appalling “parallel world” of sex abuse and crime in which male gang members entrap girls and use them for sexual rituals and gratification, as well as to carry drugs because they know they are less likely to be searched by police.

The report, Girls and Gangs, by the Centre for Social Justice – a charity formed by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, and the urban youth charity XLP – calls for urgent action and criticises the Home Office for failing to do enough to combat gang culture in inner cities since the 2011 riots .

It also says that too often headteachers “turn a blind eye” to gang activity, including the sexual exploitation of girls, to preserve schools’ reputations. Marshalling evidence from former gang members, charities and police, among others, it cites harrowing examples of girls being repeatedly raped and forced to have sex with boys as young as 10.

The authorities often refer to girls in gangs as “the invisible ones”, as they are harder to track down. A theme of the report is that female gang members slip through the net because the police concentrate on males when stopping and searching suspects.

The CSJ submitted freedom of information requests to police forces in several gang-affected regions identified by the government in its Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme set up after the riots. Of all those stopped and searched by the Greater Manchester, West Midlands and West Yorkshire forces, 5% were female and in Merseyside the figure was 3%. The CSJ discovered that between March 2013 and February 2014 just 6% of those stopped and searched by the Metropolitan police were female.

Jennifer Blake, chief executive of Safe ‘n’ Sound, a charity for young people based in Peckham, south London, said: “I’ve always said that they [the police] need to be searching girls, that girls need to be stopped and searched. I’m very for that because they’re the ones that are carrying. When you see a young girl pushing her buggy down the street, you just see a young girl pushing her buggy down the street. But take that baby out of the buggy or go through the buggy and you’ll see what they’re carrying.”

Patrick Regan, chief executive of the London-based XLP, which aims to prevent young people from joining gangs and to extricate those on the inside, said: “At XLP we are seeing more and more girls dragged into this world of exploitation, criminal activity and hopelessness, and we cannot delay acting any longer.”

Regan told the CSJ about a girl called Stacey: “Stacey wasn’t involved in a gang but a friend of hers, Angie, started hanging out with one. Stacey told Angie she didn’t think one of the guys in the gang was a very nice person and Angie reported that back to the guy in question.

“He rounded up three mates and together they waited for Stacey after school, grabbed her just a few feet from her own front door and threatened her with a knife. They took her to a nearby block of flats and then raped her. Her ordeal didn’t stop there. They rang more friends who came and joined the attack – nine of them in total, one as young as 12, all assaulting one girl for the crime of one offensive remark.”

Many boys in gangs have girlfriends and a series of “links” (girls who will have sex with them without commitment). Former gang member Amy said: “When you are as desperate as most of us are in that situation, you do anything to get what feels like love … The boys would treat us as their bitches, phone whoever they felt like fucking, order them to come over, and most girls would drop everything and do whatever was wanted.”

Schools were too often reluctant to admit that their own pupils were involved with gangs. Rob Owen, chief executive of the St Giles Trust, told the CSJ: “The reason is very simple: some heads don’t want their schools to be associated with the gang situation publicly. It’s not naivety, they know there’s a problem, but they don’t want to admit it.”

Recent research has shown that 2,409 children are known to have been victims of child sexual exploitation by gangs, with an estimated further 16,500 at risk of becoming victims. But Regan says such figures are the tip of the iceberg.

The report suggests that all hospitals with major trauma units in one of the 33 gang-affected areas identified by the Home Office’s programme should train staff to be able to spot signs of gang association and embed a voluntary organisation’s youth workers in their hospital.

The report also recommends that police and crime commissioners work with the voluntary sector to ensure that the girlfriends of jailed gang members get an offer of support to leave gang life.