The victim testimony of 'Felicity' from the Rape Gang Inquiry is the most horrifying thing I’ve read in my life.
She was 8 years old when it started…
> First assaulted just after her 8th birthday, lured into a back room on the pretext of helping put up a shelf
>Told she'd be "taken away" if she ever spoke, which was the start of years of rape and torture
>Trafficked on to groups of older Muslim men, collected by taxi after school and on church nights
>Forced to take part in the abuse of other children, used deliberately to "normalise" it and buy her silence
>Groomed with a fake love story: told a man "adored" her, that marrying him was "God's plan," and that she had to convert to Islam
>Handed a book on Islam by one of her abusers and told to learn it
Then came the captivity:
>Held in houses with an upstairs "punishment room" fitted with dog-crate enclosures
>Watched a girl accused of going to police have a hot iron pressed into her back. That girl later died. Felicity saw her strangled
>She and another girl, "Char," were both impregnated. Every pregnancy ended in miscarriage
>Later told the men had killed Char and she would "never come back"
>Saw a girl shot in front of her by a man she believed was a serving police officer
>Threatened that she'd be "chopped up and fed to pigs" if she ever told
It only escalated:
>Loaded into a van in a crate with other girls, some trafficked in from abroad to be "sold," who spoke no English
>Made to watch a girl be stabbed, beaten and set on fire for talking back to a buyer
>Hung upside down by her feet, whipped and urinated on by a man who openly idolised Fred West
>”Purchased" for a night and raped by numerous men while her main abuser sat and watched
>Forced to witness a baby tortured with cigarettes and then killed, while its mother was made to watch
And through all of it, no one believed her...
>For years she was disbelieved and dismissed, she says, treated as though she was inventing what was being done to her
>She had carried it almost entirely alone. Her statement to the Inquiry was the first time in her life she had ever been able to give a full account of what happened to her. No one before had ever properly listened
>When she finally found the courage to report one of her abusers as an adult, at 27, she was not believed
Wow.