Paige's Story

Names and other details have been changed to protect victims’ identities.

‘Paige’

My mum and dad drank a lot and take drugs. My dad used to hit mum and me sometimes. We kept kicking him out and moving house but he always managed to find us and start causing problems again.

When I was 12 a boy at my school tried to get me to have sex with him and hurt me. I told people about it but then I got scared and didn’t want anything to happen about it. So he got away with it.

At 13 I got a new boyfriend who was a lot older than me. We had sex. He said he loved me.

I started cutting myself, not eating, and I took lots of my mum’s medicines for her depression. Eventually social services took me to a hospital and I stayed there for few months. I used to run away from there a lot, meeting up with mates and that. I had sex with some of them sometimes, or friends of theirs. A lot of them were older than me.

I smoked a lot of weed and drank as much as I could to get off my head.

“Sometimes when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was or who I was with, even though we had just had sex.”

One man threatened to hurt my friends if I didn’t have sex with him. He told the police he thought I was 16, but he knew I wasn’t.

Paige was referred to a specialist child sexual exploitation team. They earned her trust and helped her move to a new area, away from the threats and bad influences. She told them what happened to her and they were able to identify and prosecute the people who committed offences against her and her friends.

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