From GB News
Police Scotland failed to investigate alleged grooming gangs in Glasgow that targeted vulnerable girls in care, GB News can reveal.
One of the gang’s alleged victims has spoken to the People’s Channel about her ordeal. She is speaking out for the first time amid a nationwide debate about grooming gangs in Scotland.
Taylor, not her real name, described years of abuse at the hands of Pakistani men.
“We would go there and we would be intoxicated. And sometimes you wouldn’t even really be aware of what was going on around about you, and yes, some instances of [being] sexually abused.” The Glasgow woman, who alleges years of abuse by a gang of up to 10 men while she was living in a care home, said that the men got her and a friend hooked on drink and drugs.
Taylor has acquired hundreds of pages of information about her time in the care home after submitting a subject access request.
She described her horror at realising that the care unit had so much information about her vulnerabilities but appeared to fail to refer it to the police. “It was quite sickening [reading the files] because I always believed I was in a place like I was cared about, and I actually found out that they actually had an inkling that stuff like that was going on.”
Taylor’s records also reveal a missed opportunity for the police to intervene and ask questions.
The files refer to an incident when her name appeared in a group-based child sexual exploitation investigation and that the police visited the care home and interacted with the staff on duty.
But Taylor says officers never spoke to her and that file suggests that the care home was dismissive towards the police approach.
One section in the files refers to the police attending with a “tentative inquiry” regarding the “possibility of possible sexual exploitation by a group of,” and then the next set of words have been blacked out by the authority.
Taylor believes that these words are “Pakistani men.” In her audit of grooming gangs in England and Wales, Baroness Casey found that the word ‘Pakistani’ had been “tippexed out” in an archive about child victims. Taylor believes that the same thing has happened in her file.
Scottish politicians continue to row about grooming gangs in Scotland after a controversial Holyrood vote in September. The Conservatives put forward an amendment that would have required research into group-based child sexual exploitation, but it was voted down by SNP and Green MSPs
In 2016, Police Scotland investigated a grooming gang in Glasgow that allegedly targeted 44 victims.
But Ms Constance argued there were “no current police investigations” into grooming gangs similar to the pattern exposed in many towns in England, where predominantly Pakistani men have targeted vulnerable white children.
Taylor’s testimony challenges the suggestion that the same pattern does not exist in Scotland. The survivor said it made her feel sick when she heard what felt like a dismissal of this form of abuse. “And just like the other girls in Scotland, I’ve been there and lived it. . . ”
The ongoing row comes as information released via FOI has shown that Police Scotland has no markers for group or gang-based abuse, leading to concerns that Scottish authorities cannot properly identify grooming gang patterns.
Bradford grooming gang survivor Fiona Goddard also told GB News about her abuse at the hands of grooming gangs in Scotland, describing how she was trafficked to Glasgow from Yorkshire.
She said: “They would then use girls from Bradford and taxi drivers to transport drugs up to them. And then once we got there, things would obviously happen up there as well. And by men up there, I also know that they were doing it to children around the cities as well up there. I remember going up in a taxi to like a dingy terraced house, and it was like a shared occupancy house, and there were just loads of men in there.” She recalled how she saw men “bagging up drugs” while “girls sat around on the surface”.
