A series of reports on child sexual exploitation scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford and Telford revealed that abused children were repeatedly dismissed for making “poor choices” and having “problematic lifestyles”.
“When you read report after report about the attitudes of agencies to these children, you find they did actually see [the exploitation] as a lifestyle choice, the children were considered to be child prostitutes – that suggests victims were complicit in their abuse, it protects the abusers and it absolves agencies from failing to take action,” she said.
In 2013 there was condemnation of a court’s decision to allow a paedophile to walk free after his 13-year-old victim was described as a
sexual predator, and in another trial victims of abuse in Oxford were
branded “naughty girls” by defence barristers.