‘Difficult girls’ are precisely who the age of consent is supposed to protect

There’s a vision of hell tucked away in the serious case review, commissioned by Maggie Blyth, independent chair of the Oxfordshire safeguarding children board. According to its reckoning some 373 girls were sexually exploited across Oxfordshire in the past 15 years. The review doesn’t quite do justice to the horrors of the ‘sexual torture’ and rape of girls as young as 13 by gangs of men who were almost all Asian and from a Pakistani and Muslim background. Girls who were, to some extent or another, ‘in care’. Never has the phrase so mocked itself. At any rate, not since the last reports on the exact same phenomenon of the sexual abuse of young girls by predominantly Asian men in Oldham and Rochdale. The girls were seen as ‘difficult’, as trouble, as wrong uns. But by the time you’ve been raped by a succession of adult men and ignored by every agency that should have protected you, you would be difficult, wouldn’t you?

As the report says, ‘The overall problem was not grasping the nature of the abuse – the grooming, the pull from home, the erosion of consent, the inability to escape and the sheer horror of what the girls were going through – but of seeing it as something done more voluntarily.