This month I have worked with artist Judy Kuo to illustrate the issues with current narratives on grooming and child sexual exploitation.

In collaboration with After Exploitation, a UK-based charity focused on exposing systemic failings in the response to modern slavery and supporting survivors of trafficking and exploitation. I explain more about my creative work, combating stereotypes and bringing the focus back onto survivors.

A passionate advocate, expert in lived experience of sexual exploitation and mental health nurse, I have worked in mental health services and uses my skills to support others. In my role I have encountered survivors of modern slavery, and recognise the challenges that stop others from coming forward. Personally and professionally, I am acutely aware of the harm that is caused when survivors and perpetrators are stereotyped.

During the time of abuse, which spanned over 5 years, I met young children of colour, ages around 6 years old to 10 years and older who I knew were victims, and they have never got that support. In fact those children were boys, and they were Pakistani. They were often forced to watch, sometimes to be involved in some way, often used as tools to trick me or other victims, or asked to stand guard whilst we were abused. Who is protecting those children? Has this EVER been raised by social services? I wouldn’t know, I have never seen it in the news, I have never heard it spoken about.

When we move on to the female victims of sexual exploitation. During my brief 4 to 5 month encounter with the Telford Grooming Gang I only happened to encounter white girls being groomed and abused. But when my abuse continued on to a gang in Birmingham, I encountered an equal amount of women and girls of colour to white women and girls.

I met girls as young as 16 years old, and women as old as in their 50s, still being abused, experiencing the long term mental health effects of a life time of sexual exploitation, trauma, discrimination and stigma. Many of these women did not recognise themselves as victims, this was their life, this had been normalised and accepted by everyone around them and no one has ever helped them. Especially the services in authority who were supposedly built to protect them. The attitude of the services towards these women is worse than the attitude of the abusers themselves.

The rapists become the lesser of two evils…

The rapists become the lesser of two evils, the worst evil being the authoritative services and our own society. It is OUR beliefs about children, women, and people of colour that plays the major factor in this type of sexual exploitation. And we are still doing it now, by stereotyping victims we are still choosing which human beings deserve to be helped, or deserve our sympathy and acknowledgement. And in doing so we are also indirectly choosing who deserves to be abused.

We have GOT to accept this, address it, and change.

Emphasis on one ‘type’ of victim stops survivors coming forward.

Portrayals of children as the only victims of sexual exploitation has to change too… those exploited as adults end up feeling too embarrassed, too ashamed to come forward. Not just the authorities but the general public, our peers, our employers, our colleagues, even our parents are the ones reinforcing this belief.

The stigma of mental health, the stigma of ‘attention seeking’, the stigma of being ‘tricked’ or being ‘drunk’, ‘missing the signals’, ‘leading them on’… stops adult victims coming forward.

I have met survivors who have never disclosed sexual exploitation purely because they were adults when it happened and they have decided that they want to take ‘responsibility’ and they don’t want to ‘overshadow’ the exploitation of children, or ‘attention seek’ when this is happening to children. I can feel a pain deep inside my heart for these adults that has been made to feel so unworthy by our own society.

In my view, comments by high profile commentators, focusing on the profile of survivors and perpetrators, overshadow the bigger problems of sexual exploitation in this country.

Attitudes towards women and girls needs to change nationally, not just amongst one community. Our own attitude towards OURSELVES as women and girls also needs to change.

If authorities only look for abuse against ‘young white girls’ they are blind to it happening to people of colour or people of all ages and genders.”

In amongst the discussions of what a perpetrator of child sexual exploitation (CSE) ‘looks like’, important conversations about survivor support have been drowned out.

In my case, accessing support was never easy, even after I disclosed my experiences to the police. Some professionals doubted my experiences, and getting specialist mental health support was impossible.

There was a time in Telford, I reported a burglary in action, I was accused of letting them in myself