Two girls who were passed between men in a grooming gang for sex were treated as “authoresses of their own misfortune” by police and social services, a judge said, as he jailed three of those involved.
Ibrar Hussain, 47, Imtiaz Ahmed, 62, and Fayaz Ahmed, 45, were sent to prison for six and a half years, nine years, and seven and a half years respectively at Bradford Crown Court on Friday, by a judge who described how they raped one of the girls in Keighley, West Yorkshire, in the 1990s, when she was 13 or 14.
Only Hussain left the dock to start his sentence, as the Ahmed brothers both absconded during their trial and are believed to be abroad, the court heard.
The three are the latest of eight defendants who have now been jailed in relation to the abuse of the two girls, it can now be reported.
In a statement read to the court, one of the girls, who is now in her 40s, said: “I feel that if I had been listened to sooner, rather than later, my life could have been different.”
She said she “became an object – used and abused from the age of 13”.
She added: “Nothing in the world can ever fix the damage they caused me. Because of them I have lost my identity.”
Almost thirty years after the abuse, the girl said she still suffers flashbacks “in my waking life and in my nightmares”.
She said the trauma left her unable to trust people, “including the services there to protect me, but didn’t”.
The woman said: “Still, to this day, I carry shame.”
Judge Ahmed Nadim said the girl’s mother went to Keighley police station on a number of occasions to report her missing, but officers “did not do anything about it”.
Judge Nadim said: “To differing degrees, the social services and police response to the situation (the girls) found themselves in was that they were the authoresses of their own misfortune”.
He described how the girls were plied with drugs and alcohol as they were passed between numerous men, “virtually all of whom were of Asian heritage”, in the town in the 1990s, when they were in their early teens.