When 13-year-old Christine first saw the “boy” who had moved from the group chat she was in into her private messages, she was shocked. “Oh my gosh,” she remembers thinking. “That’s a grown man.” When she told him how old she was, he – 23 – said it didn’t change anything. He still wanted to be with her. Lonely at school, after a move precipitated by the end of her mother’s relationship with Christine’s father, she took the apparent affection offered.

The rest of the women contributing to Britain’s Forgotten Girls – a harrowing hour-long documentary about the sexual and criminal exploitation of young girls over the last 20 years by drug gangs acting with virtual impunity – have similar stories to tell. The approach by the gangs happens at 12, 13, 14. Grooming follows. Then the game is switched. Rape or sexual assault occurs (“I was so scared, so scared,” says Annie, who was 14 when “all aspect of choice just got taken away from me” by the three older boys who had befriended her) and, through threatened and actual violence – perhaps supplemented by blackmail or by the lack of anywhere else for the child to turn – continues for years thereafter. The details are few and horrifying. A number of them mention having to go to school as if nothing had happened the night after an inaugural gang-rape. Your mind can hardly take it in.

“When I would misbehave,” says Christine, which seems to mean something akin to objecting to her abuse, “he would give people no rules.” Which meant they could do whatever they wanted to her. Sometimes he stayed and watched. “It just depended,” she whispers.

They all talk of reporting some of their assaults to the police and being met with indifference or silence. Violet was groomed by members of the local drugs gang when she was 13. She came home one morning “in a dissociative state, really” after being raped and her parents reported it immediately to the police. Swabs found multiple people’s DNA inside her. “Hideous thing to know, to be honest.” Social workers classified hers as a case of parental neglect (“So far from the truth,” she says) and she was put into care. When she called the police for an update they told her, she says, “they had bigger fish to fry”. An anonymous female police officer from another force talks of a culture in which the girls were endlessly blamed for “putting themselves in risky situations” and otherwise causing their own downfall.

The BBC says it has been told that parental neglect is a common misclassification by social workers of sexual assault involving young girls. It’s not clear whether this is because it makes for a smaller workload or because they are untrained in seeing what’s really going on – but perhaps, given that either seems like a huge dereliction of duty, it doesn’t matter.

Child advocates and experts working in the field fill in the outlines of the broader institutional failures. They speak of conspiracies of silence, of barriers thrown up when they try to broach the specific subject of girls’ sexual as well as criminal exploitation by gangs, of a pervasive unwillingness among the police, local councils, social services and others in supposed authority to entertain the idea, never mind the scale, of the problem.

What we might call the first officially missed opportunity to help what was estimated to be at least 16,500 children at risk was the reaction to the national inquiry led by the then deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz. Those 2013 findings were largely lost in a welter of recriminations and accusations that the report (which found drug gang abuse cut across all demographics) underplayed the role of ethnicity. It was as if the preceding scandal about grooming gangs had used up the media and public’s allowance of sympathy and at the same time set up a popular narrative from which they didn’t want to deviate.

In 2015 there was an outcry over the recruitment of children to ferry drugs across county lines. But it focused mainly on boys, who did most of the transporting, and not on the girls who were being used partly for that and partly for yet more awful things.

And in 2025 there was the national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse. “The issue of girls exploited by drug gangs did not form a significant part of the report,” says Carlene Firmin from the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding, with quiet frustration.

So we have another film documenting another set of wilful, persistent and profound failures of the system to carry out the protective duties it supposedly exists precisely to perform, another film testifying to the perception of girls and women as second-class citizens, as sirens who bring it on themselves, and another frightening look into the moral, social and cultural abyss that shows no signs of closing.

• Britain’s Forgotten Girls aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now