Fiona Goddard has blasted politicians for years of silence on grooming gangs (Image: Andy Stenning)
A woman repeatedly raped as a child by a depraved Asian has demanded Prime Minister launch a national inquiry into the scandal – claiming past investigations have not even “touched the surface” to expose the full extent of the abuse.
Fiona Goddard blasted politicians for their years of silence on child sexual exploitation until controversial American tech billionaire penned an inflammatory series of social media posts on the subject.
She told the Express: “It shouldn’t have taken the world’s richest man – who isn’t even from this country – to get us talking about the mass rape of young girls. It should already have been front and central on our MPs lips.”
Fiona was a promising school pupil with aspirations of becoming a lawyer when her life tumbled out of control after she was taken into local authority care and placed in a Bradford children’s home.
There, with lax safeguarding measures in place, she fell prey to a depraved gang on nine Asian men who subjected her and a fellow 14-year-old girl to a sickening catalogue of abuse in which she would be plied with drink and drugs before being trafficked around northern towns and cities to be “effectively used as a prostitute”.
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Fiona Goddard blasted politicians for their years of silence on child sexual exploitation (Image: Andy Stenning)
Her abusers were finally jailed for a total of 132 years in 2019 but some are now just four years from being back on the streets.
Their impending release terrifies Fiona, now 31, and a mother of five children, who fears that without a wide-reaching national review to fully expose the issue, children like her daughters will always remain in danger.
She believes many of the people responsible for covering-up the scandal for fear of being branded racist are either still in post or been promoted and is outraged that people have been allowed to retire on full public sector pensions whilst she has not received a penny in compensation.
She said: “I just don’t see why there shouldn’t be accountability, an explanation for how things went so drastically wrong, where little girls were told that what was going on with them was normal and they just had to put up with it.
“You know that a 13-year-old girl is not responsible for her own sexual abuse. People had opportunities to speak out and didn’t and we still need to know why they were silent.
“I know is trying to blame for being responsible but if Mr Starmer wasn’t responsible then who was and why wouldn’t he like to find out who is?
“I watched him say this week ‘if we lose anchors to the truth then things start falling apart’ in relation to what was tweeting, but surely if that’s his stance then why isn’t he wanting to find out the real truth?
It’s condescending and I don’t feel like a single one of them has our best interests at heart.”
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Fiona was a promising school pupil with aspirations of becoming a lawyer when her life tumbled (Image: Andy Stenning)
The survivor, who has bravely waived her right to anonymity as a sex crime victim, says she has been left angered by politicians such as Tory Robert Jenrick who she says are now attempting to make political capital out of victims’ plight having done nothing whilst in power – but says the Prime Minister has been wrong to dismiss critical comments as “lies.”
She added: “Members of the government branding things as lies is so detrimental to our fight because it downplays the issue. I’m not saying is right – but at least he has got everyone talking about it. I just wish someone had given him more accurate information in the first place.
“But no MP can take the moral high ground by using child sexual abuse for their own political gain.”
Fiona believes a national inquiry would finally provide accountability for why social services and police forces the length of the country all chose to respond in a similar manner by labelling the victims as being the cause of the problem rather than the paedophile gangs.
She said: “If every police force in the country had a problem with this and every single one responded exactly the same then someone is responsible for getting that information to them?
“There is no way they all reacted in the same way individually. It’s a nationwide problem so who was the person who decided the policy, where are they now and what responsibilities does that person now have?”
Fiona’s calls have been backed by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch who has revealed how she recently had “quite shocking” meetings with survivors of abuse in Rotherham and Oldham.
She said it was “extraordinary” hearing victims describe going “to the authorities multiple times… and in one particular case the police actually handed her, a 12-year-old, into the hands of her abusers”.
Her intervention came after Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, said a full inquiry was needed as “nothing less… will restore faith in our safeguarding systems”.
Ms Badenoch said she was “going to do everything, and the Conservative Party is going to do everything, to make sure that survivors get justice”.
She said she believed a new national inquiry should look at what she called a “systematic pattern of behaviour” among certain communities in the country but added that a “culture of silence” in the state needed to be addressed.
Fiona Goddard’s personal message to Keir Starmer
If the PM was sat in front of me know I’d tell him my story, I’d tell him everything that I had to go through because for me them getting sent to prison was not enough.
They were not the only people who abused me – the people in positions of power, the professional services who were thereto protect vulnerable people abused me.
They told me this was my fault, they made me feel like I was the problem, then they made me feel that bad that I tried to kill myself, I self-mutilated my body to try and get away from what was going on and rather than getting me help they have blood ontheir hands.
And why shouldn’t I get justice for that? Can you imagine if this happened in a private setting, if my parents were letting gangs of men rape and abuse me whilst telling me it was all my fault? They would be serving prison sentences. So why is this any different?