L in the A to Z blogger challenge

Lost girls

In the UK every year thousands of lost girls, are forced into prostitution.

Their lives completely destroyed before they have even had a real chance to begin.

Often these girls go unnoticed as the government focuses more of its attention on those that are trafficked in from other countries for the same purpose.

All should be deserving of help, those that are trafficked in and those who are forced into prostitution who are from this country.

Yet the lost girls of home are often forgotten.

These girls are locked up in tiny over crowded houses, where they are beaten, raped and forced to take drugs such as heroin in order to keep them manageable, on a daily basis.

Most of these girls know that they may never leave those houses alive. Those that are lucky enough to get out, are scarred and damaged both emotionally and physically for the rest of their lives.

Star a girl who once lived in one of these houses said...

“We were crammed into rooms often with no food for days on end, water was the only thing that was brought to us, and then barely enough to go around. Every so often men would come and pick one of us, and we would be dragged from the room raped and beaten.

The man who ran the house liked to play games, games that often ended with one or more of us being killed

The worst of these for me was always musical chairs, because as I got older I was picked less by the men who came into the room, and the less desirable I became the more I knew that my life was in danger.

If you weren’t earning you were no longer needed.

With musical chairs, a group of girls would be hung from the ceiling, chairs placed beneath us, when the music started men would lift us, as others moved the chairs around and around beneath us, laughing and jeering.

When the music stopped one of us would be left without a chair, and either slowly be allowed to slip through the man that held us arms, until the noose was tugging at our throats, or worse, allowed to drop quickly, our services having been deemed no longer needed.

The rest of us were left to watch, while another girl’s life was taken from her.

As I got older, into my 20’s I was subjected to this game more and more, each time certain that I would just be allowed to drop.

It was rare that people were simply allowed to leave the house.

But I got lucky, I was allowed to leave even given a small bed set to live in, my drug habit, which those men had created fed, on the condition that I helped get other girls to take the place of those that were growing too old.

Some of the girls were as young as 10.

I hate myself for helping to drag other girls into that horror; I was a coward, afraid for my own life, and sparing myself by allowing others to suffer.

The police had no interest in any of us, on the few occasions I tried to go to the police unable to cope anymore with what I was being made to do.

They laughed at me, refused to believe me and saw me simply as a junkie, one day when I attempted to go to the police again there was a young girl there, she wasn’t a British girl, but her English was ok.

We talked for a while and she told me that she had been trafficked into the UK, and that she had got away and had come to tell the police about her friends who were still trapped in that house.

I told her they never did anything, that I had come for a similar thing and every time had been ignored and turned away.

She must have thought me a liar, because when her turn came to talk to the police they were full of concern, and she was led through to a back room.

For me it was the same as it always was, I was told to stop wasting police time and sent on my way.

This is the reality still for thousands of British girls, yet all the news ever covers is those girls who are trafficked into the uk, don’t those of us born here matter at all.”

Star has escaped the horrors of that life, but lives a life of constant fear, and finds it hard to leave her home.

There are thousands of girls forced into prostitution in the UK every year. Red nose day aka comic relief, with the help of Eastender’s tried to highlight one side of this terrible reality, but there is still a much deeper and darker side, hidden away, in the streets of Britain.

So today I dedicate my post to the lost girls.

The one’s that are too often forgotten, and whose lives are lost at the hands of these evil men, all girls should matter not just those that are trafficked into the UK.

This post is dedicated to Fee, Sarah, Dotty, Lucy, Hannah, Becky, and all the other lost girls who lost their lives to young to brutal men.

If you see child abuse, report it, often a child who is being abused is a child who will later end up being forced into the sex trade.

If a child in your family is unhappy, becoming rebellious, or quite, talk to them, try your best to help and understand them, as they too could end up a lost girl.

Being a teen is not always easy, and although teenager’s problems may seem childish and unimportant in the scale of things, it can be huge for that child.

Weather it is your child, or a friends child, or even a neighbours child, someone taking the time to talk to them, and try their best to help them can save them from running away, or being taken in by a man who’s intentions are less than desirable.

Often if signs of unhappiness are spotted early enough, lives can be saved

Love and hugs joss. xxx