I was raped for five years.The police did nothing...until they arrested ME

Grooming gang victim Jade Nurse has bravely waived her anonymity to reveal harrowing details of the abuse she suffered at the hands of a Pakistani-heritage gang, and why the authorities threw her to the wolves when she tried to expose it

- ZAK GARNER-PURKIS

SHE WAS raped by hundreds of men over a five-year period from the age of 14. But when Jade Nurse's case finally came to court, it wasn't members of the Pakistani-heritage gang who groomed her or one of her rapists on trial - it was her. The person in the dock charged with inciting a child into sexual activity was 17-year-old Jade.

Police who charged her knew she'd been attacked repeatedly. Over the years, Jade had given DNA, taken officers to suspects' homes and taken screen-shots of persistent Facebook messages trying to lure her out with alcohol and drugs.

But her complaints always ended with the same three words from police: "No further action".

So it was a cruel irony that when a girl from Jade's care home was sexually assaulted at a party she'd taken her to, officers suddenly displayed boundless determination to put the grooming gang victim herself behind bars.

"I woke up to about 11 police officers above me in one of my perpetrators' houses," Jade tells me. "They basically said that I took the girl out of the care home so she could get raped. I wasn't classed as a vulnerable child. They didn't ever say that I was at risk of sexual exploitation, even though they knew I was." Today Jade, now 32, has hard evidence stating what the authorities knew about her - having gained access to her social services files. It makes for disturbing reading.

Over hundreds of pages, social workers and police respond to a vulnerable child reporting grooming and rapes by suggesting she was putting herself “at risk”.

"I was 15 when social services sat me in McDonalds and asked me if I was a prostitute," Jade recalls. "I felt sick, but then at the same time I started believing it because I was receiving gifts for sex.