Telford child sex abuse: 'They threatened my family - there was nowhere to hide'

‘Holly’, who is using a false name to protect her identity, has told how men threatened to murder and rape her mother and sisters if she ever told anyone about the abuse.

She said it started with being befriended by boys her own age, but she said they quickly sold her number on to older men.

“The older men would bombard us with phone calls – it would be relentless,” she said.

“After receiving hundreds of calls, curiosity got the better of me. They would buy us food, top up our mobile phones, stuff like that, so it built up a bit of trust. Then he started violently raping me. From that man it moved on to many men.

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“There was about seven abusers in the end. Telford is a very small area so there’s nowhere to hide if someone knows your daily routine. They’re going to find you.

“It quickly moved on to being sold to men every day. Sometimes two or three times a night.”

Holly said she was taken to what she described as a ‘rape house’, a place used solely for the purpose of abusing young girls.

She said: “It wasn’t just Pakistani men or Bengali men, it was men of every race and religion wanting to pay for girls.

'There was no escape at all'

"I was numb. I had no feelings about anything. I kept going back because they were threatening me with burning my house down, which was a real threat because it had happened.

“They told me they would rape my mum and rape my sisters. They knew all about my family. There was no escape at all.”

One man wrote a letter to her mother saying Holly was a prostitute who owed him money.

“She was angry,” Holly said in a television interview. “She was angry at everybody. You don’t expect something like that to come through your letterbox.

“I wanted to die because that was the way out.”

Holly said that if anybody in a position of authority had questioned the situation over the years she was a victim, it could have given her the courage to speak out.

“I was getting the morning after pill a couple of times a week for three years – I couldn’t even estimate how many times I took it,” she said.

“Nobody there raised the alarm. They didn’t ask any questions. I had two abortions and no questions were asked.

“I was in cars that were stopped and searched by police. I was with older men. I was never asked why I was there or who I was.

“If someone had shown interest, it may have made me speak out.”