The ‘untold’ story of child sexual exploitation

“The guy that we were doing it with kept saying, ‘there’s nothing to worry about, it’s all good, everyone does it.’ It gets to the point where it is normal, more normal than going to school.”

But ‘John’, whose identity we have concealed, was just 13 and the ‘it’ was having sex with a man in his late twenties.

John is part of what child protection experts are calling the ‘untold story’ of child sexual exploitation.

In the past year, the problem of the grooming of children for sex has risen to the surface. Several high profile cases ended in prosecutions. But the focus was always on girls. Today as the children’s charity Barnardo’s warned of the lifelong costs of exploitation, John explained to Channel 4 News how his life was almost destroyed.

John – who’s now 20 – says he had a happy, normal childhood but had begun to struggle when he hit his teens, suffering from bouts of depression

Encouraged by a friend he began truanting from school. The two boys were invited to spend time with a much older man, who offered them drink and cigarettes. Eventually John began having sex with him. As a teenage boy who’d just come out as gay, he admitted to finding it exciting, grown up.

But soon everything changed. Within weeks John was being forced to have sex with other men – lots of them. They were much older – some in their forties and fifties – and some were violent.

John quickly became one of many young boys being systematically sold for sex to scores of men by highly organised gangs.

“We were all given pay as you go phones with about twenty to thirty different numbers in and when one of those numbers called, we knew where to go, who we were seeing and how much money they were handing over to our boss.”

When he tried to leave , he was brutally sexually assaulted and threatened by the ringleader.

John is lucky though. He eventually was found help at a specialist service run by the children’s charity Barnardo’s.

Today the charity said such help is crucial to all child victims of sexual exploitation – boys and girls.

In a report put together by Pro Bono Economics, the charity claimed the average cost to the state of a child who doesn’t receive help is £63, 508 compared to £28, 480 for a young person who has been given help.

Barnardo’s chief executive Anne Marie Carrie said; “The moral argument for helping girls and boys who are exploited for sex is plain – now we have tangible, economic evidence of the necessity for specialist help too.”