Gang-rape victim, 15, says her life has been destroyed

A SCHOOLGIRL who was brutally raped and beaten by a gang of nine boys spoke yesterday of how the ordeal has destroyed her life.

The 15-year-old said the ordeal in a tower block in Hackney, east London, has left her without her former friends, unable to leave her house for fear of crowds and “being punished for something I haven’t done”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I can’t go out, I can’t really do nothing. Everything I used to do, like going shopping and ice-skating, I can’t do that now because of all the crowds. I’ve got a fear of crowds and gangs of people. Everything has changed. I had to leave all my friends behind and school.”

Last week the nine gang members responsible were jailed for her rape, kidnap and false imprisonment.

Judge Wendy Joseph QC lifted an anonymity order and named the seven members of the gang led by O’Neil “Hitman” Denton. All were aged between 14 and 17.

The girl, who was 14 at the time, was dragged between three tower blocks in east London, raped, and beaten up by the Kingshold Boys gang.

The judge at east London’s Snaresbrook Crown Court described their acts as “designed to degrade and humiliate and to send out a message to her and to others that no one messed with these boys”.

The victim said: “They pushed me off into the corner and they were saying again I were to do what they wanted and when I said ‘No, I’m not doing it’, they were threatening me with the knife and the other boy was kicking me.

“They were saying if you just do what we want, then you can go. You think about it — you think, well, they’ve got a knife, there’s four of them, you can’t really do nothing, and if that’s the only way then you have to do it, and so I done what they wanted.

“I was begging them and saying ‘Please, I’m still a virgin’, and they said ‘You ain’t going to be one any more, are you?”’

She described how on several occasions her attack was disturbed by members of the public.

When a female passer-by approached “they put a coat around my legs and were like ‘If you ask for help or anything, we know people who know where you live and we’ll come back for you’ and so I kept quiet, but I was still crying and she could see me and didn’t help me.”

At one point she spotted an acquaintance.

She said: “After everyone had got what they wanted, they moved away and I saw this boy sitting on the stairs that I knew, so I went up to him and I was like ‘Can you help me please?’.

“He just looked at me and laughed in my face and he asked me what I was doing here, and I said ‘I didn’t want to be here, they brought me here’. And he said ‘Ugh, you’re a slag, you deserve to be here’.” She pleaded with him for help but she said his response was: “No, I can’t, I’m with my boys now.”