The Lost Girls

"I've heard every excuse in the book, always from those who should know better, all of them deciding that groomed, abused, raped girls were choosing that way of life, choosing to be 'trouble.' It was so much easier to turn a blind eye, to blame the victims, that it was to tackle the underbelly of what was really happening in Rotherham."

The Rotherham Child grooming gang scandal both rocked and disgusted the nation. Girls as young as 10 had been targeted, given drink and drugs and then passed round groups of men like party favours. Tens of thousands of young children, mostly girls, had their lives ruined - yet it took years for the full scale of the problem to come to light.

Sarah Hughes was one of those who was able to give those victims a voice. She spent eight years between 2004 and 2012 as a project worker for a project helping young people at high risk of child sexual exploitation, and she continues to fight for these marginalised, voiceless girls and young women. She was in the trenches, on the frontline of UK's most vile criminal activity. And now in her own words she describes the horrors she saw, the work she did with MI5, Scotland Yard and the National Crime Agency and the shocking cases that stay with her to this day.

"Predators were acting with impunity. And the victims themselves did not fit neatly into any box that would bring sympathy or understanding. No one wanted to hear these girls, no one wanted to help them outside of those of us working on the ground, seeing it day after day and feeling as if we were fighting something we weren't even allowed to name."

In this moving memoir, Sarah recalls those difficult cases: the girl she drove around for up to six hours every day just to keep her away from the men who raped her; the 15-year-old who no longer recognised herself in the mirror; a young girl groomed by an older woman; a girl left with a footprint on her face after being stamped on by her rapist, a victim sent glass in the post with instructions of how to hurt herself...

It...