A heartbroken father broke down in tears as he revealed today how his world was ‘ripped apart’ when police officers told him his daughter was being groomed.
Ellie Reynolds, a grooming gang survivor who was first exploited at the age of just 13, told GMB how she became involved with a group of men who repeatedly drugged and gang-raped her and trafficked her around Barrow-in-Furness.
But the CPS never took her case to court, despite one of her abusers – ‘Saj’ Miah -now having been convicted of more than 40 sexual offences
She previously told how she would be abducted off the street by her abusers, forced into the footwells of cars and drugged, before being locked up in strange flats filled with adult men.
There she would often be left tied or even chained up naked before being repeatedly gang-raped.
In 2018, at the age of 17, Ellie reported what was happening to her to the police.
The day after she reported being repeatedly kidnapped and raped, she herself was arrested for blackmail – an accusation that was eventually dropped.
Ellie said she believes she was arrested as an effort to silence her.
Ellie Reynolds, a grooming gang survivor who was first exploited at the age of just 13, told GMB of her ordeal while appearing on the show with her father, Ian Piper
Ellie previously told how she would be abducted off the street by her abusers, forced into the footwells of cars and drugged, before being locked up in strange flats filled with adult men
Speaking this morning, Ellie appeared on the programme with her father, Ian Piper, as she appealed for police officers to reopen her case.
Breaking down in tears, Mr Piper described how he and his wife knew something was going on with Ellie after she kept disappearing for up to five days at a time.
He said: ‘She wouldn’t tell us what was going on. It was the anger that we knew something wasn’t right.
‘We begged everyone for help – schools, everyone, because we knew something wasn’t right.
‘We would report Ellie missing. The police would come round, the first thing they would do would be to look in her bedroom.
‘They knew she wasn’t from a broken home or anything like that. Days later she’d turn up.’
Her father described how police eventually informed the family they had ‘serious concerns’ that Ellie was being groomed – something that ‘ripped our world apart’.
‘You watch it on telly and you think, it’s not going to happen to us. And then your world just falls apart, it really does because it’s your own child.
Ellie says her principal abuser was Shaha Joman Miah, known in the town as ‘Saj’ – he has never been charged with any crime against her
Shaha Amran Miah was convicted alongside his brothers of serious sexual offences concerning children as young as six
Shaha Alman Miah will be sentenced alongside his two brothers in February
‘I still to this day don’t know half of what Ellie went through. I don’t want to know, because it would just kill me as her dad.’
Ellie told how she had no ability to focus on anything but survival while she was being abused.
‘All that was running through my head at that time was survival. You need to get out of here, you need to get back to your family,’ she said.
‘I had three main abusers, but the places you can be trafficked to had multiple, you’ve got to think about the people that live there, the staff members, they’re all friends.’
Ellie said she always refused to tell her parents what she was going through.
She said: ‘I was dropping tiny hints to different people, but never piecing the story together. I came in and was withdrawing off drugs and would just go straight to my room.
‘I had a lot of hurt, questions, anger, and I needed at that time to isolate myself, I needed to just be on my own.’
Describing the decision to go to police when she was 17, Ellie said: ‘Something in my head just clicked, and I thought, I am surely not the only person going through this.
‘I started thinking about my abusers having children themselves and I was worried about other people’s safety.’
Ellie wants a national inquiry into grooming gangs across the UK, not just local inquiries
Last week Yvette Cooper announced five local reviews into badly hit towns, as Labour backtracked after previously insisting that no new investigations were needed
She added she was supportive of a national inquiry, but wants all historic accusations of grooming gangs which did not go to court to be reopened.
‘Local inquiries are great, but what needs to be taken into consideration is that these men don’t just operate in one area, they operate in multiple areas.
‘Everybody deserves for it to be looked at again, it’s massive, I’m not the only person that deserves this.’
Her father added: ‘You put your faith in every possible system to help you. My wife was begging the schools, she even asked for Ellie to be [sectioned] for her own safety because we couldn’t figure out what was going on.’
Although no charges were ever brought in relation to Ellie’s experiences, Shaha Amran Miah, 48, Shaha Alman Miah, 47, and Shaha Joman Miah, 38, were convicted of child sex offences that occurred between 1996 and 2010 in October.
Amran Miah sexually abused three children and faced 16 sexual offences, two charges of intimidation and one of kidnap.
Joman Miah sexually abused three children and faced 40 offences.
The girls abused by Amran Miah and Joman Miah were as young as six or seven when the abuse began, and it lasted several years.
The middle brother, Alman Miah, faced three sexual offence charges against one girl.
Ellie’s case comes after the government announced ‘local’ inquiries in towns badly affected by grooming gangs, and occurred in the same town where fantasist Eleanor Williams caused uproar after making up allegations she was also a victim of an Asian gang.
Williams, 24, sparked vandalism, protests and a visit to Barrow-in-Furness by far-right extremist Tommy Robinson after she posted images of herself seriously injured and claimed she had been gang-raped.
It later emerged she had made up the claims and inflicted the injuries upon herself. She was tried and served time behind bars before being released last year.
Last week Yvette Cooper announced five local reviews into badly hit towns, as Labour backtracked after previously insisting that no new investigations were needed.
The Home Secretary also said there would be a ‘rapid audit’ of the scale of child sexual exploitation across the country that would look into the ethnicity of perpetrators as part of a £10million action plan.
But Ms Cooper refused to answer pleas for the new probes to have the power to summon witnesses, a key requirement of victims as well as politicians on all sides.
And she continued to defy calls for a national public inquiry into the scandal, despite admitting there were currently 127 ‘major police investigations’ under way into child sexual exploitation across 29 different forces.
