“My daughter was raped and sold to countless men.” These words were words from a heartbroken mother, starting with reminding me of organized rape and pimping gangs (now commonly known as the “beauty gang”) targeting young girls in northern England.

It was the late 1990s and I knew I was a campaigner against child sexual exploitation and some of these girls’ mothers had contacted me. They are eager to ask for help.

I’m not the first person they’ve approached. They have tried the authorities – police and child protection services – but have not helped their judgment on parenting and daughters. One officer described the victim as “troubled slag.” Her abuser was later convicted of horrible child rape.

Even if I saw it, I was amazed at the power of these mothers and the pain at close range. I couldn’t help getting excited when someone told me how her 13-year-old daughter came home to cry, her legs were covered in legs, tall marijuana and alcohol. She was raped.

Social workers tell families that their daughters are “choosing” this “lifestyle” and there is nothing they can do about it. For adults responsible for protecting these children, rape and prostitution are “lifestyle choices.”

I felt fear and blind anger. “We don’t know,” my mother kept telling me. “We did nothing wrong!”

They come from a wide range of backgrounds, mainly from the working class. Some of them have a happy, stable family setting, while others are even more chaotic, with their daughter being taken to local authorities nursing homes. Some girls are already victims of sexual abuse – boys or male family members nearby. Some of them were bullied at school. Some are autistic. But they all have something in common – neither the police nor the child protection professionals stepped in to help them.

The most vulnerable are those in nursing homes. Workers in these houses will turn a blind eye to the men in the flash car and wait outside for them. When the girls disappeared for days in a row, the police hardly looked for them.

It was obvious that once I talked to my mother and some girls who managed to escape the gang, it wasn’t an unknown phenomenon – health workers, neighbors and teachers all knew what was going on. It’s no secret for criminals looking to make money quickly that girls start replacing heroin as their preferred product.

I have previously investigated the widespread sexual abuse of clergy and online abuse rings. Now, I want to investigate what these mothers are telling me. One night, I was sitting outside a nursing home in Blackpool, north England, hoping to ask an employee what they were doing to protect the girl when I noticed it looked like a brand new car. It is driven by a man in his 40s. There are two young people in the rear seats. A young man got out of the car, went to the door of the nursing home, and knocked on the doorbell. He had a brief conversation with the staff who answered. Five minutes later, a girl less than 14 years old ran out and climbed to the back of the car. They drove away.

I’m very familiar with the plots of child sexual abuse and exploitation, but there are some key differences between the cases I’ve investigated before and how these gangs operate. These gangs make the victims think they are their saviors. Young people will be used to attract victims. Initially, they would provide friendship, fast food and entertainment. Since most of the victims are white and most of the perpetrators are of Pakistani descent, the girls will be told that it is best if they didn’t tell their parents because they “must be racists.” Once the girls are sucked in, they will be passed to other men who will sell them from the apartment.

Early reports from parents and victims confirmed that some older people on the network were taxi drivers. It soon became clear that the girl’s goal was: taxi drivers usually pick them up from the nursing home. I saw taxis pulling up outside these houses and the girls looked through the windows.

Taxi drivers will charge a fee for each girl (mainly men in their 20s and 30s), although this fee usually involves victims who are allowed to be allowed to rape freely.

Some of these gangs are very organized – young runners will be appointed to make preliminary contacts with the victim; landlords will rent out their apartment for the girl to rape. Others are more opportunistic. They all benefit from an impunity culture that continues to revolve around sexual abuse by women and girls—a culture with such low belief rates that make rape actually decriminalized.

Most media reports use such complex stories as stories about race, class, or sex – by no means once. But the truth is, these kids are abused because they are girls. They are denied any protections from the authorities because of their poverty. Their goal is to be ignored by the authorities because of their race, which are also concerned about being accused of racism, while adopting the racist assumption that “white girls” would “sleep” with brown men. It’s about race, class, and gender. Misogyny runs through these three.

These girls are either accused or disbelieve it. In fact, sometimes they are prosecuted for drunkenness and disorder, and that is not the case with the man who supplies alcohol (the same person who raped them).

These girls are not only “deception” as the word “combing” suggests, although they must have been deceived because they think they have a boyfriend in a young prosecutor. They were raped, sold, abused, and in some cases tortured.

Now, nearly thirty years after my first conversation with those mothers, nothing has changed. There is little faith in the still shocking complacency about organized sexual exploitation, regardless of the race of the perpetrator. The police still didn’t do enough. We still choose to blame the victims.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.