A brave survivor of Telford’s grooming gangs – who has devoted years of her life working for other victims – says she was left “sick” and “tearful” by billionaire Elon Musk’s online rants.
Holly Archer, which is not her real name, was the first victim to alert the Sunday Mirror to the scale of the abuse gangs in Telford. With her help, after an 18-month investigation, we revealed how up to a thousand girls had been abused in the Shropshire town over four decades, and that the scandal was linked to five deaths.
Musk has tweeted more than 40 times about UK grooming gangs, calling for a national inquiry and a fresh general election. Holly said: “I feel like our voices, all of our hard work, has been twisted and our experiences have been exploited for who knows what reason? Is it for politics or radical racist reasons? I feel really proud of what we have done but for the first time today I sat down and cried about not feeling we have done enough.”
Sunday Mirror front page from March 11 2018 after an 18-month investigation into Telford’s grooming gangs
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Sunday Mirror)
Holly Archer’s abuse began aged 14 when she was introduced to perpetrators by boys her own age. She said: “Over the next four years, I was raped on a daily basis, sometimes by nine men a night. I had two abortions and my ordeal left me so broken I attempted suicide. It took me a long time to accept I was a victim of child sexual exploitation but when I did I became determined that no child should suffer the hell I had.”
She was central to our campaign for an inquiry in Telford and said: “After the Mirror story in 2018, the truth about what it is like to be a survivor was in everyone’s faces. There was an extraordinary council meeting a few weeks later where it felt like a turning point. People began listening to what we were saying rather than trying to navigate through it using processes. Once that started to happen here and we were people in a room with opinions that was when the whole system changed.”
The chair of the Telford inquiry Tom Crowther KC who praised this “brave and revolutionary” decision of council to work alongside abuse survivors
She believes a “statutory” inquiry is not “victim-friendly” and said her experience of giving evidence to the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse left her feeling “very much unsupported afterwards”. She said: “I found that much more difficult, giving my evidence to someone unknown to me, who didn’t know my area or the people or anything I was talking about and was going to pop off back to London and write up their notes. It wasn’t personal and nothing came of it. Telford is not like Rochdale or Oxford. A national inquiry won’t get into the nitty gritty of each place. The Telford inquiry put survivors at the heart of the process and other councils to look at it and strive to achieve the same.”
In July, we revealed how Holly and other survivors have spent the last two years working with Telford Council to transform its approach to child sexual exploitation and have influenced national policy at the Home Office. The chair of the Telford inquiry Tom Crowther KC praised this “brave and revolutionary” decision. It had not been one of his 47 recommendations but it had been “key” to delivering them.
He said: “These are three people who were themselves, over the years, victims of exploitation in Telford. They have devoted untold hours to this work and the results have been inspiring.” The number of children referred to the Government’s national referral mechanism for victims of modern slavery by Telford’s dedicated Children Abused Through Exploitation team, rose from 8 in 2022 to 33 last year. In the first half of this year, a further 41 referrals have been made.