Academic Articles

Child Sexual Exploitation 1(CSE) is a form of sexual abuse which can include a child or young person being given gifts or money in exchange for performing sexual activities; it sometimes involves child trafficking and organised networks of abusers. Because of its complex nature, CSE is often not well understood, even by professionals working in the area. For example, there is a lack of awareness as to what actually constitutes an offence and that trafficking of children can take place within a country, or even a local area, rather than between countries. The BBC drama Three Girls (2017), a three-part fictional series based on the experiences of real victims of CSE, depicts the issue in a realistic manner that helps clarify what CSE actually entails. For this reason and because it makes an emotional connection with its audience, it can help professionals and the general public gain sufficient understanding of the issue to recognise and take appropriate action to tackle it.

Three Girls dramatises the experiences of three female  teenage victims of the highly-publicised Rochdale  organised CSE case2, in which nine men were convicted of  numerous trafficking and sexual assault offences. It was made in consultation with the girls, their families and key child protection workers involved in the case. The series  secured a huge audience3, prompted an outpouring on  social media4 including calls to add it to the school curriculum, and was partially responsible for the record  127,000 calls to the BBC helpline5 for sexual abuse support in 2017. 

Consistently refusing to sensationalise, the series  unflinchingly depicts the girls’ harrowing experiences, the  authorities’ dismissal of them as unreliable witnesses and  the key failure to recognise the systematic nature of the abuse. Grounded scrupulously in the facts of the case, Three Girls’ realist treatment of CSE, down to small details  such as showing that taking a child somewhere in a taxi can constitute trafficking, means it provides an accessible way to gain an understanding of the issue and brings the dry legislation on CSE to life. The result is to make it clear to viewers that this kind of abuse is real and could happen to any child, not just vulnerable children already in care. For these reasons, DS Molony keeps a DVD copy to pass to new colleagues and considers it should be required  watching for anybody working in the area of child protection, including police and social workers. (She does advise colleagues to watch it during the day ‘with the  curtains open’ as it is such difficult viewing.) For these  reasons also, Three Girls may have helped to inform its large audience about new types of suspicious activity to report that they may not previously have been aware of. 

However, there is more to Three Girls’ success than just its scrupulous realism. It is significant that it conveys the  girls’ experiences in fictional rather than documentary form. This form provides distance for the more than forty real victims. It also allows their many experiences and the  complexities of the police and court cases to be distilled into the story of the three fictional girls and given a compelling plot to keep audiences watching. As a key figure in the production of Three Girls points out6, telling  the story in drama form helped engage a bigger audience:  ‘Sometimes people can be slightly cautious about documentaries. So it’s getting it into more homes … and to the widest possible audience’.

Also, as Dr Bulfin’s research7 shows, fictional works invite audiences to make emotional connections with the characters and see the world through their eyes. This encourages empathy and insight into the experiences of  those being portrayed in ways that factual accounts largely do not. This means that Three Girls can help create  understanding for the perspectives of the abused girls, who were initially dismissed as making bad ‘life choices’.  Through connecting emotionally with the characters, both general audiences and child protection workers may be able to see beyond the defensive ‘acting out’ behaviour that abused children may sometimes engage in. DS Molony believes the powerful emotional response  that Three Girls triggers may even facilitate police to hit the right kind of empathy in talking to a victim to get the breakthrough that allows them to move forward with the very complex process of pursuing prosecution