The girls enjoyed rides in cool cars, illicit cigarettes and alcohol, and hanging around in disused buildings and deserted spaces, simply chatting. The sexual element crept in gradually, and when the girls were already hooked on feeling a valued part of an integrated community.
That seemed to be the major hook for both girls whose memoirs I read. They both talked about how impressed they were by how all the Asians seemed to know each other - how every new person they met was an uncle or cousin - and that they themselves increasingly felt a deep sense of belonging to, as one put it, "a whole connected web of people".
We as humans are deeply wired to desire that level of connection to the people around us - to be intrinsically entwined in the daily lives of about
150 other people. It's why soap operas are so popular: as our real-life communities and sense of connection to each other started to disintegrate in the decades after world war two, as families separated and scattered, we were given more and more soap operas to fill the gap this community breakdown had created.
We, increasingly as the twentieth century progressed, could no longer rely on having real-life daily interaction with extended family, friends, and neighbours, so we were given televised
Neighbours to watch instead, developing the same interest in and attachments to the fictional characters portrayed onscreen that we once had to real people.
Inevitably, of course, this isn't as good as the real thing - which the girls whose memoirs I read felt that they had found with their new Asian 'friends'.
When these 'friends' started demanding they participate in sexual acts to remain part of this "community", the girls were so hooked on the sense of belonging, that they did.
Even after one girl eventually reported her rapists to the police, she still continued to go out and socialise with their friends and acquaintances, because - as she tellingly recorded in her memoir - "what's the alternative? Staying in every night and watching TV?"
The grooming gangs were able to operate with such impunity because they zeroed in on one of the deepest and most powerful needs human beings have - a need for community - and ruthlessly exploited it in the most despicable ways.
That real-life community - an intertwined web of people who's daily lives we are intrinsically connected to - doesn't exist for most white people in the UK any more.
The Asians, however, overwhelmingly still have it, which was ultimately what enabled the grooming gangs to do what they did, and is a key reason why specifically white children (rather than non-Muslim children of other ethnicities, whose communities are often more intact) were targeted.
