'A lot of us were raped': The girls and women who are forgotten victims of Manchester's gang wars
manchestereveningnews.co.ukAlice, not her real name, was dragged into an alleyway in Moss Side, stripped and raped at gunpoint by a young gangster and aspiring boxer, Emmanuel Richards, in the mid 1990s.
She was 13, in care and a virgin. He was still 15 but, physically, a brute, nicknamed 'Tank'. It's only now, decades after Richards violently snatched away her childhood, that she finally feels liberated, free to open up about her pain thanks to the courage of a woman she has never met, another of Richards' victims, who would come forward years later.
For Alice the trauma continues and still informs her life. And the attack on her was part of a 'culture of sexual violence that has been going on for a very long time' in parts of south Manchester's criminal underworld, she says.
Very few women ever came forward to make formal complaints but it's a picture police tasked with tackling south Manchester's notorious gangs recognise.
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