Jennifer Blake, a former charity chief executive who advised the Home Office on tackling gang crime

An expert in youth violence has revealed the degrading and abusive treatment that girls are suffering at the hands of gang members.

Jennifer Blake, a former charity chief executive who advised the Home Office on tackling gang crime, told how girls as young as 12 are being used by their criminal boyfriends to deliver drugs, hide guns and provide sexual services.

Gang members place the girls in specific categories to dictate the roles they are expected to play and where they stand in a hierarchy of importance.

At the lowest level are ‘line-ups’, which Ms Blake explained are girls who sickeningly are pressurised to sleep with up to ten men at a time – one after the other.

One step up from this category are girls referred to as ‘links’ who can be called upon at any time by her lover in the gang to sleep with him and two or three other friends.

There are also the ‘baby mothers’ – young women who gang members get pregnant before abandoning them – and the ‘girls’ who they are in loose relationships with.

At the top of the hierarchy are ‘wifeys’ who are considered to be serious girlfriends that receive greater respect and are looked after financially.

Shockingly, Ms Blake said that girls as young as 12 or 13 have sought help at the youth charity she previously ran after being used as ‘links’ and ‘line-ups’.

She explained that, as well as using younger girls for sex, gangs often use them to ferry around drugs and conceal illegal weapons in their own homes.

Detailing the depraved treatment the girls are subjected to, Ms Blake said: ‘If the girls are line-up, there could be ten men. The men literally line up. She has sex with one then moves on to the next one, has sex with him and so on.

‘Then you have the links. One man might have two other men at his place and say “let me call my link”. She’ll come up and have sex with all three men.

'The youngest girls I’ve dealt with who have been links and line-ups are 12. We reported the matter to the authorities.

‘Even if the men know the girls are younger, they like them because they’re more naive. Those are the ones that get used to courier drugs and hold drugs in their house.

‘Their parents don’t know they’ve got an AK-something [assault rifle] lying under their bed or a bag of weed or coke because these young, vulnerable girls will do anything for these men.’

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An ex-gang member herself, Ms Blake set up a charity named Safe ’n’ Sound’ in Peckham, South London, to help young people from deprived backgrounds escape criminal lifestyles.

The charity ran for 13 years until it closed last year due to lack of funding. She currently works as a young violence consultant at a school in South London.

Many of these young women are drawn into the underworld because they are attracted by the perceived ‘glamour’.

‘These girls want the best designer handbag, the latest clothes, and they have to have the latest, most rough and tough man as well,’ Ms Blake said.

But the price they pay for associating with gang members is putting their own lives in danger.

Some are beaten, raped and stabbed in attacks by rival gangs aimed at the men they are dating.

And while it is uncommon for women to be shot dead, they can be innocently caught up in the crossfire, as may be the case in the shooting of 17-year-old Tanesha Melbourne in Tottenham, North London, on Easter Monday.

Gang members appeared to claim responsibility for Tanesha’s death last week in a message on Instagram.

Overlaying a news story about the killing and accompanied with the hashtag NPK, referring to Tottenham’s Northumberland Park gang, it said: ‘If your chillin with my opps I ain’t gonna adjust my aim for you.’

Ms Blake added: ‘It’s a safeguarding issue now because these girls are getting caught up in the most brutal violence and the Government needs to take action.’