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POLICE are investigating shocking new claims that gangs of Asian men gang-raped and abused vulnerable under-age girls from CARE HOMES in the North West.

The new grooming scandal emerged after a 27-year-old mum claimed she was a victim of a horrifying catalogue of sexual abuse while in care as a teen.

Her account of how care workers allegedly turned a blind eye to predatory paedo­philes echoes the findings of a report into a sex ring in Rochdale, which highlighted “missed opportunities” to halt abuse.

Claire, not her real name, says she was one of many vulnerable young girls who were treated like “pieces of meat” by men who hung around the care homes she lived in in Lancashire and Liverpool.

She says she was groomed and molested in return for alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. On one harrowing occasion when she was 14, she was drugged and gang-raped.

A farmer found her naked in a field covered in blood and bruises, but she was returned to her home without medical help. “My social worker told me I deserved what I’d got because I’d been drinking,” she says. “I hadn’t... I was drugged.” Claire says even though she told staff at Briar’s Hey Residential Home in ­Rainhill, Merseyside, which closed in 2005, there was no medical examination or police probe.

“I was given the morning-after pill ‘to avoid any more mess’,” she says.

Claire, who now lives with her ­partner and four children, claims her experience was the norm for many teens at the homes. “Sex was the going ­currency for girls like me,” she says. “The men would hang round the gates. If we ­complained to staff we were told to just ignore them.”

In May this year, when nine men from the paedophile gang in Rochdale were jailed, Claire contacted police in the hope they would finally investigate her ordeal.

She says: “They said it was highly unlikely they could prove anything after so many years. But I want social services to know how badly we were treated.”

A Lancashire County Council spokesman said: “Police are investigating these allegations. We are unable to comment further.”