Some time ago I was sitting in the Sunday school room of a local church, with posters made by kids depicting the teachings of Jesus curling at the corners on the walls. I was there to do my advice surgery in my role as a local councillor.

A man came in to ask for help getting his family moved to a bigger house. His daughter had two children who had been removed from her care but were allowed to live with her on condition that she live with her parents and they acted as guardians. I diligently took down the names and ages of the children to assess the size of house they needed.

He told me his daughter was 20, her children were six and two.

It didn’t take a maths genius to work out she had been 14 when her first child was born. He explained that his daughter had struggled with mental health problems, and had “mild learning difficulties”. I asked where the father of her children was. One was “a Pakistani fella with a wife and kids”, and they weren’t sure who the father of the littlest was.

I am trained in the issue of sexual exploitation, so instead of seeing the father of a wayward woman who had made bad choices, I looked up from my notepad and said: “I think I need to see your daughter, I’m worried that she has been exploited.”

I explained what I thought and he told me his daughter said the men she had slept with were her boyfriends.

My heart sank, not because it was so awful – I’d heard lots of similar stories in my time working at rape crisis centres. My heart hurt because I thought of all the social workers she had seen: she had after all had her children removed from her. She had given birth twice, seen many medics, no doubt been at school, seen her GP. No one spoke up.

Every police force and every children’s service needs a specialist team and the government has to pay for it

I asked if they had ever contacted the police? He told me the only interaction was when she had been in trouble herself. No one had ever seen her as a vulnerable child, she was just a naughty girl, a bad mum, a fallen woman.

This week’s revelations that in Telford, a small industrial town, sexual exploitation could have been occurring on a mass scale with hundreds of vulnerable girls potentially affected is utterly maddening in its familiarity. This is Groundhog Day. Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, Telford, they trip off the tongue like a nursery rhyme about a plague. Give it six months and we will have another town to add to our grooming ring of roses.

I’m with Lucy Allan, Telford’s MP, who is pressing the government for an independent investigation into grooming in the town. Hitching these incidents to the child sex abuse inquiry does nothing to understand the specifics that lead to exploitation on this scale. Time was that the government funded 15 areas in the UK to set up support services for sexual exploitation. It was linked to the gang violence agenda that sprang from the riots of 2011. That’s gone now, and even so, linking those three things was always naive. Yes sexual exploitation happens in gangs, yes sexual exploitation is most commonly committed by peers. But generalising about the problem is a political shrug and it changes nothing. We need to understand. We need to create a vehicle to tackle the specific nature of grooming gangs.

Every police force and every children’s service in the country needs a specialist team that only works on this subject, and the government has to pay for it. It must also fund specialist victims and youth services that can win trust among the difficult to reach groups – who in my experience are not difficult to reach if only people didn’t find them so difficult to look at.

These teams need to work on prevention as much as on prosecution, offering intensive work with vulnerable groups of girls – those in care, with special needs, mental health problems and other difficulties. Police teams should be doing outreach work with the communities identified in every case. I live in one of these communities and I know they want things done. We must find a way to talk about this stuff, break a culture of silence and change the story.

Telford is not the end, it’s barely even the middle. How many more scandals will it take that are so large we name the town,not the victims? My guess is that it will take more than it should. And then we all fall down.

• Jess Phillips has been the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley since 2015