The interview room of a police station. Present are two male officers, a traumatised girl with an injured hand, and her father, acting as the appropriate adult, as his daughter is only 15. It turns out that the girl – Holly – has been arrested, on suspicion of causing criminal damage to the glass counter of a takeaway and stealing two cans of pop. Already, it’s telling that a victim is seen as a suspect. “Would you like to tell me what happened?” asks one of the policemen.
Three Girls (BBC1), Nicole Taylor’s powerful and important three-part drama, based on the Rochdale child sexual abuse scandal, then goes back a couple of months, to soon after Holly arrives in town, falls out with her parents and befriends headstrong, rebellious and naive sisters, Amber and Ruby. (Names have been changed in order to protect them.) Through them, Holly meets a circle of older Asian men. As they have done to Amber and Ruby and other vulnerable young girls, they befriend Holly and give her food and vodka. They groom her.
“Now it’s your turn to give something to me,” the delivery driver they know as Daddy says to Holly. Then he rapes her. We later learn that Holly did smash up the glass counter, but didn’t steal the cans of pop. The only robbery was the one committed against her, Amber, and Ruby and many more girls – of their childhoods, and lives. Not that the police are particularly interested. “Do you understand what you’ve come to talk to me about today?” asks the yawning policeman at Holly’s next interview. “And what do you think that is about?”
It doesn’t matter how well you remember and are familiar with the scandal, it is impossible not to splutter with rage at the extent to which these girls were let down – by the authorities for a start, and by the council, by social services, by the CPS, and a criminal justice system that doesn’t believe a particular kind of person. In other words, they were let down by everyone who should have been helping to protect them. Only sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham (played by Maxine Peake) comes out well in this first instalment. She sees what is going on, records it and reports it, despite the reluctance, ignorance, blindness and fear of everyone else.
Peake is excellent, as you would expect. Kindness, exasperation and fury personified – and utterly infectious. “Yeah, fuck off,” I’m shouting, too (from safely behind the TV screen), at the police when they finally decide to look into things and ask to see her files. Oh, that’s actually in today’s second episode, when she loses her rag. I watched them all in succession, because I had access to them, and I felt I needed to. You wouldn’t believe some of the courtroom questioning from the defendants’ lawyers in the third episode if you hadn’t been told that it was all based on the trial transcripts.
Anyway, where were we? Yes – we are in no danger of reaching peak Peake with a performance this brilliant. But it is the young actors Ria Zmitrowicz (Amber), Liv Hill (Ruby) and, especially, Molly Windsor (Holly) that this one belongs to. It is a beautiful, affecting, profound performance from Windsor.
The strength of the drama is that it does what everyone and everything – including the investigation – failed to do: it focuses on the abused rather than the abusers. The story is told from the girls’ – particularly Molly’s – point of view, which is the perspective that really matters here.
Not that the abusers are ignored; there are fine performances from Simon Nagra and Wasim Zakir, too, as Daddy and Tariq – roles that can’t have been easy to take on. Neither is the race angle pushed aside. In fact it is properly explored, mainly in the final episode, when a community meeting becomes heated and divided. But it is dealt with sensitively and sensibly rather than sensationally. Likewise, the confusion, for Amber especially, about who and what these men were to her. They knew exactly who and what they were, which jars with her uncertainty.
Again, that is symptomatic of the whole thing, for which director Philippa Lowthorpe needs a shout out, too. It is not scared to go anywhere, but it when it does, it treads extra carefully. And, although it is numbingly bleak, it is not entirely without hope. In spite of all the mistakes, lessons have been – and will continue to be – learned.
