Girl 'forced into sex act with teenager she feared was in gang' at Pentagon shopping centre
Published: 14:56, 20 September 2018
Updated: 14:57, 20 September 2018
A young girl was twice forced into a sex act in a shopping centre car park with a teenager she feared because he belonged to a gang, a court heard.
The 15-year-old girl did not try to fight off her alleged attacker or run away because she had seen him with a knife under his jacket, a jury was told.
She told a teacher at her school that she had been at the Pentagon Centre in Chatham with a friend in March when approached by a teenager, aged 16, wearing a bandana on his head.
She said the boy told her to go with him. They moved away from the others to a stairwell in the multi-storey car park.
He then asked her if she was sexually active and whether she had “given uck”, a slang term for a sex act, and whether she was going to do it for him.
The girl said the teenager, who cannot be identified, unbuckled his belt and forced her to perform the act.
Prosecutor Christopher May said the next day the girl was at the shopping centre again with friends when they saw the teenager and other boys.
He again asked her to go to the stairwell. She tried to gesture to the others to go with her, but they didn’t.
“She was worried about the repercussions if she refused what he wanted,” Mr May told Maidstone Crown Court. “Afterwards, she was very scared and ran off to find her friends.”
She saw him again on another occasion at the centre and he showed her videos on his phone of other girls performing the sex act on him.
The alleged victim said in a recorded interview she knew the teenager was in a gang.
She said of the first time the teenager told her to perform the sex act: “At that point I was scared, because he’s like gang and stuff, and he’s got like knives and stuff.
“And, like, I would love to have retaliated, like hit him back or something, but I didn’t want to get hit or, like, stabbed or anything.”
Mr May told jurors: “The prosecution case is this was not done consensually. He pressured her into doing so. She made it very clear she did not want to do so by telling him repeatedly.
“She didn’t want to do it. She felt disgusted. She felt sick. Afterwards, she ran to her friend.”
The next day the girl said the teenager was “really aggravated” and “really vexed”. She tried to get her friends to go with her and the teenager got “really mad”.
He later contacted her on Instagram. She saw a photo of him wearing a face covering known as a “bally”, similar to the one he wore in the shopping centre.
She blocked him and deleted the messages because she didn’t want to be reminded of it.
The teenager was arrested at his work on March 24. His home was searched. He gave a no comment interview.
Mr May said DNA was obtained from the girl’s scarf and a match was made with the teenager. The chances of it coming from somebody other than, and unrelated to, him was one in a billion.
The teenager, from Medway, denies two charges of oral rape, claiming she consented.
The trial continues.
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Keith Hunt