A GENERATION of teenage girls on inner-city London estates is growing up in a climate of fear because gang rape has become a real and growing danger, says Camila Batmanghelidjh. The founder of Kids Company, a charity that helps abused and neglected children, claims: "We are seeing a shocking increase in young girls, some as young as 13, who have been sadistically gang-raped but most perpetrators are never brought to justice because the victim is usually threatened with her own life, and the lives of her extended family, if she speaks out.

"On some estates, gang rape has become a way of meting out brutal punishment to girls who go out with members of a rival gang, or who talk back and are regarded as 'rude girls' acting above their station. Gang rape is a kind of trophy humiliation, and the more savage the attack, the more it notches up their credit rating within the gang."

With the Metropolitan police admitting that gangs are getting younger and resorting to more lethal violence more swiftly and for the most trivial of slights, Batmanghelidjh argues that a new approach is required i to tackle this spreading menace. "The police should take the pressure off the victim and charge the perpetrators with rape, irrespective of whether the victim brings charges, just as they do with domestic violence cases," she says.

Her warning comes in the wake of two sickening gang-rapes. In one, a 14-year-old girl was repeatedly raped "as punishment" by nine members of Hackney's Kingzhold Boys gang because she had "insulted" their leader and called him "ugly". The boys, some as young as 13, dragged her around three tower blocks, calling friends by mobile phone to join in. They laughed and egged each other on as they took turns to assault her.

Handing down sentences ranging from two years and five months to indeterminate detention orders, the judge condemned the gang for their chilling lawlessness and lack of remorse after one gang member said: "It's not a problem for most girls to be raped." In another case, 10 thugs were found guilty of repeatedly raping and throwing caustic soda over a 15-year-old Tottenham girl. They will be sentenced this month.

In the past two years, there have been 176 reported gang rapes (involving three or more attackers) in London, though "these offences may be under-reported", admit the Metropolitan Police. Most gang rapes take place in deprived boroughs, they add, with most perpetrators and most victims aged 15 to 21.

The one voice hardly ever heard is that of the teenage girls themselves. What is it like to confront a rampant misogynistic male culture as part of your daily life? Sandra, 17, a bright, attractive girl who has just passed her A-levels, has lived on the rough Ibscott estate in Dagenham, east London, with her unemployed mum and younger sister since she was 12. Sandra, who is white, regards herself as "one of the lucky ones" in that she has not been raped herself. But the gauntlet of abuse that she runs - and the trauma experienced by some of her friends - is one that readers will find deeply disturbing.

One day when Sandra was 14 and walking home from school, she heard some boys call out: "Here, come here!" "My heart started pounding," she says. "I told myself: walk on, keep your head down, ignore them, just keep going." Sandra knew it was best not to talk back to the local Lego Manz crew - so named because of the Lego-like colourful high-rise flats off the A13 they lived in - and she prayed the gang would let her pass.

But taking her silence as rudeness, they began chasing her. As Sandra tried to run, she tripped and fell. She looked up to see the boys, who were also just 14 and attended her school, spitting and laughing at her. She was terrified she was about to be raped, she recalls, for she knew all too well what happened to girls targeted by local gangs.

This time she warded them off and ran, crying hysterically, to a shop to call her mother. "After that, I was too scared to walk home from school on my own," she says. "The school let me leave 10 minutes before the bell and I caught the bus and my mother would meet me at the busstop every day. At home, my mother would only let me play outside with the other kids on the estate if I stayed within sight and I had to be indoors by 5pm."

If that sounds like an extreme response, consider this: two girls she knows from the area have been gang-raped. One case appeared on Crimewatch but the other was never reported, she says.

When Sandra was 15, her best friend's older sister, Michelle, who was 17 and lives in Beckton, started going out with a boy from the Greengate gang who live in the Newham area near the West Ham football stadium. "She had only been going out with him for about three weeks when the Lego Manz crew, the gang in her neighbourhood who hated the Greengate gang, heard about it," says Sandra.

"They warned Michelle to stop seeing her boyfriend, and when she refused, they waited for her one night and raped her in an alleyway yards from her home. They told her it was her 'punishment' for being a 'slag' and 'going with the other gang' and that it would also teach the other gang a lesson. She was too scared to report it and the family kept it quiet but two years later, Michelle is still too afraid to go out with boys.

"About six months after that, another of my friends, who was 15 at the time, got pulled into a car and driven round various estates in Dagenham for about four hours. She was held down and brutally raped by three boys and then thrown out of the car. It was a random attack - the boys had decided to rape somebody for entertainment and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"The boys were caught after her case appeared on Crimewatch but she was never named. She used to be a happy, confident girl but now she's always anxious and has no self-esteem."

When you live with this sort of thing around you, it affects your confidence even if it hasn't happened to you, says Sandra. "Almost every time I leave our flat, I see them sitting on the railings, drinking and smoking, and it puts me on edge. They call me names, like tramp or bitch, then they all start laughing. I've lived with it for five years now and to be honest, it grinds you down. I have grown up with a huge amount of fear and I find it hard to go anywhere without looking over my shoulder."

The unpalatable truth is that Sandra's experience is not atypical. A recent internal east London police report talks about the growing menace of predatory gangs engaged in "committing the most disgusting acts of violence". And the Standard has spoken to other girls whose horrific stories echo Sandra's. Chanise, a 17-year-old from the sprawling Yellow Brick Estate behind the Peckham library in south London, said that after her 14-year-old cousin was "kidnapped and terrorised" (but not raped) by a gang, she stopped wearing skintight jeans and started dressing in baggy tracksuit pants to avoid male attention. "Of 30 girls I know, six have been raped, which is one in five," she says. "People think it's just boys who suffer from gangs and knife crime but what we live with is worse."

But why is gang rape on the rise? The causes are complex, though the fact that our estates are full of children raised by single mothers is part of it, says Batmanghelidjh. "Often girls with absent dads turn to a local gang to provide male protection, which can make them extremely vulnerable if the gang turns against them," she says. "On the boys' side, many have grown up exposed to inappropriate sexual activity by mothers with multiple partners and will have been knocked about, humiliated and shouted at by mothers who are themselves not coping. Initially they're the victims but later they form gangs and become powerful.

"The smallest slight from a girl can cause them to act out viciously on young girls what was acted out on them. The more they were degraded, the more their hidden hatred of their mothers, the more depraved and ferocious the attack will be. Their behaviour is sadistically driven. It's their attempt to communicate to other gangs and to their mothers that they are now in charge. It's their revenge."

For Sandra, the worst part, she says, is that the police seem powerless. "It's the boys who control the space, not the police. The police will only come onto our estate in groups of three or four because they're as scared as the rest of us. It's like we're living in a lawless zone."

As she talks, she starts to shiver. "It's a no-win situation: if you speak back you get attacked, if you don't answer back, you feel like dirt. One boy tried to kiss me and when I refused he punched me in the face. Another boy told me I had to let him get on top of me and he pushed me down and could have raped me if my cousin hadn't suddenly appeared on the scene.

"I was only 12 at the time and five years later I can still remember every detail of that disgusting experience. I know of so many girls who've been slapped around by boys for no reason and it's never addressed or talked about."

She admits that unless girls like her speak out, nothing will change. "I'm 17 now and streetwise but I worry about my 13-year-old sister. At that age, they're naive and think boys are their friends. I so want her life to be different. We have to confront the taboo and say: 'Enough is enough!' And we have to ask our councils and the police what they will do to protect us and to put ordinary people, and not gangs, in charge of our estates."

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