A teen anti-violence group is concerned about the alleged resurgence of a so-called “club” of high school boys that preys on younger teen girls.
Anita Roberts of SafeTeen, a non-profit group that works to educate young people about violence prevention and personal safety, told John Daly on CKNW’s Back on the Beat that someone connected to an unnamed B.C. school recently informed her of the reappearance of something called the “Little Girl Slayer’s Club.”
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“What it is is the older boys in the school, the 10, 11, 12th Grade boys are luring Grade 8 girls to parties, drugging them, and sexually assaulting them,” she said.
“Younger boys are betting over who’s going to win, because it’s a competition.”
The “club” originally popped up at a Surrey school back in 2010.
At the time, the district took action and SafeTeen was brought in to offer counselling and workshops.
The “club” appears to have re-emerged, Roberts said, though she declined to say which school contacted them for privacy reasons.
“This is such a purposeful, planned evil that they’re doing,” she said. “And I imagine all the parents of all those boys, that none of them are thinking that their boys would be capable of that.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education said it has not been contacted about the issue but is “very interested in any information that can be passed on,” and that it is reaching out to SafeTeen.
Surrey School District spokesperson Doug Strachan said he was aware of the original incident in 2010, but that he has not been made aware of any reappearance in the city.
Roberts said her group has now been called in to the school where it will work with the students.
“SafeTeen is all about prevention, that’s what we do,” she said. “We prevent girls from getting assaulted, we prevent boys from doing the assaulting.
“Why does something tragic have to happen before people will implement prevention? And that’s been a very frustrating thing for me because so many assaults are preventable.”
Roberts is calling for increased funding for youth anti-violence and sexual assault awareness programs in B.C. schools.