The families said it was only when they began getting together as a group that they had become aware of the disparity in support they had been offered.<\/p>\n
They now meet regularly and the children have even started dance and pilates classes together.<\/p>\n
“It’s really fun when we dance together, because it feels like we’ve all been through like the same stuff and only us really understand it,” Bella said. “It just feels nice to be together.”<\/p>\n
There are lots of laughs too.<\/p>\n
“It’s funny watching the mums dance,” Charlotte said, smiling. “I think my mum did an amazing job doing the cha-cha-cha.”<\/p>\n
All the parents the BBC spoke to share the same hope – that their daughters will one day be able to decide for themselves if they want to reveal their identities.<\/p>\n
But before that, they want their bravery to be recognised.<\/p>\n
“We want people to know how great our daughter is,” Charlotte’s dad said. “First and foremost, we want her to know – and in years to come to see that we’ve told the world how brilliant she is and how utterly in awe we are of her.”<\/p>\n
Daisy’s father says his daughter is determined not to be defined by what happened. <\/p>\n
“This isn’t her life, and it won’t be her life,” he said. “She wants to continue living how she did before, with a carefree attitude, where the only thing she really needs to worry about is how long she has to wait for the next Taylor Swift album.”<\/p>\n
“They fight so hard every day to just keep going and keep going,” Bethany and Amber’s mum said. “There’s so much more to them than the letters and numbers that were given against their name in court.”<\/p>\n
“All those children are such heroes,” Bella’s mum added. “Our daughter got herself – critically injured – out of that room and ran for help. They’re all amazing. There’s no words to describe little girls doing that.”<\/p>\n
The names of the girls have been changed in line with the court anonymity order and the wishes of their parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The families said it was only when they began getting together as a group that they had become…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-597501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}