by Girl A
I left school once my exams were over, but didn’t do much beyond staying at home with Mum and Dad.
I missed the School Leavers’ Ball. I’d been invited, just like everyone else, but I was seven months pregnant and couldn’t face anybody. Part of me wanted to put on a nice dress and go to a ball, but I couldn’t do it. Apart from anything else, I felt ashamed that my life was such a mess: at times, I’d have another wobble and wouldn’t be sure I even wanted the baby I was carrying.
I saw the pictures of the ball on Facebook – a sea of bright, shiny faces, all scrubbed up and wearing smart suits and outrageous summer dresses. Not for the first time, I felt like I’d missed out.
I was beginning to miss out on Jane, too. She kept trying to call me but I kept putting her off. I’d be in the bath when she called, or busy, or something. Whatever. At the time, still a kid, I’d thought Dad was right. I’d become so used to just believing what others told me to believe. We’ve both changed our minds now. I can’t believe either of us truly believed it at the time.
Over the months, Mum’s initial horror at her eldest daughter’s pregnancy had mellowed. As my due date approached, she was more excited than anyone.
I, of course, was terrified, still not knowing whether my baby was the daughter of a paedophile rapist and not knowing how I would react if she was. Would I blame her and want to have her adopted? Or would I just accept her, whatever her colouring, whatever the way she was conceived? All through the pregnancy, the exams, the meetings with social workers about the baby, these were the thoughts that were always at the forefront of my mind.
Despite accepting the baby, and the fact that I was going to be a mum, I never felt much excitement or elation. Sometimes I’d convince myself that I hated the baby, that I didn’t want her at all. And I still so hated those mothers who were full of how wonderful their babies were, oh, and look at the pictures, and come and see the clothes we’ve bought …
It was, in fact, me that I hated the most: me and Emma and those men.
The girl who had loved dressing her Barbie dolls had shrivelled up and died long ago. I didn’t buy anything for the baby until a week before I was due, and even then I just bought a cot, a pram, bouncy chair, sterilising stuff and some nappies. I think part of me wanted to love the baby, but until I knew who the father was, it was too difficult, so I slipped into some sort of weird denial. Only, I knew there was no stopping Mother Nature, and soon I would have to confront reality.
* * *
The contractions were coming every five minutes when Mum and I set off for the hospital.
It was around 6 p.m., a cold, blustery day, and by then the midwife had already been out to see me.
When we got to the hospital, though, they weren’t sure. ‘Well, you don’t look to be in pain,’ said one of the nurses, ‘so we’ll probably have to send you home.’
She changed her mind when I had a contraction just as she was checking the dilation. ‘Crikey, Hannah, you must have a high pain threshold – you’re six centimetres! You can stay in.’
So for the next six hours I lay there, Mum wanting to rub my back, me not wanting her to, while, slowly, I dilated to eight centimetres. By then I was in pain, for all that the nurse had said about my threshold, and asking for an epidural.
They suggested instead breaking my waters to speed things up, but in the end agreed to give me the epidural. Mum and I both nodded off for a while then – me in the bed, her in the chair beside me.
At 6 a.m. I started pushing, and for the next half-hour I felt panic-stricken, wondering what colour the baby would be. I’d looked on the internet and, to my shock, read that even when a baby looks white when it’s born, the skin can change colour later on. I still wouldn’t know for sure, even when I saw her for the first time.
‘What will I do if it’s one of theirs?’ I whispered to Mum, after one of the later contractions.
But by then Mum was trying desperately to forget how this baby might have been conceived, and how abused I’d been. She’d been taken over by the excitement of it all: worried, too, but mostly excited. ‘You’ll do what’s right, Hannah, that’s what you’ll do. So don’t worry. Let’s just help her to be born.’
I wanted to be happy, to enjoy the moment like all the other mums on the ward that day. Instead, I was beside myself, almost with a feeling of grief, as I pushed one more time.
In the moment she was born, I looked away. I didn’t want to hold her or anything until I was sure, until I’d had a chance to have a proper look at her, to see if she was the daughter of one of my attackers. Tears were pouring down my face, and inside I was screaming: ‘What colour is she? What colour is she? Is she one of theirs?’
I remember still looking away, looking anywhere, frantic, as one of the nurses put her to my breast. Through my tears I screamed at Mum, ‘Get her off me, get her off me!’
Thankfully she was calm, sweeping this warm, soft little bundle of humanity into her arms and giving her a kiss. A first kiss.
Then she was trying to get me to focus. ‘Hannah, Hannah,’ I heard her saying, my eyes still turned away, ‘She’s not one of theirs, sweetheart, she’s not one of theirs. She’s just yours, and she’s beautiful.’
So that was Mum’s reaction: normal, happy, just enjoying the moment of her granddaughter’s birth. I still couldn’t look, still couldn’t hold her. Not for another two hours.
And then, tentatively, I eased the shawl from the side of her face and looked down at her, as she lay in her cot next to my bed. Slowly, I took in her features: the shock of black hair; her nose, just like mine; her lips; those beautiful blue eyes gazing back at me.
‘Hello, Chloe,’ I whispered.
Until that moment, I’d convinced myself that I didn’t really care for her at all. Now, seeing her, holding her, all that changed. ‘What did she weigh, Mum?’
‘Seven pounds, one ounce,’ said Chloe’s proud grandma. ‘She’s perfect, isn’t she?’
I lay there for what seemed an age, holding my baby, pressing my nose against her cheek so that I could inhale her wonderful, unique scent, my mind flooding with the relief of knowing that we could both have a fresh start.
For her, there would be the steadily gathering, simple joy of life while for me, still only sixteen, there was the chance to rebuild my own life away from the misery and pain that had engulfed me for so long. I knew there would be difficult times ahead, but I would try my hardest for her to put the past behind me and give her a future.
As I drifted off to sleep, I recognised there was a part of me that was still damaged, still desolate and still frightened, but I saw, too, that none of that was her fault. An inner certainty told me that no matter how she’d been conceived, she was her own person and fully deserved to have her chance.
The next time I woke up, Dad was there, Chloe in his arms, smiling at me. He’d brought with him a pink blanket that would be so adored by my little girl. It had the image of a teddy bear in the middle, and, as she grew older, she’d take it everywhere with her, always hating to give it up, even to be washed, as if she had a fear of feeling alone in the world. I think she knew instinctively that it wouldn’t be all plain sailing and that with a kid like me as her mum, she’d need that blanket.
My brothers and sisters weren’t allowed to come and visit in the hospital, so they only got to meet her when I came home the next day.
Jane sent me a New Baby card and wrote her number inside, to let me know she still cared and was still there for me. I didn’t feel ready to reply, but I felt glad inside.
Chapter Nineteen
Trying Again
I was asleep with my new baby when the letter from Greater Manchester Police arrived.
It landed on the hall floor like an unexploded bomb that detonated the moment my dad unfolded it and began to read.
I woke up to the sound of Dad ranting and raving downstairs in the living room. Bleary-eyed and aching, I went downstairs to see him waving an A4 piece of paper in his hand. H
e was crimson with rage.
‘They’ve stopped the case, Hannah! The Crown Prosecution Service say it’s not strong enough. They’re not going to put that bastard on trial. They’re just going to let him go.’
Dad held his arms out to me and I collapsed into them, sobbing, suddenly terrified that my abusers would be free to attack me again.
As my tears soaked into his dressing gown, Dad went on reading bits of the letter out loud. It was dated 25 August, though it turned out the CPS lawyers had actually reached their decision almost a month earlier. The police had taken until July 28 to send them the file and they made their decision not to prosecute the following day.
I could feel Dad shaking with rage as he talked about the DNA the police had from my knickers. ‘You were fifteen, for God’s sake, and he was nearly sixty,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘How could any jury ignore that? You were under age. They’d have to convict. They’d have no option!’
I was in shock. What would happen to me now, with Daddy and the others completely free?
Mum had come into the room too, and while we sat in a huddle on the sofa Dad rang one of the detectives on the case. He was raging at him about the decision, and then went suddenly quiet as the police officer at the other end of the line explained what he knew about it.
When he came off the phone, Dad said, ‘They didn’t think you’d make a credible witness, kid. And that the men would have just claimed it had been nothing more than consensual sex with a girl who’d gone off the rails.’
I thought of all the evidence the police had gathered: the DNA, the interviews I’d put myself through, the names I’d given them, the addresses, and the detailed, harrowing accounts of being passed carelessly around like a broken doll. They knew about Daddy, about Tariq, and Billy, and Cassie, and all the others.
What more evidence did they want? Why bother interviewing me again in the January if it was going to come to this? Why bother driving around with the police to show them the addresses they’d all taken me to? Why the resulting identity parades?
The identity parades were among the worst things I had had to do.
From the surveillance operations the police had set up of the addresses I’d given them, as well as the locations from the day we’d spent driving around, the police were gradually arresting the men they thought had attacked me. Every so often they would ring and say, ‘We’ve got some more, please come in.’
It made me sick every time.
I did three or four identity parades, or VIPER sessions as they were called, involving about fifteen suspects. I found these VIPER parades, which is a form of identity parade that allows a victim to see line-ups by video, really stressful.
At each VIPER, it was down to me to say whether or not I recognised any of the men in the images that flashed up in front of me. There’s always a suspect in each group of pictures – you’re shown the men’s faces randomly, nine on each disc, I think – and you have to pick the suspect out. If you don’t, they’re allowed to go free. If you’re sure it’s them you say so, and another paedophile is hopefully off the streets. Quite a lot of responsibility, then.
And yet, here I was, back at square one. Why hadn’t the CPS believed me? Or the police? Wasn’t it obvious that I’d been raped? And trafficked?
All in all, at this point it was as if nobody believed me. I thought about all the months it had taken for the police to even get the file to the CPS. I thought about their attitude at the time they were interviewing me; as if they thought that whatever had happened to me I’d brought it upon myself. There was also the fact that Social Services had told my Mum and Dad I was a prostitute; that’d I’d made a ‘lifestyle’ choice.
In their eyes I was just a wayward teenager who’d made the choice to sleep with takeaway workers and taxi drivers in their forties and fifties; to have sex with them one after the other, this way and that way, and then be driven back to a fleapit of a house to recover in time for the next round of ‘fun’.
I felt as though the whole world was laughing at me: the lawyers in their flash offices, the police down at the station, and the men in their taxis and takeaways and grubby flats and houses.
My life had been destroyed, and yet no one was going to pay but me. No one had even bothered to come and see me to break the news. I realised, in those moments, that I’d been abandoned. Again. All that remained for me was a life sentence of fear and ruin.
As Dad threw the letter into the bin in total disgust, I headed back to bed, distraught, paralysed by the fear that now gripped me.
I couldn’t believe it. The police had taken almost a year to get a file to the CPS and the lawyers had decided – in a day, as it turned out – that there was no case against Daddy and Immy. Never mind all the other abusers who’d followed them. Here we were, within days of the anniversary of me first telling the police what Daddy had done to me, and it was all being thrown out.
I knew that Jane believed me, and that she knew I was only one of dozens of girls being picked off and broken by the gang every night of the week. She thought she’d done the right thing by persuading me to go to the police. She’d coaxed me, reassured me, helped me through it all. And for what? So that the people in suits, and the people with social-work degrees, could throw it back in my face and turn a blind eye to what was going on in my home town. I should have trusted my instincts when I thought it would come to nothing.
I didn’t blame Jane, and for all that I’d lost touch with her now I knew she’d be bitterly disappointed by the decision. She’d feel she had let me down, I knew. But it wasn’t her. It was all the others. I’d told Jane right at the start that no one in any kind of authority would believe me, and now I’d been proved right.
A whole year to decide the case was too shaky. A whole year to decide that it wouldn’t be in the interests of justice to put a gang of paedophile rapists on trial. It was a joke, and it made me weep.
The injustice of the Crown Prosecution Service decision wasn’t lost on some of the detectives involved in the case. One had once hinted to Dad that it might come to this because he’d seen it happen in the past. That same officer came to see him now. He was shaking his head, saying: ‘I don’t believe it. If it had been up to me I would definitely have prosecuted.’
It would ultimately come out that even at that late stage, Greater Manchester Police could have contested the decision, but the top brass decided not to. I’m guessing they didn’t want to upset the CPS. Or that they, just like the lawyers, had decided to take the safe, more politically correct route, rather than face up to the fact that gangs of Asian men were preying on kids like me.
At the time I had no idea they could have appealed, and there was never any talk about it.
* * *
All that was left was a deep, impenetrable silence. The whole investigation stopped. Just like that.
I was left feeling devastated and frightened out of my wits. With no trial, there would be no justice. And, worse than that, the gang would feel the police couldn’t touch them and so they’d be free to carry on with an ever-widening pool of victims.
I kept hearing of other girls they were using.
The system had allowed my abusers free to roam, completely beyond the law. I looked down at Chloe, almost for comfort, shuddering at the thought of what the future might bring.
Two days after I was abandoned by the Crown Prosecution Service, Dad drove me to school so I could get my GCSE results. I’d made a huge effort with them, but as I slipped into the hall to learn my fate I really couldn’t be bothered. What did exam results matter now?
Miss Crabtree was there, and she came up to me, really friendly, asking how I was and the baby and what did Chloe weigh? When I showed her a picture of her she gave me a hug and started to well up.
All the GCSE results were in brown envelopes on the stage, and I opened mine with Miss Crabtree. I couldn’t help but smile when I read the sheet inside. I’d got C grades in everything! Not bad for a no-hoper who’d just bee
n dumped back into hell! And it meant I could go to college.
Miss Crabtree was really, really pleased for me. ‘Oh, Hannah,’ she said, and then her voice cracked. She actually started crying, properly crying.
I couldn’t believe that someone was crying for me, crying because I’d done something good. For one of the few times in my life, if only for a moment, I actually felt proud of myself.
* * *
Even with the bounce of my GCSE results, the rejection of my case sent me into another downward spiral. It was even worse this time around as I’d started a college course and also had the baby to care for.
I struggled, I really did. I wasn’t breastfeeding Chloe. The nurses at the hospital had given me the usual encouragement but left me to make the final decision. I had decided I didn’t want to. It just didn’t appeal to me. I don’t regret it – I think she’s turned out fine without it – but it did make things more difficult, with sterilising and mixing the formula and everything. Doing all that on your own, as well as nappy changing, bathing, dressing, winding and comforting Chloe, while trying to do my college work, was stressing me out.
Chloe and I stayed at my parents’ home through the autumn and winter and into the new year of 2010 and of course my parents helped out. But Chloe was my ultimate responsibility – the buck stopped with me, and I wanted to get it right.
A couple of weeks into January, I decided I was ready to call in to see Jane at the clinic, and to show Chloe off to her. She was great, and said she looked so like me. I told her I was sorry I’d stopped seeing her.
‘How’s college?’ Jane asked, delicately changing the subject.
‘It’s great,’ I said, jiggling the baby. ‘I’m doing pretty well, too, I think. It’s just tough with this one.’
‘And home?’
It felt as though a cloud passed over my face. While the gang was history now, so was any court case that might have put Daddy and them in prison. Plus, life with my parents was getting more and more stressful again. Dad was always on at me, saying I was living there rent-free, and if I ever went out with my mates both of them would start on at me, accusing me of having sex with people all over the place. It had got to the stage where I could really only speak to my sister, Lizzie.