by Girl A
Life was tough, but the crucial difference this time around was that right from the start I felt Susan and the others in her team believed me, and wanted to hear what I had to say. They were immediately sympathetic. I wasn’t some kind of child prostitute wasting their time with made-up stories.
* * *
Unbeknown to me, there’d been a huge change in the way the police looked at the sort of abuse and grooming I’d been through. Susan’s investigation had involved just a few girls, me included. Now, it turned out, Greater Manchester Police were going to spend millions of pounds on helping kids like me – and cracking down on the gangs exploiting them. So detectives like Susan were taken into a new, much wider investigation. They called it ‘Operation Span’, though I wouldn’t know that until my involvement in it was over.
Most of the early cases looked at by Operation Span were in Rochdale but, gradually, once more and more detectives knew what they were looking for, the operation would expand. And, in time, other police forces would start to do the same. It was a ball that would keep on rolling.
While Susan was speaking to me, and constantly reassuring me, other detectives were trying to track down some of the ‘newer’ girls who’d been picked up off the street and dumped on the gangs’ production lines. Rochdale Social Services didn’t want to face up to it, but I knew, and eventually the world would know, that virtually all the girls were white and almost all of the men who paid to rape them were Pakistani.
Sometimes the truth hurts. But it’s still the truth.
As for me, I was still confused, still desperately frightened. I was still paranoid about Emma and the others contacting me – I’d hide in the flat and switch my phone off when it got really bad.
With the video interviews, all my memories of the bad times with the gang came flooding back – the pain, the threats, the way they’d pass me around. Then, too, I’d think about the revenge they’d try to take against me if they knew what I was doing.
Even though I didn’t know it at the time, Susan and Jane started to talk to the housing unit and Social Services about how they could help me through the process. They all knew how scared and upset I was, and they set up what I suppose was a safety net to help me through. The police, too, had their own doubts and, unbeknown to me, at least to begin with, they were working behind the scenes to make things a little more bearable for me.
One of the issues they had was that the housing unit was close to the centre of Rochdale, close to where so many things had happened to me, and where so many of my abusers might be lurking. Social Services only seemed to think as far as the town itself; the police thought I’d be safer if I could be found somewhere to live outside the borough.
Little by little, I came to believe that there really would be a trial this time. The only problem was that I was incredibly damaged, and I wondered whether I’d have the strength to stand up to what lay ahead. I still carried with me a huge sense of injustice about being abandoned the first time around, and I was still finding it incredibly hard to do even the normal things in life – like raising my baby and getting on with the college work I hoped would give us a future.
In the end, I suppose I thought that until they were locked away I’d never be free; I’d always be looking over my shoulder, wondering when they’d catch up with me.
No one actually came out and said it, but I could tell that the detectives involved with Operation Span were annoyed with their colleagues who’d dealt with my case before. They kept on saying they were sorry, that the evidence had been there right from the start, and that certain procedures hadn’t been carried out when they should have been – basic things, like collecting the knickers as soon as I’d mentioned them, because in a case like this that sort of thing was crucial.
When they’d picked Daddy up, he totally denied having had sex with me, and yet his DNA was on my knickers. Wasn’t that enough to convince the police? And the CPS lawyers who looked at the file? It would have been more difficult for them if Daddy had said I’d had sex with him willingly, but he hadn’t – he just denied the whole thing.
The Operation Span team had to go through the whole investigation again for themselves, checking and rechecking, testing every single thing that I’d said and that my abusers had said, and reviewing all the forensics.
I’d hear them muttering things like: ‘This should all have been done the first time around,’ and ‘How the hell could they not bring this to court?’ Just like me, they couldn’t believe that the CPS had sent back the file marked ‘No Further Action’.
‘It’s as if they just didn’t want to know,’ hissed one detective. ‘All in all, Hannah, they had your account and they had the forensic proof. It just looks as though they’d all agreed – the police and the CPS – that they didn’t want to pursue it. We can’t believe how shoddy a job it’s been.’
Operation Span was only a couple of weeks old when the police moved in to start arresting more men who’d attacked either me or some of the other girls they’d groomed.
In quick succession they picked up Tariq, Cassie, Saj, Car Zero and Tiger.
Billy didn’t know it then, but he’d be next on the list. He was the one Roxanne thought she was in love with. She’d got pregnant by him, but he’d persuaded her to have an abortion. The police checked all the medical records, traced the remains of the foetus and sent them away for forensic tests. The results proved that Billy had been the father, and he was arrested as soon as the report came back from the lab.
There was one glitch, however, and that was over Aarif. He was arrested, he was questioned, but after being allowed out on bail he went home, packed his bags, and caught a flight to Pakistan. As far as I know he’s still there – until the day police can perhaps track him down and bring him back to finally face trial.
* * *
The rest of that winter, 2010 into 2011, was a nightmare for everyone involved with me: my family, the police, social workers, Jane, and the people at the housing unit. And me, of course.
Things had started to get on top of me again. Badly. I felt like I was in a recurring nightmare, with everything from all that time ago bubbling up again.
Locked inside my flat, terrified in case others in the gang came for me, I was heading straight back down the spiral, no matter what Jane or Susan did to try to keep me afloat.
The first time I tried to kill myself is a blur now. I know it was just into the new year, and that I was still conscious when the ambulance arrived, but after that your guess is as good as mine.
Afterwards, staff at the housing unit said I’d locked myself in the flat, and that three litres of cider had turned me mental and aggressive. The night staff shouted at the door for a few minutes, before deciding they had no option but to break in. One went to check on Chloe, lifting her, still asleep, out of her cot and taking her downstairs. The others piled in on me. Restraint they call it, but I needed it.
Drama over, they saw the empty packets of paracetamol and called an ambulance. It hadn’t just been cider, either. There was also an empty bottle of Calpol on the sofa. As if anyone tries to commit suicide with Calpol!
For good measure, apparently, I’d cut my wrists; which explains the jagged little scars I still carry there today.
I spent that night in hospital, while Chloe was driven off to Mum and Dad’s place in the back of a social worker’s car. Nobody visited me in hospital that night, not even my parents. They couldn’t bear to. They were livid with me because I’d done it with Chloe helpless in her cot. And me, as I came round – I couldn’t believe I’d abandoned her like that.
Once I’d been discharged, I headed home from the hospital in a taxi. Mum and Dad gave me the cold shoulder, thinking I was just attention-seeking. Or, simply not knowing how to cope in this situation; this new turn of events. Chloe, though, ran to me as I came through the door.
As she snuggled into my shoulder I thought, What they hell have I done? I’ll never do that again. It’s just not fair to let her grow up witho
ut her mum.
After that, I was sent to the hospital in Manchester where I’d been born. This time, though, it was for counselling about the abuse that had made me try to kill myself.
It didn’t do me any good, however, not then. And, back at the housing unit, I was still so paranoid about Emma and the others contacting me that I was still getting drunk all the time.
A few weeks later, I got a final warning. Any more trouble, the staff said, and I’d be out and homeless. But they always said that to girls and nothing ever seemed to happen.
For weeks after that, the police had to file a whole series of reports on the trouble they said I was causing: with my mum, with friends, or the people at the housing unit. Then there was the self-harming. It was always when I was drunk, which was pretty much every night.
The drinking was the worst of my problems, as it exacerbated my paranoia. I felt really low for a lot of the time and was prescribed anti-depressants. Most nights, and sometimes days, I settled for my own anti-depressant: a couple of litres of White Star.
I spent my eighteenth birthday just getting drunk in the flat with a few friends. Mum and Dad, still despairing of me but still trying to reach out, had given me £20. It probably went on cider.
Worse, I couldn’t be bothered to go to college much, and my tutor there started to worry about me. Amazingly, I was still on track to pass the course, but only if I started turning up more often.
The police were still trying to help so I’d be in some kind of fit state to give evidence when the case came to court, but it was tough. And Rochdale Social Services weren’t a lot of help.
Chapter Twenty-One
It Will Come To Trial
At one point, the head of targeted services, Steve Garner, was asked to give me extra support. His department promptly sent along the two social workers I hated the most. One of them, Anne, came back later, asking me a million questions about Chloe’s paternity. I was so angry I wanted to throw her out. It all just added to the pressure, but Rochdale Social Services didn’t seem to see it that way. Another time, when professionals met to talk about me in February as the police and Crisis Intervention had said they wanted to give me maximum support because they knew how messed up I was, Social Services didn’t even bother to turn up.
It didn’t seem to matter to them that I’d been a child at the time I’d been abused by the gang, and that emotionally I was still just a kid. They had ignored all the warnings about me while it was going on; now they were washing their hands of me again. They didn’t seem to be able to see me and Chloe as a unit, and that if they helped to sort me out, they’d be sorting things out for her, too.
Jane was still keeping closely in touch with me, though, and every so often the police would ring and say, ‘We’ve got some more, Hannah. Are you okay to come in?’
On 21 February I went to a VIPER parade and identified six men out of eight. It was so difficult, though, because I’d not seen them all for so long. The two who got off must have been thanking their lucky stars.
Most of them had been identified initially from the descriptions I’d given the police – descriptions of their features, their characteristics, the cars they drove, the places they visited or lived. After that, they were put under surveillance, and finally they were picked up.
The police had finally managed to tease some of the information from me in 2011. Some of it, though, went as far back as the earlier, pre-Span investigation of 2008 and 2009.
Three days after that latest VIPER I met up with Susan to do another video interview. I can still remember sitting there in my pink cardigan and the usual black leggings, arms wrapped around my middle, shaking sometimes as the police interviewer, Steph, asked me dozens and dozens of questions.
It was good that it was another woman. She started off by telling me there was nothing I could say that would shock her; I just had to try my best to remember all the details. ‘I understand it may be embarrassing,’ she said, ‘but you can tell me anything.’
My head was down, trying to avoid the cameras I knew were filming me. ‘Look, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,’ she was saying. ‘You were fifteen, you’re eighteen now. You learn as you grow older, don’t you?’
Yes, I thought. Looking back, I’d been so stupid, so naïve.
I was on the verge of tears as I took her through the way the abuse had started after I’d moved into Harry’s house, the way Emma had taken me to the Balti House, and how Daddy had raped me. It was part of the deal, he’d said. He bought me things; I should give him things. I’d felt so scared.
‘He said, “We’re friends, we do things for each other.” I didn’t want to because he was old, but I didn’t want to say no because I didn’t want to look soft to Emma. I just tried to laugh it off.’
Steph leaned forward and asked: ‘What were you scared of?’
‘Sleeping with him,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s disgusting.’
I told Steph how I’d hoped Emma would come in and save me, but she hadn’t, and Daddy had started pulling at my pants and I had started trying to look at the wall.
‘Could he see the tears?’ asked Steph.
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.
We moved on to the time Daddy gave me to Immy as his treat, and how he had told me that in his country, it was tradition for men to have sex with girls as young as eleven.
What had I thought of that? asked Steph. ‘I don’t even know what I was thinking,’ I said. ‘I was stupid.’
‘How do you feel about it now?’
‘Bad.’
‘What do you think about Daddy doing this?’
‘I think it’s sick.’
I said to Steph that I’d been too scared to fight Immy off; scared of Emma because I was living with her and because she was so threatening.
‘She’d have battered me,’ I said. ‘At first she was nice, but then it changed. I didn’t like her any more but I couldn’t get away from her.’
There had been a time when Chef had been touching me from behind. Wiping away tears, I said: ‘Emma told me to let him carry on, but I told him to stop and he stopped’.
A few minutes later Emma had gone upstairs with him. It was the time he’d paid her £20 to let him go down on her. Afterwards, she’d joked about maybe telling someone what had happened. It really was a joke because I don’t think she’d ever have said anything, but he didn’t take it that way. He went wild, grabbing a kitchen knife and waving it at us, screaming, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you two bitches!’
As the questions went on, it felt as though Steph was trying to help me understand how I’d grown up in those three years, and that at eighteen I would have just fought them all off and run away. But, back then, my abusers – whether white, Asian, all of them – knew I was vulnerable and isolated, and that I believed all their threats.
Who could I have told about it? she asked.
I welled up. ‘I couldn’t have told any of those in the house, in Harry’s place. If I’d told my dad, he’d probably have gone mad at me. I couldn’t get away.’
Steph asked me if I had spoken to anyone about it. I mentioned Jane, and Steph asked me if anything had changed as a result. I told her no – we both knew how slowly these things happened. But the questions still went on.
I told how Daddy had just kept bringing people to have sex with me, and sometimes he’d give me money to make sure I stayed quiet.
‘That’s what he used to do. Get people to have sex with me in the places.’
‘So why would he do that? What would he gain from doing that?’
‘Maybe he was getting money as well,’ I said slowly.
A few moments later, to my relief, the interview ended. When the tape and the cameras had been switched off, I looked up at Steph and said: ‘There’s lots of stuff I could have done, wasn’t there? I could have rung the police. I could have stood up for myself. But at the time …’
She smiled at me
sympathetically. I left it there. It had all been said.
When I did the next video interview with her, on 1 March, I told her about some of the other girls I’d seen at different houses, about Daddy’s threats to kill me, and how I just got used to being made to sleep with all those men.
‘How did you think it could finish?’ she asked.
‘I thought it would finish after I told the police about Daddy,’ I said, biting my nails. ‘But it didn’t.’
We talked about the mattress they kept at the Balti House so they could sleep with the under-age girls. Me, Emma, Roxanne, whoever else went there.
I gave her a list of names, counting them off on my fingers. ‘I don’t know if they’ve all slept with them, but probably,’ I said.
‘When you’d reported to the police once you’d been arrested at the Balti House for smashing the counter, what did you expect to happen?’
‘I thought it would stop.’
‘What actually happened? How come it didn’t stop?’
‘Because Emma got different men instead of them.’
Once Daddy and Immy had been interviewed, I had thought it would stop. But, of course, Emma just went out and found another ‘ringleader’.
‘What did you think about the fact that it had clearly stopped with these men you’ve spoken about, but then started again with different ones?’
I wasn’t even bothered any more, I said. She wondered what I meant. ‘Because it was happening every day, so I didn’t bother any more. I didn’t feel anything about it. It had been going on for so long. At first I felt dead bad and dead horrible, but then I didn’t feel anything any more.’
Steph glanced up from her notes. ‘So basically, you’ve come to the police, you’ve told us about these men, but what you’re saying is that because Emma’s got different men that’s why it continued with different men?’ I simply nodded and Steph continued.