Girl A

by Girl A

  ‘When Daddy’s been arrested, you’ve been interviewed. What’s happened in relation to where you’ve been living?

  ‘I carried on living at Harry’s,’ I replied.

  ‘What’s happened with your relationship with Mum and Dad?’

  I shrugged and explained that nothing had changed. Steph asked why.

  ‘Because they’ve said it was my own fault for keeping going back,’ I explained. ‘So I didn’t want to live there any more.’

  Steph kept on pressing, kept on trying to make me understand the child I’d been; the victim I’d been. ‘What do you think about your parents saying it’s your fault?’ she asked.

  I felt a twinge of guilt. ‘Well, it is a bit,’ I whispered. ‘It was my fault for not standing up for myself … and I carried on going.’

  I tried my best to explain why; that I was scared, that I felt I had no escape and that Harry and Emma respectively provided me with the food and money I needed to get by. Steph moved the conversation on to the abuse.

  I said that Aarif had always been the one to go first with us at his flat. I didn’t know why, I said; it just happened that way, no matter how many other men were there. I told Steph how he would rape me and then call the next one through. I’d just let them do it, all the time looking at the wall and hoping it would end soon.

  I told her it was him who had first raped me anally. ‘I told him not to put it there. He said he wouldn’t, but then he did …

  ‘It hurt. I started shouting, telling him to get off me and shouting for Emma. I felt angry and upset because I didn’t want to sleep with him anyway, never mind that.’

  The next one to rape me that way was Aarif’s cousin, Saj, I said. By now I was in tears, but she kept on asking me questions, trying to get the detail the jury would need to hear. I knew it was important, but I couldn’t help but feel humiliated.

  ‘I thought at first he would just do it normal,’ I said.

  ‘How come it’s not been normal?’

  ‘Because Emma’s told him I was on my period.’

  Steph could see I was distressed, but she kept going, saying she’d just ask me these few more questions and that would be it for the day.

  ‘He asked me if I was on my period,’ I sobbed. ‘I said no, but he shouted for Emma and she picked up my knickers to show him the pad and the blood. Then he just told me to bend over.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  ‘I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to go home.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Nothing. There was no point.’

  I told her it had hurt, and she asked how he could tell he was hurting me.

  At this point I couldn’t help it: my face cracked, and the tears fell down towards my top. ‘I was scrunching up my face,’ I whispered.

  I was back in the video suite again a week later, recalling how Joe from Jo Baxi’s Taxis had been friends with Cassie, and that they’d go to Aarif’s flat together: if one was there, the other would be.

  I said how we’d all just sit there for a couple of hours until the other girls and I were dead drunk. That’s when they’d say we had to sleep with them.

  Steph asked what I would have wanted to happen if I’d had a choice.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  ‘Why would you want them to stop?’

  ‘Because I didn’t like it. I thought it was wrong.’

  ‘Why did you think it was wrong?’

  ‘Because they’re old and I was only young.’

  I thought of how I knew they’d come and find me if I refused to do what they wanted, and how Emma would batter me because she was such a thug. All of it was because of her, and all the time it was happening I just never thought it would stop.

  Towards the end Steph asked: ‘How did you cope?’

  ‘Most of the time I would get drunk so when it happened I wouldn’t feel as bad.’

  ‘How do you feel about yourself now?’

  I fought back tears, my head down, a hand covering my face.

  ‘I feel horrible about myself,’ I said in a whisper. ‘That I didn’t do anything to stop going.’

  Steph was trying to explore the whole issue of me hating the way some of them would touch me – as though they meant it, as though I was special to them.

  ‘It’s because it’s more intimate,’ I mumbled, head down, not wanting to say the word. ‘If they just had sex with me, it felt like nothing. I didn’t have to…’

  And then the dam burst. ‘Because I don’t want them to feel my “puddy” or touch my body because I don’t like them!’

  My face was awash with tears. For a few, eerie moments it seemed as though Steph was speaking not to me but to the people – all those unknown people, prosecution lawyers, defence lawyers, police, jurors – who might one day view this video.

  I think Steph realised I’d reached my limit, and that to push me any further would leave me damaged. So she eased back, asking me how old the men had thought I was – and how old I thought I’d appeared to them.

  ‘I looked younger than I was,’ I said. I hadn’t worn make-up then, I said, and I was dead skinny. And I’d had no boobs until I was pregnant.

  Steph asked what I thought about Cassie wanting younger girls like Roxanne and Paige.

  ‘I would have been glad,’ I said slowly, knowing how bad it would sound but knowing, too, that it had to be said because it was the awful truth. ‘It sounds tight, but…’

  ‘Why glad?’

  ‘Because I would not have had to go,’ I replied.

  ‘Why tight?’

  ‘Because then it would happen to them, so I’d feel bad.’

  I told Steph how towards the end of the abuse I’d be taken to a house in town.

  ‘I’d go there with Emma and Paige,’ I said. Then I looked up, wide-eyed, horrified and added: ‘They still go and sleep there sometimes.’

  * * *

  I was trying my hardest to come to terms with the abuse the gang had put me through and how it was still affecting me, but I’d get nervy and lose confidence if I didn’t drink. Every time the police asked me to do another identity parade, everything would crowd in on me again: going through all the necessary VIPER parades was bringing ever-more degrading memories rolling back into my already fragmented mind. Of course, I never drank before the interviews, but afterwards I would have to unwind.

  It was all a bit up and down, but mostly down, if I’m honest. I was given a provisional offer of a place at university, which was great, but then I got a final warning at the housing unit because they saw me as aggressive, abusive and disruptive. Well, yeah, but wouldn’t they have been?

  Social Services, having signed me off their books, were still looking closely at Chloe. I never had got on with Christine, my social worker, but at least she wrote one nice thing about me in the core assessment they did on Chloe. She called me ‘a lovely young parent’ and said she could see I was trying my hardest to give the two of us a better future. They had me marked me down as a ‘high risk’ to Chloe but, at the same time, another of the professionals dealing with me was calling me ‘a devoted young mother’. In one report she wrote: ‘Chloe is always well presented. I have observed she has regular baths and is dressed nicely. Chloe is a credit to her.’ That felt nice.

  As I say, a bit up and down.

  A week after I’d gone through the latest video interview with Steph, Susan rang with the news I’d begun to despair of ever hearing. That morning police had finally, finally rearrested Daddy at his home in Oldham.

  ‘It’s an important step, Hannah,’ said Susan. ‘We still can’t give you any guarantees, but we hope it will at least come to trial now.’

  Suddenly, the streets seemed a lot safer, and for all my misery, I began to hope I’d see my main abuser brought to justice.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ups and Downs

  If the Crown Prosecution Service had thought I would have been a flaky witness in 2009, they must have
loved me two years later. In the time they’d abandoned me, I’d gone steadily downhill, a mother struggling both with the memories of her past and the alcoholism she’d fallen into to keep them at bay.

  For now, my mind was focused mainly on drinking two, sometimes three litres of White Star a night – whenever the benefits money would stretch to it.

  Christine, my social worker, would come to my flat to check on me. One day, in late March, she asked if I had any alcohol in the flat.

  ‘No,’ I said, but I think I must have looked a bit shifty. The next minute she was checking the fridge and finding a big bottle of cider. She went about as mad as a social worker can get. I went red.

  As usual, it all went into a report about me.

  Social Services called a conference on Chloe towards the end of April 2011. I went with my dad, and we had to sit around a table with fifteen professionals. The police were there, Sara and Jane too, and a couple of people from the housing unit. Christine sent her apologies.

  They all agreed that I loved Chloe and was good at looking after her when I was sober. Not only that, they could see that I saw a future for myself. But it was the getting drunk all the time that ruined everything for me. Every night I was getting hammered because of both the new investigation and my memories of the abuse. Overall, it made me a disaster, and that’s why they put Chloe on a protection plan for neglect.

  The fifteen of them voted unanimously.

  I wouldn’t speak to Jane afterwards. I just brushed straight past her.

  What I didn’t know then was that she and Sara were furious with Social Services. Sara had actually written a letter complaining that they weren’t liaising with her team, and that Crisis Intervention hadn’t even been invited to one particular conference. Basically, I think, she wanted them to pull their finger out and help me, rather than seemingly get in the way of everything positive all the time.

  Around that time, with Social Services looking for an interim care order, I was sent to see a psychiatrist. He found me really quiet and, I guess, unresponsive, but didn’t think I had a personality disorder. It was just that my emotions had been messed up by the abuse.

  According to him, the attacks had left me emotionally ‘quite blunted’. Let him try living my life, I thought. It just all felt relentless, as if I didn’t have any time to get over things. Everything that was going on was constantly there, all the time, reminding me.

  There was only so much that Susan and her colleagues could do, and no matter how caring, even loving, they were, it didn’t stop me from trying to kill myself for a second time.

  I’d been asked to help with the identity parades, as I say, but I was worried that I had forgotten some of the people because it was so long since it had all happened. I don’t mean the main ones, the ones who took me here and there, or the ones who were always at a particular flat or house. I mean the ones I’d seen only once or maybe a couple of times. I found it harder and harder to remember them, and that’s what was worrying me.

  There came the day I was asked to go to the police station to do one of those sessions. This particular VIPER took longer to get through than I’d been used to. We went into a little room with no windows and just a TV screen on which they played the disc. There was a chair in the middle for me, one for a policeman, and one behind for the suspect’s solicitor, if one was present.

  With some of the men I identified, a solicitor had been there. Whenever the solicitor couldn’t be there, they’d record me on a separate video so my reactions could be sent to them later.

  I really wasn’t expecting to feel the way I did; in fact, I went in thinking everything would be all right, that I was over it now.

  The pictures came up on screen, and for a while I wasn’t recognising anyone. Then Aarif’s face suddenly popped up and a wave of fear swept over me. Even though I could only see him on a TV screen, and in the middle of a police station, I felt terrified, and I began to recall scene after scene of what he’d put me through, like in a horror film. I remember I identified seven or eight of them that day; it took two hours to go through them all.

  Once the session was over, the police drove me back to my parents’ house so I could collect Chloe. Mum made me a sandwich and afterwards we set off back to the flat in the housing unit. We got back at about 2 p.m. Later on, I put Chloe in her cot.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing when it happened. I’d started drinking at around 6 o’clock: just a glass of wine, which became two, then three, then a second bottle. Chloe was asleep.

  I don’t know why I did it. Like the first time, I certainly didn’t plan to. I think everything had got to me so much again – their faces, seen again in the VIPER line-ups, peering at me, taunting me, it seemed, after being out of my life for so long. I remember thinking about the evidence I’d given, and wondering whether the police and the CPS had not believed me because I hadn’t cried enough for them in the interviews. They weren’t to know I’d become so used to it all that tears felt cheap now. I just felt useless.

  I’d no need to buy the pills; they were already there. It wasn’t a cry for help, it wasn’t – I just knew at that moment that I wanted to die, so I grabbed the pills. There were sixteen in a packet and I took four packets. I started gulping them down, washing them down with wine and then with just water once I ran out of wine.

  Then I just lay on the sofa, waiting for the darkness to gather me up. I didn’t write a note, I couldn’t see the point in that.

  By then I was so drunk I was half asleep and half throwing up – throwing up some of the pills I’d just swallowed. That’s maybe what saved my life.

  I woke up in hospital and, straight away, like before, was full of remorse. I’d left my daughter in her cot and hadn’t even gone into the bedroom to say goodbye to her.

  The staff at the housing unit had found me, apparently not long after I’d taken the pills. They said later that people had been knocking on my door and I wasn’t answering, so they came up. Because I wasn’t answering, they used their own key to get in. Just like before.

  After the overdose Mum and Dad were looking after Chloe, so I had to go back to my flat in a taxi paid for by the hospital. It was the loneliest of journeys.

  I felt as though I hadn’t learned anything, and I was back to square one. Again.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, in mid May 2011, I was on anti-depressants and Christine was back at the flat. She knew I’d drunk loads on the night of that second overdose, but I didn’t give her any reason, I just promised to change. I went down on her report once again as ‘high risk’ and ‘spiralling out of control’.

  Spiralling out of control I may have been but, somehow, for all that I doubted myself, there was something in me that wouldn’t give in. I had a will to live, a will to survive, and a resolve, somehow, to do well.

  When I got my college results, Mum and Dad couldn’t believe it, and nor could I: a double distinction and enough to get to university. Maybe I wasn’t the failure I’d convinced myself that I was!

  Added to this, the new chief crown prosecutor for the north-west, Nazir Afzal, ordered the case against Daddy and Immy to be reinstated, which meant that, finally, I’d have the chance to put them away for what they’d done to me. It was a moment of pure joy. I celebrated with a bottle of white.

  Later on, I heard the CPS had taken a lot of persuading because once they’ve made a decision, they hate to change it. Most of all, though, they have what they call thresholds – a way of deciding whether to go ahead with a case based on the chances of a conviction at the end of it.

  Not what you or I would call justice; not what’s right. Just statistics.

  My dad says it’s so that someone, somewhere, probably in London, can stand up in front of a Government minister and say the CPS has a 90 per cent success rate, or whatever, in the cases they prosecute. So they can look good.

  According to the CPS lawyer who looked at my case, and one of his colleagues who approved it, the chances of getti
ng Daddy convicted – in spite of all the evidence – fell below this threshold.

  Mostly it came down to me being too flaky. The jury might not believe me, they thought. And if that happened, they’d lose the case and their ‘success’ rate would come down.

  Dad reckons that in the days before the CPS made the decisions about whether to charge people, good detectives tended to go on their gut instincts. Did they think someone was a rapist? Yes? Then charge him.

  And if the jury got it wrong, then at least they’d done their level best to do the right thing.

  But the people making the decisions in my case were operating in a very different world.

  Detectives from Operation Span made the strongest case they could to the CPS and then waited for them to react. For the lawyers at regional headquarters, and perhaps in London, too, it must have felt like sucking razor blades. They dug their heels in for a while, until Mr Afzal looked at the case afresh and decided it was time to bite the bullet. It was one of his first decisions in the job as chief prosecutor and I think he realised that by taking it he was giving me – and all the girls like me – a voice. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

  At the time, though, my life was still messed up and, just as I could see myself finally getting justice, everything else in my life started to fall apart.

  I moved out of the housing unit and into my mum and dad’s house because Social Services were threatening to remove Chloe. The idea was that Mum and Dad would control me. If it didn’t work out, they’d remove my little girl.

  And of course, I buckled and the social workers suspected that Dad wouldn’t level with them if I’d been drinking or whatever. In the middle of June 2011, Social Services made Chloe the subject of an interim care order, and the following week, Christine, my social worker, called at Mum and Dad’s house.

  Chloe was asleep, her head resting in my lap, when we heard the knock on the door.

  Social Services had given the impression that if I went back to live with my mum and dad everything would be fine; that they, as responsible adults, would be a safety net even if I went off the rails.